3 ms·
Yes the article talks about consumers scheduling things like washing machines during the day, or even filling up a battery.
by willvarfar 11mo ago
Yes the article talks about consumers scheduling things like washing machines during the day, or even filling up a battery.
- mikeyouse 11mo agoThey could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
- ch4s3 11mo agoIf you built homes with a lot of thermal mass, you could cool the internal thermal mass when energy is $0 and have that mass absorb heat the rest of the day. This is sort of the principle a lot of traditional architecture uses where evaporation, wind over a courtyard, or nighttime lows cool thick walls.
- mikeyouse 11mo agoYep, our house was built like this but in a cooler climate (large windows facing south with the all of the stone flooring and surfaces getting direct sunlight in the winter). But since most houses in the Aussie suburbs aren’t really optimized for this, you’d have to retrofit many million houses to take full advantage. Opens up some interesting opportunities for sure.
- ch4s3 11mo agoYeah, for sure. Building for 0 carbon AC and electric resistive heating will probably look a little different.
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoThis is how the cold storage caves work in the Midwest. They run their ammonia loops harder in the off hours and let the cave mass handle it(provided a large enough area is kept frozen, otherwise thermal expansion cycling can cause a carve out in the ceiling).
- BtM909 11mo agoMore countries where there's a surplus, are advising people to charge or use electricity during the day.
- bee_rider 11mo agoThis is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet. Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price. Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
- naIak 11mo agoPower at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.
- bee_rider 11mo agoIf power wasn’t cheaper, there’d be no incentive to run our heaters at the same time. I’d expect the market to work this out, and price power down during unexpected over-supply, rewarding nimble workloads. Then there arrives a reward for being nimble, which is something we should incentivize I think.
- bryanlarsen 11mo agoPower at peak times is cheap because it's the time of highest insolation.
- naIak 11mo agoYou’re missing the other side of the equation.
- tstrimple 11mo agoThink of being able to set a price on Amazon Spot instances where it's low enough to charge your home battery for "free". When the price is right, you recharge your batteries as much as possible. When the price falls outside the range, you leverage your battery to offset the higher electricity prices. This would be part of the "smart" in "smart grids".