Right, good ideas, I am thinking too much inside a box. > good luck keeping aluminum cells warm, lol There was article on hackernews recently about exactly th

Right, good ideas, I am thinking too much inside a box. > good luck keeping aluminum cells warm, lol There was article on hackernews recently about exactly that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8666681 > Because electrical power is now super cheap, there are industries that have not put the slightest engineering effort on it... think CNC machinery, where there's no scientific reason a machine can't enter "sleep mode" within seconds, and return to work in seconds after sleeping, although in practice no one has ever made or shipped a machine like that, that I know of. Big power consumers even now can enter "consumption reduction offer" market. They provide offers that they will reduce consumption by 1 MW between 11:00 and 13:00 at thursday, and when electric network needs rebalancing - distributor buys these offers from them (often at many times the regular electricity price) because it's cheaper to slightly reduce consumption here, than to pay someone else to power on a whole new powerplant block elsewhere and send the energy longer way around just because at one point in the network there's not enough transfer capacity for a few minutes. There's a whole exchange market, allowing to publish these offers on consumers side, and buy these offers on distributor side, and regular traders doing brokering beetween them, even some automated trading systems, you can even buy futures based on that :). It is quite elegant system - using free market + some regulation to solve allocation and prediction problem. This, with law support for smaller consumers (and serious automation, because consumers wuldn't want to spend their time trading energy) could make these changes (quick sleep/wake modes) profitable, even if the energy savings alone aren't enough to justify it. In the end new washingmachine etc could be connected to internet, automaticaly publish such offers when you switch them to energysaving mode, and react when someone buys its offer. I think EU wanted to expand these regulations to allow regular consumers to participate, but I don't know how advanced it is (I changed job and no longer work on energy trading systems).