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A comment on Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid, scientists say. Parent comment

Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by angry_octet on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @01:13PM (#14596413)
We already waste a great deal of food. Having it too cold will damage food, as will too hot. Older fridges used a sawtooth cooling pattern (on/off) but newer ones, with fancier motors, have might tighter regulation. I'm sceptical of how much energy can be scavenged.

I'm sure with enough IoT you could delay motor start +/-30s across a region to smooth the tip of a load spike, but it sounds very complicated. How would end users be compensated for such a tiny shift in load? Isn't instaneous power demand a martingale process?

It sounds like it would be easier and cheaper to have a few batteries.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by greglindahl on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @01:59PM (#14596916)
I wasn't suggesting making it so cold as to damage food. I also wasn't arguing against batteries.
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Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by PeterisP on Wednesday June 21, 2017 @08:04AM (#14602954)
If you were suggesting a refrigerator to run the cooling in the night so much so that it'd be able to sustain a safe temperature for many hours while conserving energy in the day, then yes, you were suggesting making it so cold as to damage food - a few degrees difference isn't sufficient to achieve what you want, and if your temperature fluctuates more than 3-4 degrees then the food either gets unsafely warm or gets frozen/damaged.
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Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by greglindahl on Thursday June 22, 2017 @12:48AM (#14610185)
I wasn't suggesting that, no.
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Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by angry_octet on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @02:05PM (#14596967)
I was just generally arguing against the parent proposition as well.
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Re:Storage ‘not fundamentally needed’ for future power grid,... by greglindahl on Tuesday June 20, 2017 @02:20PM (#14597093)
Well, if you're a skeptic as to how much can be saved, you might want to look at the many "smart grid" studies, because this has been a hot topic for a while and is already implemented to a small degree.
[ Parent | on HN ]