That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.
Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).
This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?
Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.
I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.
I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things:
- turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range
- scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times
- maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction
- or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)
- not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.
It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however.
Conclusion:
Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.
It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.
This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.
I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.
For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).
Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.
No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up.
Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80.
If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.
Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the option to save money by heating your house when power is cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate about his power use times?
It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?
- the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty
- we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die?
- the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.
Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.
Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.
There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?
Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment
That isn’t a temperature you can reasonably describe as “freezing”. I’m not used to having a thermostat that high even in winter, it’s getting hot and stuffy that warm.
[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta...
20°C isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or there's some serious draft going on in your house.
Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."
Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.
Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.
rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.
Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.
Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)
If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)
This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.
Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.
It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.
It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.
Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".
I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such.
I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.
For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.
Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.
> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled
>
> Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.
> In order to save money, please send us money.
> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.
> thank you for your consideration.
>
> Mike at GE
Basically this. Few individuals pay the actual price of electricity. At best, they'll pay time-of-day rates that might change schedules 2x/year. Otherwise, everyone pays the average cost, and couldn't care less if noon-time electricity costs 10x on Monday vs. last Thursday.