“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.
The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:
Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]
So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.
By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.
Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.
Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.
There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.
These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.
Sounds like it worked out great for them — people who could afford living in single detached houses (generally the richer ones, and therefore generally the management) now get reserved parking out of the pollen. The people who are inconvenienced (i.e. you) weren't the people involved in the decision anyway.
Financially it works out for a couple of road trips a year, not so much if you're doing it a couple of times a month.
The real harm I think is giving too many perceived privileges to something that is currently a luxury.
Why?
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity.
Just an oversight...
// Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
Could it be that this isn't "virtue signaling", but rather people overestimating the impact of the action? In other words, an honest (if mistaken) attempt at doing a good thing rather than just wanting to be perceived as doing a good thing?
It’s right in the name. When you “virtue signal”, you are signaling morals to a wider audience. It’s “virtue signaling” regardless of conviction.
If the reason I am doing something is that I believe it will create results independent of being seen to have done it, I am not virtue signalling. Which is what @JohnFen said.
Conversely, if the reason I am doing something is because of the signalling value I believe will be attached to the way others see my actions, I am virtue signalling. Which is what you said.
So doing a #supportsoupkitchens on a twitter repost vs actually going and volunteering at one.
There are over a billion iPhones in use today. Assuming 10% of them get charged during peak times, each one shaving a watt off of its peak is 100000 kilowatts of load reduced from the energy grid.
Considering the number is probably a lot higher, and the load reduction a lot greater, my estimate is probably pretty conservative. And then further consider that this is being rolled out to iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches as well. It starts to add up!
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage.
Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.
There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).
Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.
And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.
Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder, but I would wager it's at most as much of that. So yes, completely insignificant at a large scale.
If anything, the biggest impact will come to individual consumers, if and when electricity prices start varying more widely across times of day.
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
That is the entire point of this exercise. My point is that OP fails to address that with data (as do you).
Based on the data we do have, there doesn't seem to be any reason to care about iPhone charging - so, if you don't come up with some data or rationale for why we should, then I still feel it's justified to say that this change has little chance of helping the world in all but the most minor of ways.
If 1W of gas fired power needs to be brought online in the middle of the night to charge your phone, then all the wind power gets the same price. That's why peaks have always been the most economical place to target investments.
It would be interesting to compare the charge rate of a Tesla Powerall * the number of them deployed. I can see iPhones alone winning that depending on some assumptions you make.
You'd then probably be able to find stats on what Tesla gets paid for providing that service to get some idea of scale.
You are the one making claims with poor data and assumptions, not me.
This strategy actually works with laptops though. I know that one company set up all their laptops to stop drawing power from mains and run from the battery at peak hours, even though it was still plugged in. This was for cost savings and not for environmental ones, but the same strategy would work.
???
Most people I can think of charge there phone as part of their nightly routine.
Good move.
Dumb dumb to use a gasoline engine’s generator to charge it, but I don’t want it to go dead either.
A typical car uses 330 Wh per mile.
Charging your phone from flat will cost you about 90 yards in range. At the most expensive electricity on the planet of about 70c per kWh it will cost you about 1c.
A few days ago the price was almost zero (plus tax) for several windy hours.
https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr... (add 1.59DKK for the taxes.)
It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.
If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.
As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most.
They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.
The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.
This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".
Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.
If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).
I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.
it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.
It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.
But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)
the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.
but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.
in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)
and it varies regionally too
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
But it's also probably best for poor people, that will optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.
Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.
Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in absolute values, but they have more relatively to their income.
Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.
I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.
Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.
For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.
Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.
I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.
Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.
Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.
This sounds.. astonishing. How can one consume so much in a house?
My average is around 500 kWh which results in a $200+ bill.
...Mission accomplished?
an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.
In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.
Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
Found these examples by quickly googling:
https://www.trueenergy.io/app/
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.andr...
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.and...
EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/
https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-...
All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.
My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.
Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2]
South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2]
It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it.
[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
[2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
A similar story is playing out in France, with Flamanville 3.
Good choice of states, though: I grew up in SC and live in California. California uses time-of-day rates to nudge people away from charging during the early evening peak.
Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve.
So simple!
Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7
> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself.
Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"
I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?).
My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.
We already see this to some extent, as people with free workplace charging often choose that over home charging when possible.
At the lowest level it's people plugging things in at specific times to save pennies.
But people can build systems to do this automatically, like the ripple signal that's been used for half a century to turn on water storage heaters.
People can build entire business around building widgets that will help other businesses save money.
The (soylent) green energy market is people.
We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.
It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"
Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.
Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users
Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...
Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.
The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.