This should change with electric cars. I'd love to have an electric car set up to recharge when the rates were low. This could really even out the power consumption.
Heck, I can think of a lot of uses of power that become practical if the rates are really low. The hot water heater could be heated up a bit extra hot. Ice could be made to supplement the air conditioner during high electric cost times, etc.
All that's needed is variable pricing to the consumer.
It can be set to change when the price is cheapest (on a short timescale, not just an off-peak price) and also to try to minimise the carbon used. It does depend on the local utility offering rebates, but it's often in their narrow financial interests to do so, so the incentives work out.
See also Ice Bear (and competitors) for air-con that stores cheap electricity as ice.
This generally falls under "smart grid" and "demand management" and well designed electric grid markets like in Texas enable these companies to respond to the market price signals.
Yup. I seriously do not understand why electric utilities do not do variable pricing to consumers. Do it, and the 'problem' of electric surpluses will go away.
There's usually some cost differences for night/day time (or winter/summer) depending on your contract
Now, to have variable pricing for home customers I think the complexity outweighs the advantages (as in, limited capacity to enjoy momentarily cheaper prices)
Usually how this is done is that you get a cheaper tariff and give up some level of control, e.g your air-con might be shut off for 5 mintues (along with 100 of your neighbours) to respond to a demand spike elsewhere.
The "power company can turn off your AC" thing never made any sense to me at all. Why not just let the customer set the price at which they will automatically turn off their AC, and let the power company know what it is. Then you get automatic dutch auctions for the price of electricity that set the price where demand meets supply.
Then you can set different prices for different things: Don't turn off my AC unless the price exceeds $.50/KWh but stop charging my electric car if it exceeds $.12/KWh.
Because "power company can turn off your AC" is not a feature for you, it's a feature for the power company.
The power company's problem is that everybody has their AC turned on at 3pm and either the node supplying those houses is overloaded or they must buy energy at crazy spot prices to clear the market.
If they can flip a switch and knock out nearby ACs for 10 minutes then they have time to figure out how to solve the problem before it becomes a blackout.
Now they could "theoretically" introduce a pricing mechanism such that a number of people would shut off their AC due to an increase in price. But that is a lot more complicated (most residences do not do real-time billing for energy, harder to forecast how many users will shut off if price is raised, have to maintain real-time channel for price data) and in practice something will go wrong and you'll blackout instead.
> Now they could "theoretically" introduce a pricing mechanism such that a number of people would shut off their AC due to an increase in price. But that is a lot more complicated (most residences do not do real-time billing for energy, harder to forecast how many users will shut off if price is raised, have to maintain real-time channel for price data) and in practice something will go wrong and you'll blackout instead.
Doing real-time billing is not a hard technical problem, it's just a one-time cost to replace all the meters.
At that point all you actually need is a standard IP-based protocol to announce real-time rates. The power company doesn't even need to communicate bidirectionally with individual devices whatsoever -- all they need to do is broadcast the current rate and let the devices make choices. Because the choices various devices make will invariably be "when price goes up too much, use less power." So if people are using too much power, you raise the rate a little bit at a time until they no longer are (or the higher rate causes more expensive generation methods to come online).
The only way you get blackouts is if the rate goes so high that every smart device with a cutout is already off and you still don't have enough power, but that's exactly the same failure point as letting the power company turn off your AC. Only worse because if you need some non-standard power company interface with bureaucratic rules instead of a simple standardized rate announcement protocol then there will be fewer smart devices built and purchased that will reduce consumption in response to high rates.
> it's just a one-time cost to replace all the meters
Much easier said than done.
> At that point all you actually need is a standard IP-based protocol to announce real-time rates. The power company doesn't even need to communicate bidirectionally with individual devices whatsoever -- all they need to do is broadcast the current rate and let the devices make choices
Several problems there (before I get into 'kids these days' mode):
- Meter connected 24/7 just to get prices is not feasible (also remember you need per meter pricing for the issues
listed by the parent)
- For it to make decisions to "use less power" you need a controller for every device (heating/AC/etc) you want to be controllable - or something more complex if you want fine-grained control
Too complex for home usage, basically, where you want to turn your devices on and not worry about spot pricing
Said chargers simply wait until midnight to begin charging, when power is at its cheapest.
My power in Northern Illinois from nuclear plants run by Exelon is 1 cent per kwh between midnight and 5am due to such low demand. That's pretty close to free.
But I'd sign up for variable pricing. I'd need a way to query the internet for the current price. Then, appliances can be set to run when rates are the cheapest. (Electric dryer, hot water heater, refrigerator, dishwasher, car battery charger, etc.)
If they're paying people to dump electricity on them, I can't believe they've got variable pricing for the bulk of their customers.
Not really. Most people have pretty inflexible schedules, which dictates when they are home and when they are sleeping, etc. and thus when they are using electricity.
Heck, I can think of a lot of uses of power that become practical if the rates are really low. The hot water heater could be heated up a bit extra hot. Ice could be made to supplement the air conditioner during high electric cost times, etc.
All that's needed is variable pricing to the consumer.