Smarter Electric Grid Could Save Power 268
Wired has a timely story about putting more of the automated and non-automated decisions behind the use of electrical power into and around households. From the summary: "If the electric grid stops being just a passive supplier of juice, consumers could make choices about how and when to consume power. Power providers and tech companies are working to redesign the grid so you can switch off your house when high demand strains the system, or program your house or appliances to make that move."
A similar story is featured right now on PhysOrg, highlighting a particular pilot project involving "smart meters" in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
3rd world status? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for more energy efficient appliances. I've got all compact fluorescents, have an automatic thermostat, and my computers power off when not in use. But not having hot water, or raising the temperature by 4 degrees? Forget about it.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Duh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:3rd world status? (Score:4, Insightful)
Frugality is a virtue, gluttony is not.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
The nature of power plants (turbines, etc) makes them plenty scalable, within a range of possibilities. Building more plants (or generators within plants) requires a massive new capital investment, as well as environmental compliance.
There is no type of currently-available power plant that is infinitely scalable without further capital investment--solar is limited by how much sunlight is shining, wind by how much wind is blowing, hydro by friction of water flowing through a finite pipe, nuclear by turbine and heat dissipation capacity, gas by turbine size, etc. You can't just dump more fuel into any of these systems and expect a positive response.
Re:3rd world status? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A lot more needs to be done to the grid (Score:3, Insightful)
The technology already exists.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:3, Insightful)
The plants were designed to be scalable, and they did plan for growth.
Then a funny thing happened. Environmental-whackos stepped up and put a stop to all new electrical generation plants for a period of around 15 years. You couldn't even expand existing plants during this period.
Only when things started getting really bad, and California blacked out a couple times did the rules start to loosen.
Hell it was probably you marching up and down with your scruffy beard and cardboard sign in college that stopped infrastructure development for all we know.
Re:All of this is possible now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Duh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Capacity costs money. When it goes idle for 16 out of 24 hours, it's just a dead weight. Base load plants are generally more economical than plants that can easily adjust their output, so peaks genuinely cost more to cover in any event. If they want to offer customers a discount to help them shave the peaks and avoid the outlay, I fail to see the problem.
I don't think the plans that essentially have homeowners buying on a commodities market are likely worthwhile. People already have jobs, becoming ameteur commodities traders in the off hours is a bit much to ask.
Hoever, simple things like a different rate during set peak hours can work well. Most households can delay laundry and dishwashers until the evening or early morning. Many do anyway because people are at work.
Re:3rd world status? (Score:5, Insightful)
we should also mandate all new water heaters be tankless by 2015, or sooner
Maybe on new construction, but it's not a simple plugin replacement for a tank. Anyway, why choose a particular technology over another? If you care about energy efficiency, just mandate that the efficiency of the water heaters be above a certain percent. We do it with refrigerators, why not water heaters?
Re:Some things need the juice (Score:5, Insightful)
Figures don't lie, but liars figure. They are required to pay more than wholesale because they charge the customers more than wholesale. It's a simple matter of fairness and incentive. Why would I find it fair to sell power TO the grid (often during peak houre when it costs the MOST) at $0.02/KWh and buy it back at $0.14/KWh (at night when it's cheap)?
If the power company buys excess power at retail from home producers, they STILL gain because it helps them shave the peaks.
No but it could be used to keep costs down (Score:4, Insightful)
This is already done on a large scale in the US. For example grid controllers will talk to a company about shutting down part or all of their usage at a certain time. A good candidate might be something like a food processing/storage facility. The controllers ask them to shut down their coolers at the time when homes are kicking up their usage (like around 4-7 PM). This isn't a problem for the company, they just cool it down a bit more before hand, and the temperature stays low enough.
Well a similar thing could be applied to houses as well, in theory. Shut down or reduce certain things during peak times, or zone the usage so only part of the homes in a given area are using it at once.
I'm not saying it is a cure-all or that we want it doing things like shutting down air conditioners for 3 hours in the desert or something, but there is potential to balance things out better and thus save money.
Re:Some things need the juice (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would you find it fair to sell used games to Gamestop for $1 per game, and buy games for $20 per game? Same reason - because Gamestop provides a service, and pays money for the right to provide it (in inventory space, real estate, and employee wages.)
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All of this is possible now (Score:1, Insightful)
It's called "the electric bill."
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:3, Insightful)
they can be loaded using the cheapest electricity availiable and they can sell at the peak load (the most expensive electricity).
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Enron, amongst other crooked energy traders, and the states that enabled them (Hello Texas!) stepped up. California wasn't counting on being screwed over by its fellow states (as in transmission lines deliberately scheduled to block power going *into* CA during peak times).
The California blackouts were caused solely by criminals doing criminal acts. There was plenty of power otherwise.
If anything, California has since realized that it needs more of its own power generation facilities to protect itself from its neighbors that would sell it down the river (more literal than you know) in no time flat.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Gas fired electrical generation plants can respond faster than Coal fired ones, and Nuclear (contrary to your assertion) can also respond quite quickly to additional demand.
All of these require that their boilers be kept at or near steam temperature at times when peaking is likely to be necessary.
About the fastest responding technology is hydro power. Penstocks can be opened and turbines spun up in less than 5 minutes.
Current electrical generation capacity is "scaled" by replication. As a utility approaches 100% utilization during peak periods it starts planning another generation plant. These things 1 year to design, 2 years to build, and 15 years to get permission to build. By that time the design is obsolete.
The problem is one of NIMBY, pure and simple. It will take several California brownouts before the political hacks get out the the way and let the engineers do their job.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
> of its own power generation facilities to protect
> itself from its neighbors
But this is exactly what I was saying.
California had long had the practice of dis-allowing new electrical generation plants anywhere in the state by tying them up in such a morass of regulation that it was effectively impossible to build new plants there.
This was done intentionally to push the generation plants (and the associated pollution) out of their back yard into someone elses.
Why should Texas, who built and owned their own plants and transmission lines (and who, for a long time saw no need to tie into the national grid) be forced to deliver electricity to California SIMPLY so that California could avoid pollution. Texas didn't escape the pollution. They had gas and coal fired plants belching 24/7 so California could flip the switch but never see the smoke stack.
California got exactly what it deserved. Washington, Oregon, and even Montana also faced increased rates due to California refusing to improve its infrastructure.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No but it could be used to keep costs down (Score:3, Insightful)
All in all there is an increasing demand for electricity. That necessitates either upgrading the grid (some places are doing that, Consolidated Edison is installing a superconducting backbone in New York), or balancing the load so that the peak isn't as high.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:2, Insightful)
it was effectively impossible to build new plants there.
No, it was done to curb pollution. Previously, the environmental impact wasn't considered -- or hardly at all.
You do realize that CA prides itself on protecting and cleaning up its environment?
Why should Texas, who built and owned their own plants and transmission lines (and who, for a long time saw no need to tie into the national grid) be forced to deliver electricity to California
No one forced Texas to do anything. Keep that in mind for my next counterpoint...
[Texas] had gas and coal fired plants belching 24/7....
No one forced Texas to do anything. Besides, you just effectively argued that Texas' environment (and consequently the health of its own citizens) comes secondary to heavy polluters.
California got exactly what it deserved.
Now we see your true feelings. It's a blame the victim mentality. Enron felt the same way.
Washington, Oregon, and even Montana also faced increased rates due to California refusing to improve its infrastructure.
Perhaps you missed where energy traders, such as Enron, were illegally gaming the market. Criminal acts drove up prices for everybody.
Once Enron imploded due to its sheer unsustainable greed, energy prices fell again. The fake power shortages went away. People went to jail. People lost their ill-gotten gains. Funny, I haven't seen a rolling blackout since.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop building power plants, then regulate how much suppliers in your state can charge the people. What could go wrong?
Did Enron screw California over? Yep, don't like it? Fix your goofy ass laws, and build some infrastructure. It's the same exact thing that's happening right now in the oil market. In the U.S. we stopped building any infrastructure in refining or producing, now idiots are crying that someone else controls the price of their fuel.
Re:Want to save power? (Score:1, Insightful)
Lets say everyone in your neighborhood has a 3W soft-off TV. Lets say there is 100 houses in your neigborhood. Then lets say no one turns on the TV for 1 month or 30 days. Let say (pulling from the air power is
Now at 3W per hour that is 3x24x30x100 or 216000W (216KW) per month. In dollars thats $21.60. For 1 year thats 2628KW, or $262.80. That is 1-2 houses for 1 month in power. So extra capacity needs to be built just al the time.
Yes its not that big of a deal for you, but scale that to a city the size of New York, LA, Denver, Dallas...
That is the issue. Also if you REALY want to just give money away (which you are) why not give it to an org that can do something with it like buy food or blankets for people who need it?
Also what OLD ass TV are you using? 3 W to keep the tube elements warm I havent heard about that in YEARS. Tubes? There should be 1 tube in your tv and it doesnt need to be kept warm. The rest is caps. Most TVs go from off (no power) to on in about 4 seconds. The only thing you are saving these days is 3 seconds. OLD (i mean early 70s and earlier) TVs had tubes that needed to warm up and be kept warm.
I used to be with you on the 'it doesnt matter much'. Then I went around and unplugged everything in the house. Saved me about 5-10 bucks a month. It was a lot more than I thought it would be.
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:4, Insightful)
Humans are most comfortable at a "room temperature" of 72 degrees, on average. At 78, you're going to have nearly one standard deviation of people that are actually sweating (and not necessarily just the fatties, either). I think we can all agree that office stench is also important to keep down.
The problem is manifold, as like I often say, "You can always put on another sweater. You can't take off more clothes than all of 'em."
Re:fine I'll say it (Score:1, Insightful)