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Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

news.cornell.edu

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Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#11

Post by evanreichard »

Ecobee has eco+ which has "Community Energy Savings" [0]. It was just way too intrusive. It seemed to be a reactive system vs proactive. Technology Connections goes into this more [1], but I believe they should be providing a system that proactively cools when there is less demand _prior_ to an expected increase in demand. Effectively using your house as a "battery".

When I had it enabled, I was _always_ too hot (in the summer) during peak hours. Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.

___

[0] https://www.ecobee.com/en-us/eco-plus/community-energy-savin...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#12

Post by lotsofpulp »

cratermoon wrote: post #5
labrador wrote: post #2

It's a well known problem, so I'm surprised no one thought about it ahead of time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

There's also the semi-mythical "Super Bowl Flush" https://news.arizona.edu/story/super-bowls-super-flush-just-...

Perhaps we should have a national “if it is yellow, let it mellow, if it is brown, flush it down” ad campaign.

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#13

Post by cshokie »

kevincox wrote: post #3

How is this different from a regular timer thermostat which turns on exactly at the set time?

Syncing the time over the internet would make them a lot more consistent.

Our non-smart thermostat has trouble keeping accurate time and drifts a minute per month or so. That would spread the load out more because “6am” is a ten minute window.

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#14

Post by cratermoon »

Sounds like they need to program them with something like exponential backoff and retry with jitter. Do the smart thermostats have any information on grid demand? IF not, then they could just be programmed to apply some random time shift +/- a few minutes (or however long) to spread out the demand and lower the spikes.

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#17

Post by bob1029 »

The power grid is a very complex thing, and I strongly believe that demand management is an important component for stability. There are ways we could better organize our HVAC fleets to provide near-equivalent levels of comfort. The current proposals really suck though.

Storage is a big deal that seems to be the focal point of most of the renewable/non-renewable debate, but there are other concerns that are discussed less frequently.

Having sufficient inertia in the grid is important as well. It's like a low-pass filter for the desired grid frequency. The less equivalent spinning mass you have, the easier it is for these spikes to cause serious problems - Even if you have a gigantic reservoir of water ready to spin up some turbines, you still need to be able to handle all of the instantaneous events up to that point, during, and following.

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#18

Post by photochemsyn »

Smart thermostats could really be a lot smarter, in particular if you had a little bit of local battery storage, but even without that it's possible to imagine a thermostat that could be set to lower electric bills based on real-time monitoring of electrical prices.

> "With few exceptions, when the load peaks, the price also peaks. So, if you can move some of your electricity consumption away from the peak times, real-time pricing will enable you to save money by buying more of your energy at lower prices."

There are many ways to implement this but it might result in a fairly pricey thermostat requiring an internet connection and the ability to automatically switch from grid power to local battery power as prices fluctuate. It would likely reduce demand variation however.

https://extension.psu.edu/real-time-pricing-for-electricity

Some people have also rolled out notions like allowing utilities to control thermostats remotely but I think that'd be very unpopular for most people, it has too many dystopian Big Brother connotations.

Re: Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids

#20

Post by mistrial9 »

bob1029 wrote: post #17

The power grid is a very complex thing, and I strongly believe that demand management is an important component for stability. There are ways we could better organize our HVAC fleets to provide near-equivalent levels of comfort. The current proposals really suck though. Storage is a big deal that seems to be the focal point of most of the renewable/non-renewable debate, but there are other concerns that are discussed…

what I am reading here is that the first use-case for "smart" remote is .. remote service disconnect. Profit goes Up. Second use-case is better dossier building. "smart"
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