101–110 of 195 posts
(Off-topic, but regarding this site) Am I crazy or is this website capturing down-button clicks and ignoring them? I typically use down and up to slowly scroll as I read an article. This page is driving me nuts.
Surprised to see that get through QA. (Up arrow works just fine.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
This is a really good argument for carbon taxation to appropriately increase the cost of dirty energy. Send the correct price signal everywhere rather than making your own software do the equivalent of looking out the window at the weather and trying to decide if it’s a sunny or rainy or windy or clam day, and thus if solar or wind generation is making the grid cleaner. Or if instead those are likely offline and the…
If there is also a dynamic price for using the grid, that usage will also spread.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Carbon consumed in building a server is sunk cost and would be paid independent of whether the server does any kind of carbon-footprint-aware load shifting. Assuming the server is "sitting unused for 23 hours a day" is the wrong model for what this work changed. You're assuming the server could be running at 50% duty cycle vs. 100% duty cyle. It isn't; since we're talking the batch load, there's a roughly fixed amoun…
Doesn’t not buying servers create pressure to not build them in the first place?
Google builds datacenters to N-year-long plans that are expensive to modify. Whether they're running their batch jobs on solar energy or coal energy, the carbon footprint of the datacenter build plan is not going to change. They want those datacenters anyway (mostly for the non-batch work and whatever the next big thing is that hasn't been invented yet but can only be done by putting a beach's worth of thinking sand on the problem).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large enough to bid at the wholesale level.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally…
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers. One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could…
Our hypothesis is that market signals combined with the right tools (friendly app and home automation) can help households shift demand into less carbon intensive periods.
So far it's working pretty well.