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The idea is simple: supply people with smart meters that give real-time information on electricity use and price. Armed with the new information, consumers might opt to plug in their laptop in the middle of the night instead of, say, the middle of the day. As a bonus, the system would lead to more use of renewable energy sources like the wind and sun.
But there's a hitch. If everybody aims to use cheap electricity, the slow time in the middle of the night becomes the high demand time. In the worst case, everybody's laptops start recharging, refrigerator compressors kick on, dishwashers start up and so on, at the exact same moment. At least so say M.I.T. researchers in a paper presented at a recent meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Instead of charging on the cheap, you get a huge spike in demand and, potentially, a blackout. That's because electricity must be produced at the same second it is consumed and utilities must precisely match supply and demand.
One solution would be to give consumers imperfect or non-instantaneous price information, though that kind of defeats the original purpose. But it does keep the smart grid from outsmarting itself.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
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18 Comments
Add CommentIt might mis-characterize the process to call it "imperfect" price information... If you call setting prices in a way that crashes the system "perfect", I guess you call call setting prices in a way that doesn't "imperfect", but that seems weird to me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't see why the devices couldn't be set to stagger the price reductions in a manner that is both fair and consistent with maintaining a healthy grid.
I would expect that as demand rises during what used to be the off hours, then the price benefit of switching to those times would wane somewhat (although people will still demand more during daylight hours whatever the price difference...) , but you still would have accomplished the goal of shifting a lot of usage to previous non-peak periods and getting better results across the whole system.
You won't catch me roasting the dinner at 2 am - were all the researchers male by ay chance?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI surprised at the conclusions shared in this report. The MIT researchers must have a very narrow concept of the capabilities of the smart grid and its operators. If pricing policies created demand spikes, parameters can be adjusted to stagger low rates at different locations to optimize power generation and usage. For someone to assume that all user locations would automatically switch to lowered rates at, say, 10pm and therefore would create a peak demand only shows their lack of understanding of the system that is already in place. Many utilities have staggered pricing schedules and can even remotely control—in real time—large demand customers (by prior arrangement & with pricing incentives) in order to efficiently match minute-by-minute supply with demand, sans blackouts.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn addition to the highly unlikely scenario of too many people changing their usage to the middle of the night, the original article also says that such a usage switch would negate the value of renewables like wind and solar, due to their erratic nature. But no renewables that I know of are without a storage system (batteries, etc) to get around that problem, regardless of pricing schemes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt seems like the MIT researchers are perhaps ill-informed at best. And to repeat the findings in SA without questioning them, even in a blog, is disappointing.
Censorship lives at SciAM - my previous critical (but not abusive) comment disappeared.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy biggest problem with this is how do they plan on staggering the prices? Are they lowering the prices for low demand times or are they raising the prices for high demand times? They'll probably do a combination of the two but most people can't change the time they use energy, especially businesses so essentially it would be raising prices on energy for most people. Also, will this be the energy companies raising the prices or will it be the government raising energy taxes for those time periods?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis whole idea is just a huge headache waiting to happen.
Not sure if you have the same system in the US but we (UK) already have a (significantly) cheaper "night rate" as part of dual rate electricity tarrifs. The prices vary with provider but the cheap rate times have all been the same. Many people with electric "storage" heaters and appliances (dryers, washers, dishwashers and electric cars in the future) switch these on (or they are switched remotely by the supplier) at the start of the cheap rate periods. The system hasn't fallen over yet so I don't see why we won't be able to cope with "smart meters". Large industrial users usually negociate individual supply contracts with suppliers independent of any moment to moment supply cost variations.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, it seems more like what MIT is talking about is a 'stupid grid', not a smart grid. A sufficiently well-designed smart grid will simply communicate status information to its customers in some fashion, maybe as dynamic pricing indications or supplemented with more basic "you need to reduce usage now" kinds of notifications. While there is SOME inflexibility in people's energy usage, there is also a lot of flexibility, and likely to be more as time goes on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObviously this kind of issue is a matter for engineers and policy planners to consider, but it is only one of 100's of different issues.
I can also see a lot of advantages to something like dynamic pricing based on instantaneous demand. Local energy storage systems for instance can then make intelligent decisions about whether or not it makes sense to go into a charge or discharge mode at any given time and it should become fairly straightforward to make cost/benefit calculations when deploying such systems at different levels in the grid.
Why don't they just leave the grid alone? They have this same complaint and argument about the new health care system..."everybody is going to go to the doctor at the same time and you are going to have a three day wait in their office before you get to see the doctor!" Bull Crap!!! If you leave the grid alone, everyone will not charge their car at the same time, just like not everyone gets gas at the same time, and everyone is not going to cook their meals or wash their clothes at the same time, and about all the charging stations will be ran by solar. General Electric has already installed five or six solar charging parks with 40 quick charge stations at each park and they can even lessen those stations to one or two and you can erect it somewhere on your property as a carport where you can pull your car in during the day and supercharge in less than an hour. The remaining power can be plugged into your home to help with inside electric. So leave the grid the hell alone and get your little "brains" onto something more important.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFollowing on from tharter above, couldn't certain sockets in the home be designated 'cutrate' & turned on by the energy companies, ... if their grid is all that smart, that is?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMeanwhile, I am seriously concerned about the mention, in the article of 'refrigerator compressors'. Ahem. Main usage - door opening involved - of fridges takes place inevitably in people's waking hours. I really hope energy executives don't expect me & my perishable food stuffs to wait until night time to cool down the fridge again. Or perhaps they are thinking I'll take everything I need for the following day out of the fridge & leave it on the counter in the middle of the night in order to avoid opening the door in daylight hours.
Erm... no? 'Cuz that is NOT going to happen. Right?
As *vbillc* mentions, people have been using offpeak energy in the UK for years. You might set your appliances to run during that period & certainly your 'storage' heaters (one of the really BAD ideas of energy-efficiency since by the afternoon, one is often freezing one's ... erm ... arse off) & I'd definitely charge my car then, but my laptop? Probably not so much.
We could save a lot of energy merely by changing our household habits now, but Americans are mostly lazy about such things. When daylight energy costs double, they will probably begin to think differently. We can but hope.
And furthermore, because I have the room... :)... I am totally unconvinced that today's energy companies really give two hoots about alternative energy. Everything they do is half-hearted & feels like a sop to public demand. If they really wanted to switch to alternative energy sources, they'd invest some money in it instead of planning new nuclear reactors, as many are now doing.
Sigh...
(Wanders off muttering to herself, "Not much hope. Not much danged hope at all.")
Oh please. What a useless report. This has been common knowledge since the 80's. People choose to do it or not and it's reported on their utility bills.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCreating fear over having people use power over night? Sounds like a power company backed this report. Home users aren't a big power drain it's the transportation and businesses that are.
This is junk science and totally doesn't belong with reputable Scientific American.
See this other link, from MIT. It has more two paragraphs and maps.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/too-smart-grid-0803.html
What will be different with the smart grid? and todays multi-price grid is ability to communicate with the household equipment directly, and potentially the ability to both store and generate electricity for sale to the grid. What if 5-10 years in the future thousands of hybrid cars with fuel cells in LA switching from producing power for sale to taking power from the grid to store in batteries, and they all switch at once? Not only will the large the spinning reserve be required to deal with it will off set any savings to both the environment & costs. Further we will need many new larger, expensive local transformers, medium voltage transmission lines, etc, to avoid overloaded and triping local grids.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is the complication. If as some above suggest, we give discounts to individuals not all at once, you can imagine those people who get less time at the cheap price will be very upset.
FYG, I sell electricity from my home to the grid, and put extra storage just to help me sell it at the peak, and I often sell off more than my wind rig generated that day because I can buy the balance cheap at night. This is why during deregulation utilities were allowed to keep pump storage units while being forced to sell off or separate generation units. With fuel cells, hybrid cars, etc, If a large number of households started to do what I do, then the stability of the grid becomes very complicated.
So your electricity supply starts working on the same principles as Wall St. You can therefore expect the same behaviour.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere is the complication. If as some above suggest, we give discounts to individuals not all at once, you can imagine those people who get less time at the cheap price will be very upset.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJamesDavis: If there was a way to tap your anger for energy we would have a large supply. Most of what you've said is either not true or not feasible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe peak times will remain peak because consumer use of the grid is tiny compared to industrial use. That is, no matter how many of us charge our laptop at 2 AM it's not going to cause an overwhelming flood on the system. The biggest demands are from really big users. They decide their usage in well understood and non-surprising ways that the grid is prepared to deal with.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis study is so flawed its hard to even know where to
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisstart. Even the simplest schemes can be adjusted. If too
much night time load, make the incentive for night time
load less. In reality people aren't going to switch to
cooking at midnight to save 5 cents. What we will see is
electric car charging at night. However this will not
pop up all of a sudden. A truly smart grid would use
such optional loads as charging to help balance things.