Comment by HexPhantom
2 days ago
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
2 days ago
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
There should be a penalty for having less flexibility in consuming electricity. That’s how the market incentivizes us to figure out how to be flexible in our consumption.
We should probably also subsidize the conversion, for people who look at the incentives, want to become more flexible, but don’t have the money.
And we might have to handle some special cases—maybe hospitals, for example—where reliable power is an important social good. But these should be rare.
For households in Europe, there are some incentives to switch to heat pumps for heating... for best efficiency (and longevity), usually a heat pump needs to run at lower power constantly without switching off much.
And since the heat pump will be the biggest total consumer in a household (in winter), there is not a huge opportunity for flexibility.
This seems like a sort of complex trade-off (taking your word for it that they do run more efficiently when run continuously). We’d still probably prefer to run them on renewable energy and defer them when running on non-renewables, because the inefficiently consuming a plentiful resource that is not very damaging to produce, is better than efficiently consuming one that is destructive to produce.
But if we have multiple tasks with multiple levels of defer-ability (either due to efficiency benefits or due to people just wanting to run their dishwashers at a time convenient to them), it could be more complicated. But working out trade offs like this is what the market is for, right?
I've long thought there should be a standard mechanism for back pressure for loads that can defer their usage.
For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run.
Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
This sort of thing was called “smartgrid” but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe we could lean into modern buzzwords.
The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.
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