They don't... yet. Once the whole plan comes to fruition, they will. Do some deep research about, not just the technology, but the proposals and product roadmaps and adoptions plans (many of them being codified).
Step 1 - smart meter
Step 2 - report when usage is above "baseline" for zoning type/size
Step 3 - break baseline into demand windows
Step 4 - variable rate based on usage during demand windows
Step 5 - smart meter connected devices
Step 6 - per device rates - based on need/luxury/baseline, etc.
Step 7 - load shedding per device - smart load shedding may control min/max thermostat, etc.
The "steps" may not all come in that order, but fear not, they are long ago proposed, built into standards and being developed, tested, deployed.
Go ahead - and while you are at it, plug in the little ODB2 tattle tale that your insurance company wants to give you so that you "get the best rate"... Again, no thanks.
Yes, they can cope with TV pickups because they usually know when they will be and roughly how big they will be. Unexpected breaks in popular TV programs can still cause trouble, though. It is not just boiling the kettle; flushing the toilet means that a water pump somewhere has to pump harder to refill it.
It has been a year or two since I have really spent any time looking into it... but I have gone down the rabbit hole more than once, as the ramifications are extremely disturbing.
When the "do gooders" twist the tax and spend folks hard enough and the for profits see the handwriting on the wall (and play along, for more profit) - we are all in trouble...
If you have done the research that you indicate, then you have already seen that what I posted above is already in the works, and in some cases already being tested with real households.
Well-designed new houses in moderate climates are energy neutral: the solar panels produce as much energy as the heat pumps need, although not at the moment they need it.
Some UK energy firms are being accused of 'blackmailing' customers by blocking them from the cheapest tariffs if they refuse to install a smart meter.
For example, Scottish Power customers have to register an interest in smart meters if they want the cheapest deal.
Of the Big Six providers, only EDF lets it's customers opt out of having one.
British Gas, Eon and Npower ‘blackmail’ customers into getting smart meters by withholding cheapest deals
For example, Scottish Power customers have to register an interest in smart meters if they want the cheapest deal.
Of the Big Six providers, only EDF lets it's customers opt out of having one.
British Gas, Eon and Npower ‘blackmail’ customers into getting smart meters by withholding cheapest deals
All true, if you mean the Los Angeles region (some other parts of California are very different, for example, the Monterey Bay area.)
Scientists studying climate change in the region concur on the opinion that Los Angeles' future is increasingly severe drought and increasingly severe heat, until it eventually becomes virtually unlivable, like Death Valley.
There are approximately ten million people in Los Angeles county now. The vast majority of them will eventually be forced out of the area.
Before I left, the price of real estate had already climbed so high that people were buying houses with forty-year mortgages. It's quite likely that the area will be essentially uninhabitable before those mortages are ever paid off.
(The probability that a 40-year mortgage will ever actually be paid off is worth another discussion. It seems likely that California is headed towards the multi-generational mortgage, babies born carrying their parent's debts, as in Japan.)
My wife and I are among them. Not because we had vast resources at our disposal, rather the opposite; we could see the unlivable, unaffordable future written on the wall.
-Gnobuddy
So expensive storage batteries and expensive electronics that require:
Raw materials, including heavy metals, that need to be mined, processed, shipped, manufactured into heavy batteries and electronic components, photovoltaic panels and heatsinks, that again need to be shipped (several times) to their end location... by carbon consuming planes, trains, boats and automobiles, only to live a rather short life and then be shipped again to be disposed of in an expensive process meant to protect the very environment that they are supposed to be "saving". A process that also uses extensive resources to operate. Lest, we forget about the real world life and output of said photovoltaic panels.
There is nothing "energy neutral" about a solar storage equipped homes, insulated or not. The "moderate climate" bit makes it even more suspect, as the energy footprint of a pure electric, gas or wood burning home is small anyway....
And the question is, small compared to what? Depending on what we compare this to, we get some very thought-provoking results to ponder.
This 2017 Los Angeles Department of Water & Power document ( http://rates.ladwp.com/UserFiles/Rate Summaries/Electric Rates Summary (effective July 1, 2017).pdf ) says that in Zone 1, the first 350 kWh of electricity used by a home each month is charged at Tier 1 (the lowest) rates.
Use more than 350 kWh, and you get charged at higher Tier 2 rates for the next 700 kWh, i.e. up to a total of 1050 kWh each month). Use more than 1050 kWh, and you get kicked up to Tier 3 rates.
So the LADWP considers 350 kWh of energy usage per month a reasonable amount of energy - stay within this, and your house is reasonably energy efficient. You've been a good boy or girl, and done your bit to "save the planet". Yay!
When I lived in Los Angeles, I managed to keep our electric consumption within Tier 1 most months. But we lived in a very small house, cooked with gas, had a relatively small 'fridge, and almost never used the air conditioning. No big plasma TV, no heated pool, no frills, just basic housing.
Assuming a 30-day month, The Tier 1 allotment of 350 kWh per month works out to 11.667 kWh per day.
An average human being working at an average pace for several hours can sustain a mechanical energy output of about 100 watts. In the horrible days of slavery, a slave might be forced to work ten-hour days of physical labour. Multiply 100 watts by 10 hours, and you get 1000 watt-hours, or 1 kWh. That's the daily energy output of a hard-working human.
In other words, the LADWP's energy-efficient home is allowed to use up about as much energy as nearly twelve servants working inhumanly long and hard hours every day. The small and energy-efficient home consumes an order of magnitude more energy than one of our pre-industrial ancestors did.
There were two of us living in our little LA home, so each of us used, very roughly, just for our housing, about as much energy as five of our pre-industrial ancestors would have used. If we extrapolate that usage to the planet's current 7.7 billion population, if every two people had a small home like our old LA one, then our homes alone would be using up about as much energy as a pre-industrial population of about 40 billion humans would have used.
(That's about 55 times more people than there actually were on planet earth then - it's estimated that there were 0.7 billion people on planet earth in the mid 1700s.)
Staying with just the USA's 350 million population, each of them using 5 times as much energy as a pre-industrial human, that means that energy-efficient single-family housing for just the US population alone is equivalent to roughly the energy demands of 1.75 billion pre-industrial humans.
And we haven't even talked about those enormous 5000 square foot mansions, or about our personal transportation, which often uses far more energy than our homes.
A small car uses very roughly 10 kW of power just to roll along at highway speeds - a constant 65 mph or 100 kmph on level ground with no head-wind. Spend an hour a day in your car, and that's another 10 kWh of energy you use each day, and that's if you drive a small car, very gently, as though there was a raw egg between your right foot and the gas/accelerator pedal. Drive alone, and that's very roughly the energy equivalent of another ten pre-industrial humans. Floor the gas pedal of your 100 horsepower compact car, and you're using the energy equivalent of about 1000 pre-industrial humans as long as the pedal is down. Floor the gas in your 350-hp SUV, and that's 3500 pre-industrial humans.
(Actually, it's much worse, because cars run on fossil fuel, re-emitting CO2 that was stored by plankton tens of millions of years ago, while humans run on fuel (food) grown recently, so humans are just re-emitting the CO2 that was pulled out of the air in the last year or two, when the food was being grown. )
I first began doing these very simple back-of-the-envelope, order-of-magnitude calculations, in the early 2000s, when we were beginning to see the first major weather and climate anomalies that were obvious to the lay person, without need for scientific analysis - for instance, the extraordinarily hot summer of 2003. What I kept finding out is that each of us is now using orders of magnitude more resources than our pre-industrial ancestors.
Not to mention, there seem to be no other animals of roughly our mass (order of magnitude 100 kilograms) that have a population in billions - other than cows, you have to look hard to find an animal of our size with a global population in the tens of millions, even (seals may qualify.)
So there are about a three orders of magnitude (a thousand times) more humans than any other comparably sized animal, cows aside, and each of us is using ten to a hundred times more energy and resources than those other animals are. Multiply those two, and it suggests we humans are using up 10,000 to 100,000 times as much resources as the world's entire population of creatures of roughly our size and weight.
All of these crude estimates suggest that cutting our energy and resource usage by half, or by three-quarters, or even tenfold, would still leave us orders of magnitude away from a planet that can sustain itself without human intervention.
Clearly these sorts of rough estimates are very far from exact - as I said, they are no more than order-of-magnitude estimates, i.e., at best, within a factor of ten of the correct answer. But these sorts of estimates have one enormous advantage - they can be done by anyone using common-sense and an Internet search engine to look up some numbers, and they can give us a big-picture view of how deep a hole we've actually dug for ourselves.
I often get the feeling that even the specialists don't do enough of this stand-back-and-look, see the big picture, thing. Or maybe they do, but they keep it to themselves, or only talk about it around the water-cooler at the research lab. Obviously, this sort of rough estimate, unsupported by hard data, will never be published in a scientific journal, or told to a member of the press. Scientists know better than to expose their throats to the furious attacks that would immediately follow, possibly destroying their scientific credibility and their scientific careers.
Since I am a gnobuddy and have no scientific credibility to lose, I can go ahead and talk about what they cannot.
-Gnobuddy
Australia has a reasonable level of grid interconnection on its eastern side, allowing PV and wind power to be utilised far afield. Economics have meant PV has had quite a surge over the last decade, both for residential and large farms, and there are now quite a few large wind farms - they are all very quick to install. What takes longer is to upgrade the poles and wires, and especially the large power interconnects that pump power between some regions (eg. to Tasmania, and to South Australia). South Australia put Tesla's '100 days to install or its free' battery in recently, and a new hub of wind, PV and a battery 4x larger, is just getting the tick of approval now.
So although battery has been lagging due to commercial reality, it is now starting to make commercial sense (due to electric car uptake via Tesla) at a large grid node, and can be used to alleviate limitations due to 'poles and wires', and hence add security of supply by enhancing diversity and allow the grid to manage short duration peaks and troughs of generation capability.
One advantage of having large battery installations, is that they will hopefully pull battery life-cycle processes up. Recycling of PV panels is not yet acceptable here, so hopefully that part of the cycle will also improve quite soon.
So although battery has been lagging due to commercial reality, it is now starting to make commercial sense (due to electric car uptake via Tesla) at a large grid node, and can be used to alleviate limitations due to 'poles and wires', and hence add security of supply by enhancing diversity and allow the grid to manage short duration peaks and troughs of generation capability.
One advantage of having large battery installations, is that they will hopefully pull battery life-cycle processes up. Recycling of PV panels is not yet acceptable here, so hopefully that part of the cycle will also improve quite soon.
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Really I wonder, they have claimed energy neutral houses here in New England with bitter winters and hot summers. Factor in cooking, laundry, HVAC, I don't see it except with a grossly unbalanced subsidy for grid tie. Just roll the numbers for average insolation you need a mass quantity of panels to truly be independent.
Indeed. A decent-quality 15% efficient solar panel generates 150 watts per square metre, for maybe 6 hours a day, so roughly one kWh each day.
So you'd need ten square metres of solar cells, in a sunny locale, just to match that LADWP Tier 1 energy usage number (which really isn't enough for heating, cooling, or cooking.) That's over a hundred square feet of solar panels, if you think in Imperial units. Not exactly tiny, though quite do-able, if you can come up with the roughly $5000 USD cost.
A little Googling found US residential solar installers promoting "10kW" systems - not 10kWh, but 10kW - at a typical cost around $30,000 USD before any rebates that might exist. That is a lot of money for any normal working person.
-Gnobuddy
A I understand your point... but I think you missed the context of mine (on purpose to make yours).
Yes, we use far more resources than our Clovis brethren... I am happy to not be alive in that time. Most of man’s existence, innovation and purpose has centered on his bettering of his own circumstance and is driven by free will. That too must be viewed in context, as if viewed from your context, ends in the ultimate irony.
You contend man ends himself under his own weight before the Sun or an ELE ends him anyway. You aver there is no fix, or at least without culling the herd and/or limiting resource usage and allocation. Who gets to be the lucky ones who get to live so that others don’t suffer? Who decides that? Who sustains that after those who implement it are gone (hint... nobody, as man will do what man does) Anyway, to what end, waiting for Godot... er the Sun?
Not being argumentative or trying to put words in your mouth... just boiling it all down to a simple reality.
Yes, we use far more resources than our Clovis brethren... I am happy to not be alive in that time. Most of man’s existence, innovation and purpose has centered on his bettering of his own circumstance and is driven by free will. That too must be viewed in context, as if viewed from your context, ends in the ultimate irony.
You contend man ends himself under his own weight before the Sun or an ELE ends him anyway. You aver there is no fix, or at least without culling the herd and/or limiting resource usage and allocation. Who gets to be the lucky ones who get to live so that others don’t suffer? Who decides that? Who sustains that after those who implement it are gone (hint... nobody, as man will do what man does) Anyway, to what end, waiting for Godot... er the Sun?
Not being argumentative or trying to put words in your mouth... just boiling it all down to a simple reality.
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The phrase "smart meter" covers MANY different technologies.
Out here in the boondocks, we have "smart" in the sense that only once in 10 years has a meter-reader come to our meter. And the billing is generally more accurate than my last house where a reader had to go to every house. And I can get yesterday's consumption on-line (when the site works). Something in my meter sends numbers to the billing office. (I thot it was 900MHz but I now think my rig glitches the zero-crosses of 60Hz.)
_My_ meter does not have a remote shut-off. (I have seen newer ones which probably do.) It is in fact a plain mechanical meter with a small gizmo added. If I was bad, I know they can put a shut-off shim behind my meter. I am suspecting the local infrastructure is one-way: billing, not control.
Time of day does not require "smart". House I once lived in had a special rate for water-heating overnight. Just a clock with a switch to cut-over to a low-rate meter. But it was already depreciated, the meter readers forgot to re-set the clock after power failures, and I was getting my best rate mid-day (which spoils the point). Eventually I got a letter saying the discount was eliminated.
> One evening there was a knock on her door and she (and they!) were surprised to find a gang of her colleagues doing what they thought was a raid on a cannabis farm.
Friend of mine was a ceramic artist. She bought a pottery kiln. Electric! Couple months later, police and a power company tech knocked on the door and asked if she knew any reason her electric bill had shot-up. She's not technical, but did grasp that the kiln was the likely reason. She took them downstairs, showed kiln and wiring and a lot of her pots and gazing tests, potter's wheel, with sacks of clay and clay-dust all over. The tech agreed that the kiln could be using that much juice (as much as an attic full of grow-lights). Incidentally, there was a joint in the living room
, but of course that's not why they were there and they did not see (or overlooked) it.I shouldn't be alive.
I was installing a geyser timer and all the switches on both DB's were off, and the house supply was off. My left hand was resting on the wall, touching a water pipe at the wrist. My right hand was unscrewing the neutral from the geyser connection. I got a massive wallop across my chest. Lots of pain and shouting, a very surprised little 5 year old boy who was watching (his eyes were so big, lol), but here I am today, heart beating strong.
There must have been a floating voltage on the neutral-to-earth. Scary stuff. I've been shocked before a few times with 240 V, but nothing like this. Nothing comes close to this pain (for mains shocking).
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