Hacker News Reader

Comment by RealityVoid | Hacker News Reader

This assumes automatic adjustment of consumption on the consumer end. I doubt individual residential consumers will look at the time and the consumption and plug their appliances according to the network for a few cents. I do not know if industrial usage is enough to move the needle here. Maybe someone can chime in with some data?

View on HN

If I had a smart dishwasher or a smart washing machine that could turn on or prep hot water when the demand is low, it could work.

It would work during the times it wasn't busy participating in a distributed cyberattack along with the rest of the internet of shit.

I hereby would like to record my claim to the term "high frequency dish washing", or HFDW as it is to be known :D

If every smart dishwasher does the same thing, the price will surge across a time period shorter than the minimum run time of your dishwasher. That stratagy only works if you're the only one doing it.

I think you are simplifying the model a bit too far. Peak load is very likely not driven by dishwashers...

It could, but for it to work on a mass scale, everyone would need to replace all of their appliances, which will take at least a decade for the tipping point to occur.

Sure, but the same can be said for almost all change. Driverless cars, solar panels(renewable energy in general actually), even windows updates! I don't think saying "we shouldn't do it because it will take too long" should be a valid excuse

If (some) people drive five miles to save $0.10/gallon on gasoline, they'll run the dishwasher when power is less expensive.

However, your question presupposes that it's only human behavior that can be influenced with price. Send a price signal and let technologists and entrepreneurs do what they do best...

Some people doing that is not enough to assume significant shifts in market forces will happen. The question is will enough people do that?

I agree, a price signal might send some people finding solutions, but I'm afraid that a lot of the solutions would cost more than the savings, so that would reduce the field of what is possible. And mostly, I wanted to underline that simply sending a price signal is sometimes not enough for certain markets and does not scale too well by itself.

Gas prices vary daily. This works very well at matching supply with demand. I don't see any particular reason to believe that there's something different about electricity.

What is the cost of time-shifting usage versus paying peak pricing versus buying some storage to charge at lower rates? At the industrial scale this becomes a game of capital expenditures versus cash flow. At the consumer scale it's a game of convenience and cost. If energy can be made cheaper at the cost of informational overhead (or less convenience), then what is the role of storage (as it itself becomes cheaper) in managing that overhead? It doesn't seem far fetched that it will play a role.

Also, at some point, can I get a discounted rate on my hyperloop ticket if I sell it energy during peak demand at an under-market rate?

We already have internet-connected thermostats, for example. If there's enough of a price differential, the market will provide ways to do it.

Hi, we are an energy company working on load shifting of EV charging. The customer will just set some preferences- the charging timing is then fully automated to shift load and smooth demand peaks. Pretty sure most modern demand response systems work this way.

How's your product going to far, and are you hiring? :P

I think you might be on to something, but this needs to be presented to the consumer in a certain way. And I do not know how far you can get without support from the big players in the appliance market.

EV and heating/cooling. Sector coupling and electrification will bring in the needed flexibility. It's not really there now with all the washing machine and appliances talk.

Cool to see you are working on this so concretely!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com