Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

People get a little bit hysterical about demand response.

It's just a cheap and sensible thing to do. But since fossil fuel interests need to create that continuing narrative of chaos and collapse, doing the cheap and sensible thing is treated like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The rest of the article touches on why the peakiest peaks are expensive. But still, sending a text message to offer a financial incentive to do something trivial to help avoid an inefficient waste of resources, is a sign that civilization is on the verge of collapse, rather than a boring cost optimisation.

View on HN

There are a lot of different things under the demand response umbrella. I agree that text messaging with an incentive is a no brainer. So are commercial and industrial DR programs. But at the far end of the spectrum, where it starts being more automated and more opaque and confusing to residential power customers, I think it's less clear cut.

> sending a text message to offer a financial incentive to do something trivial to help avoid an inefficient waste of resources

It might not be trivial. As the article notes, the main thing that ends up needing to be "shifted" (a misnomer, as we'll see in a moment) is residential air conditioning. But you can't "shift" air conditioning. What "shifting" actually means here is "leaving your A/C off and letting your house warm up". Some people can withstand that without much problem; but some can't (for a variety of reasons). For the ones that can't, running their A/C is not "an inefficient waste of resources", it's a necessity.

The inefficient waste of resources being discussed wasn't on the demand side, but rather on the generating side. It would be far better to shed the load, instead of firing up less efficient (i.e. wasteful) peaker units.

You can shift air conditioning, to a degree. You could cool down the house, maybe even one or two degrees under your usual temperature. Your house now acts as a thermal battery and you can leave the AC off for some time. How long will that work? With the general atrocious insulation in Japan and the very humid/hot summers, probably not super long.

Of course not super on topic but the insulation in central Japan seems to be a big problem to me. Walls are thin and often made out of wood. There are ventilaton holes, often closeable, but with the thinnest plastic cover. Windows are single pane, and the window frames and doors are often of such shoddy construction, you can see the outside through some cracks. If there was a shift in construction quality, I'm sure the electricity use in summer and winter would drop, but I don't expect that to happen soon. Insulation and construction quality is expensive, so this isn't done in construction of rental apartments.

> How long will that work?

Not very long in any house, if the day is sunny. If the day is cloudy, you might squeeze some more time out. The main heat load on a house in the summer is the sun.

There's a lot of stats and utilizing personalized information that go into this.

I was part of https://www.oracle.com/industries/utilities/products/opower-... before the oracle acquisition, and we powered the Demand Response program, in addition to other things.

There's a couple steps to this:

    1. Eligibility and Program Opt-outs (figure out who it is legal to send the message to)
    2. Machine Learning to predict the ROI - how much to offer and how many people are likely to "advertise" to - the utility needs to know so they can keep within budget.
    3. What effective, A/B tested messaging to send (some people care about money back, some cared about being green, some both)
    4. What medium the customer reacted to (we did batch, usps snail mail - generate PDFs and automated the mailing while minimizing postage cost, or did they react to SMS)
    5. The actual platform to blast out texts to all residential customers 24hrs before the DR (Demand Response) event to a city - ex: (BGE) boston, tokyo, PGE (bay area)..

fun times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com