Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

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My jurisdiction rolled out millions of Time of Use smart meters only to find that residential users really didn’t change their behaviour much. Demand shifting was something like a couple percent and faaaar less than predicted.

It turns out when you run surveys, it’s the people that like to think about answers to questions that respond to them, which isn’t representative.

45pg pdf government report: https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports... which starts getting good at page 5.

Understated costs and exaggerated benefits. Peak reduction targets ended up with increases in peak demand.

As hard as it is for the HNer to believe, the vast majority of people will just do whatever they want whenever they want.

I see this everywhere: “why would anyone go to this expensive supermarket that sells the same crap as the cheap one I go to? Why would anyone go to that gas station, their price is always higher than the others in the surrounding area. Why would anyone buy that car, it has a terrible TCO, and on and on”

That makes sense. Running laundry or other household equipment when energy is cheaper makes sense, but it requires a different time commitment. Cooking at other times to save energy costs is unlikely.

You'd get more participation if appliances could be smarter without increasing cost. The holy grail of delay freezer defrost cycles until off-peak, and relaxing temperature thresholds a bit to pre-heat or pre-cool towards the end of off-peak and let things go a bit farther off the set point while on-peak aren't realistic for say water heaters, because the increased consumer costs to do that (more expensive equipment, more time to set settings, most likely some signalling or networking to maintain) don't justify the savings.

I'm guessing there's reasonable uptake on smart thermostats that can participate in demand control, because smart thermostats are desirable anyway, network anyway, and can control large enough loads to matter. Not everybody will want it, but I'd be ok with starting peak a degree cooler or warmer than my set point, and letting the temperature float a degree farther during peak, because HVAC uses a lot of kWh and why pay 2x for those... but then I'm in a low energy cost area with flat rates, so maybe I would change my mind after experiencing it. :)

Yeah, basically a human factors approach will work better than asking general users to vastly increase their cognitive load and/or increase capex for a small value of savings.

Free LED light bulb handouts are more effective than complex expensive-to-implement programs requiring user intervention. Mandating low gpm showerheads works better than asking people to take short showers. Better windows per building code works better than asking people to choose the exotic greenbug window, etc.

ToU pricing can be very effectively used by having an energy management system. This will automatically shift power usage to the most cost efficient times.

In theory. After 15 years, the best most of us in Ontario have is a “4h delay” on a dishwasher and discounted (not free) smart thermostats that you have to install yourself or pay an installer for. I suppose electric cars do a good job here at least.

And this is in new construction.

Overall, it didn’t (and may never) make financial sense to put light users on smart/time of day metering.

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