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Computers Causing 2nd Hump In Peak Power Demand
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Oct 20, 2008 11:26 AM
from the that's-why-i-compute-with-the-monitor-off dept.
from the that's-why-i-compute-with-the-monitor-off dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. 'It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau,' says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. '8 p.m. is kind of a recent phenomenon.' Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. 'Without a doubt, there's demand' for green PCs, says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point, adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."
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Simple solution. (Score:5, Funny)
Just change the air time of American Idol to 6:00pm and turn politics to 8:00-9:00pm
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Just change the air time of American Idol to 6:00pm and turn politics to 8:00-9:00pm"
LOL. Scary, but true.
That would not solve the problem, as it would just enhance the effect of the 4-7pm peak.
Move American Idol to 6am and you might actually spread power usage a bit.
Yeah, yeah, I know you were joking, just had to play along.
Seriously now, the solution is demand-based control. Move laundry and other big users of electricity to the middle of the night, and charge demand-based rates (cheaper rates at night
Re:Simple solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
this already happens if people try - where i live i opted for the time of use meter - where off peak power is extreamly cheap and on peak it is 2x or more normal price..
mix that with the fact that i have appliances with timers - we load the dish washer or washer or dryer and set it to run at 12-2am .. and go to bed..
in a 2 story house with 2 people the standard compliment of 3 comps and 2 laptops last month our power bill was 100$
if you try there is incentive to do it - you just have to be willing to make the effort
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
2 story/2 people house and you're paying $100/month for power?
My wife and I live in a two story townhouse. All the lights are CFLs, we both have laptops that are on quite a bit of time, but I also use intelligent strips that shut off the entertainment center when the 60" LCD is off. Our power bill is never over $40/month. What's your price per KwH?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
$0.07/KwH from ComEd (Nuclear) in Northern Illinois suburb.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So I shouldn't tell you that with time of day metering, the price goes down to $0.01/KwH between midnight and 4am? =)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My business partner's wife is very big into aquariums. They just installed a new 750 gallon tank in their basement, and with all the metal halide lights (used to promote plant/coral growth), their power bill is pushing $700/month. I've spoken with him about switching to new full-spectrum LED systems that have a higher initial investment, but would bring his bill down to $250-$350/month.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I just moved to I'm paying $0.155/kWh. Where I was before it was $0.065/kWh.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Incidentally, if I leave my clothes in the dryer overnight, they get wrinkled.
So don't leave them in the dryer. Wear them for a few weeks like a good little /.er
Re:Simple solution. (Score:4, Interesting)
We will not likely be able to affect things like TV and Internet usage times,
How long can a TV run from a car/truck battery? If electricity prices varied by time of day and/or your connection's current power draw, it might actually be cost-effective for people to run some daytime things from batteries that they could recharge overnight.
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Re:Simple solution. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was about to say the same thing ... so here I am doing it :) But seriously you are right. The first thing I thought of was, "hmmm a bigger UPS would certainly solve the problem." Although I'd need to size it even bigger for constant charge/discharge cycles or it will die a quick death, but still the point remains ... the market for On-site power storage would skyrocket which would also help that same market in its support for things like Wind and Solar. By increasing the market for local energy storage we are more likely to see an increase in investment for new-tech and a reduction in consumer cost as R&D/fixed-production costs can be amortized across more units.
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Calculations of power use (Score:5, Informative)
Car battery capacity is usually between 40-60 amp-h. That is, if you wanted to use battery power for three hours of peak, you would get (generous estimation) of 20 amp-h per battery. Your battery gives 12 volts, and, again under ideal conditions you should get 12*20 = 240 W-h per battery for the peak time.
A standard light bulb is 100 watts. Your plasma TV may be 800-1200 watts.
Thus to run the TV for three hours you would need five batteries, and that assumes that you could run them to dry. Lead acid batteries can produce surge power pretty well, but it would likely be cost prohibitive unless you could get a lot of duty cycles out of them.
Looking at Sears -- a cheap car battery is around $50. Electricity costs $0.08 per kwh where I am. Thus to equal the cost of one battery you would need to produce 50/.08 = 625 KW-h of electricity before being spent. That is 625,000 W-h or 1,000 charge cycles.
I'm not sure if a battery can handle this before getting corroded and functioning badly. Of course, this is only the cost of the battery, and really what you care about is the delta cost from night and day electricity. Additionally, people could not use retail car batteries but could get cheaper lead-acid apparatuses.
At delta cost of $.05 per kw-h, then if you could get more than 1000 charge cycles from the battery, then anything above this is profit on the order of $.05 KWh * 1kW * 3h = $.15 = 15 cents per day for your plasma. Is it worth it?
The short answer is no. The long answer is probably not.
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Re:Calculations of power use (Score:5, Informative)
If you were to do this you wouldn't use a Car Battery. You'd use a deep cycle. Second you wouldn't get a deep cycle the size of a car battery. Get a Fork Lift battery. 1300+ Ah.
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Re:Simple solution. (Score:4, Insightful)
offer cheaper power at off-peak times. Let me use my dryer cheaper at 11PM than 5PM and I'll gladly make an effort to do just that.
Keep charging me the same, and I'll continue to not care about peak power.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's called time-of-use metering, and is offered a lot of places in the US. Contact your power company to see if it's available where you live.
Problem solved: (Score:5, Funny)
Easiest way to fix these humps in power demand is to disable stanby/hibernation and leave computers on all day!!
Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
The free market is actually coming up with solutions?
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
The free market is actually coming up with solutions?
No.
The fact this trend happening in consumer electronics is a boon to a straining power industry is an accident. (No, i'm not being sarcastic).
These companies have other, more important reasons for developing higher performance per watt.
The trend in computing is increasingly toward notebook ownership. Notebook battery life is increased by lower power consumption.
LCD displays also eat a lot of computer battery power.
It is in the best interest of the panel makers (whose panels end up in both TVs AND Computers) to increase the energy efficiency of their panels.
Flat panel tv's also benefit from this lower power consumption, which also serves as an excellent marketing angle for "those thrifty tree huggers".
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
So, in other words, the consumers are demanding certain kinds of products, and the companies that make them are creating them.
Sounds remarkably a lot like the free market working.
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Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
So, in other words, the consumers are demanding certain kinds of products, and the companies that make them are creating them.
Sounds remarkably a lot like the free market working.
Yes, but not for the power companies.
There are plenty of incidences of interactions between 2 parties providing benefit to a third by mere coincidence, but that does not mean the third party influenced them.
I'll let you know when the free market caters to my demand for affordable healthcare coverage so I can have more than 8 hours awake per day.
Let me know when the free market
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Re:Mod Parent +0 Confused (Score:5, Insightful)
For saying that this isn't free market you sure did a great job explaining the OP's case for him.
This guy said this is an example of a free market "working"
free markets work on supply and demand.
These companies are not responding to power companies' complaints. The power company is not benefiting from a free market, just a fortuitous but unrelated chain of events.
If the customers of laptops demanded obscene brightness, more screen real estate, and high performance short bursts of computing power, they'd put 17 CPU's and 4 panels on laptops and they'd suck the grid dry.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
.....Of all the countries that practice significant government intervention in markets, how on earth did you pick North Korea? It's like saying, "Hey tjstork, your computer is a bit laggy" "WELL AT LEAST ITS FASTER THAN THE P3 I INSTALLED VISTA ON, LOL"
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)
A command economy declared to be a terrorist state which has been gimped repeatedly many/most countries not being allowed to trade with them at all.... Hey Somalia is a free trade market too right. Wonder why its not rolling in the money (Oh and its not as badly economically gimped as north korea by a longshot). Really really funny.
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
I think I'd rather have the USA's free market, even with its fiscal problems, then what's going on in North Korea....
It's tree bark and it's good for you! And if you don't finish your supper, you'll go straight to your corner of the room without any seawater.
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Re:Wow. (Score:4, Funny)
Lol i'd prefer getting beaten by a small child than a big german man too. I've no idea what your point might have been. Quick! someone Godwin this thread!
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Be careful agreeing to those rebates from the power company. The ones I have read come with a small string ... the power company gets to use the carbon offsets associated with the solar cells/water heater for the life of the system.
Whether this is a good trade off or not I'm not sure. Makes some sense for them to receive some of the offsets, they helped pay for it. But I'm not willing to give up 100% of the offsets unless they are willing to pay 100% of the cost.
Putting in the solar cells and heater are a
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)
FYI, you don't need to notify the power company if your main disconnect only switches between utility and generator power (can't backfeed power because generator power can't get to the utility with the power transfer switch). On the other hand, you do need to notify the utility if you have a grid-tied inverter that feeds power back into the grid from solar/wind/etc. Note though that the utility needs to do nothing to disconnect you when they're working on the lines. NEC code requires grid-tie inverters to completely disconnect the utility feed when it detects utility power has been shutdown, so they can't feed power back when line workers are working on the lines (like after a large storm). Also, you are required to have master disconnection on the exterior of your home that the utility or line workers can lock, but that shouldn't affect power to your house if you're generating, only your ability to sell power back to the utility during the disconnect time.
Disclaimer: My experience on this is from permitting/installing solar and wind grid-tie systems, as well as from a good friend who is an electrical line worker.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"With all the loss in conversion and transportation of electricity, you'd think being generated locally would save a lot of electricity (since there's little to no loss in pumping that natural gas to the home)."
The problem is that, generally speaking, a few large generators are more efficient than a whole bunch of small ones. To the extent that transmission loss is greater then the loss from using small (relatively inefficient) generators rather than big (relatively efficient) your statement is true... but
Y'all live in Texas? (Score:5, Insightful)
Traditional peak power hours -- the time during the day when power demand shoots up -- run from 4 pm to 7 pm when air conditioning begins to ramp up
But what about those of us who DON'T live in Texas? I only use my air conditioning 3-4 months a year, and not consistantly then. I haven't had it on for weeks; I ran the (gas) furnace this morning.
And most people I know (granted, most of tem aren't nerds) turn the TV on as soon as they get home. How did they come to the conclusion that computers are causeing the spike?
Maybe folks are eating dinner later and it's that George Foreman electric grill and 750 watt microwave nuking dinner that's causing it?
Sorry, I didn't read the linked blagh. Were there some useful stats garnered from real research, or was it a slanted piece like it seemed from its URL?
3 steps (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Offer to sell electricity at a fixed rate by the hour
2. Broadcast the price through the outlet
3. Let appliances display the current (ahah) hourly rate
There are many credible ways to solve this (Score:4, Interesting)
I hope that the 'market' comes up with many of the ones that I can think of.
Battery UPS in your PC case... stores power for power outages and uses the battery during startup cycles, thus spreading the draw from the grid to less used times.
EU just made incandescent lights illegal.
Green design homes
Light timer switches with built-in motion sensors and other such devices.
More efficient solar energy. Windows with solar collectors built-in as well as LED lighting so that daylight can continue unabated.
The list goes on. Anything that prevents a 250 watt drain on the grid during peak times will reduce the problem dramatically if millions of homes participated. Say 2 million homes used 250W/hr less at peak times for any given grid supply area: 500MegaWatt hour savings. That's a lot of savings.
Re:There are many credible ways to solve this (Score:4, Interesting)
And if every home saves 250W/hour for five hours a day, then each of them will see about $4 per month savings on their electric bill.
Which is so trivial that noone will bother with the effort required to make the savings.
You won't sell a conservation measure on the notion "the country will save oodles of money", you have to sell it on "YOU will save oodles of money". Which is, frankly, pretty hard to do these days - unless you happen to live in an uninsulated house, with a 30 year old AC/Heater, there's not really a whole lot you can do to significantly (key word here is significantly) affect your monthly bill.
Parent
Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
Article blows (Score:5, Interesting)
If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.
That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.
The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.
Article costs. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system"."
How much would we save if all computers hibernated during non usage? Or had smart UPSes that turned everything off and on instead of running 24/7?
bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:
9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage
I can confirm this (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).
They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.
problem solved (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Informative)
I think that the problem is that very few people have 13 to 17 inch LCD TVs anymore.
They are more power efficient but bigger. THe back light is the real killer.
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Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Informative)
As TV manufacturers move from Cold Cathode Fluorescent backlights to OLED backlights, you'll see a significant drop in power use. What really needs to be dropped is standby power, which is being sucked up the whole time the TV is off.
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Re:Stupid Question (Score:5, Insightful)
1) More efficient drivetrains for cars -> we immediately think "kewl, now I can use a bigger motor and go 0-60 in 4 seconds!"
2) Lower power semiconductors just let us ramp up the GHz.
3) Better insulated homes, we buy bigger homes with more empty rooms.
4) Ultimately now matter how energy efficient we become, it will just make the carrying capacity that much higher (i.e. more affordable to have more kids).
All of these are good things - I like big flatscreens, fast cars, and kids as much as the next guy. But as for efficiency reducing mankind's footprint on the environment, I'm worried it might not happen.
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Re:Stupid Question (Score:5, Informative)
CRTs are power hogs, but your laser printer is the biggest power hog of your computer system. The fuser gets up to 2k F to melt the toner on the paper.
Plasma displays use less than CRT, LED uses less than plasma.
A space heater uses more juice than just about anything in your house save your AC or (if it's electric) your water heater. Your toaster comes in a good second (while it's actually toasting, which isn't long) followed by your microwave.
If a device's primary purpose is to heat something, it uses a shitload of electricity.
All your electric appliances/gizmos are rated in watts. Just RTFM, it's usually listed on the back page. If you have no FM it usually says on the back of the appliance how many watts it consumes.
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Re:Stupid Question (Score:4, Informative)
If a device's primary purpose is to heat something, it uses a shitload of electricity.
The big power spikes in the UK are at the start of the ad breaks in soaps, when millions of people get up to turn on the kettle and make a cup of tea.
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LED-source DLP FTW (Score:5, Informative)
You won't find a more efficient design on the market right now. Samsung's 67" LED DLP set draws about 120 watts.
A quick google finds these:
65" Panasonic Plasma at 800W.
65" Olevia LCD (probably CFL backlit) at 540W.
55" Samsung LED-backlit LCD at 250W (note that this set is smaller than the rest)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The other 90% is your standard generation.
he 10% is a buffer for high-demand hours, for leeway in routing, minimizing outages during maintenance, and emergencies.
It's (mostly) separate hardware that kicks in only when needed.
They're saying that the power usage throughout the day has developed a second high point that often requires the extra hardware to kick in. They mention this period being a plateau, meaning it lasts a long time. Running extra hardware is expensive, running it for a long time is more e
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The 90%, or a large slice of it, is nuclear and large coal fired power stations that are hard to turn on and off. These are the baseload stations, and they run 24/7. Then there are lighter-weight stations that can be turned on and off in an hour or two, which run during the day. Then you have some very lightweight stations using technologies such as gas turbines, which can spin up in seconds. These are turned on just at the peaks, and constitute the t10% which is rarely used.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, most of the time, the plants sit locked up and offline. About a week before the projected peak, the regional entities will issue hot weather alerts indicating if it is projected that those "peakers" would be needed. On the bulk power level, electricity cannot be stored, it can only be produced in near-equal amounts to the energy being consumed by residential, commercial, and industrial demand sources. It does noone any good to have a powerplant on standby if its energy is not needed.
In normal opera
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
LCDs _do_ save power compared to equivalently-sized CRTs. Quite significantly, in fact. My 24" LCD monitor uses half as much power as my older 21" CRT.
However, I suspect that when they moved to LCDs many people also upgraded to physically larger TVs.
The other thing to consider is that many people have plasma displays, which consume significantly more power than LCDs.
Re:I got news for them (Score:5, Insightful)
You're young and naive; things don't move that fast. I'm 56 and the stuff that was science fiction when I was a kid has mostly already happened.
Look at Star Trek (it's dead, Jim). Self-opening doors? Yep, in every grocery store. Communucators? Yep, only we call them cell phones. Flat screen voice activated talking computers on a desk? Yep. When Star Trek came out the average computer wasn't much more powerful than today's scientific calculator and took a whole building to house, and cost millions of dollars. Say "Mom" into your Razr and it will dial your mother.
Some other things we didn't have included digital clocks, the internet, CDs, DVDs, VCRs, microwave ovens, motion sensors, crack cocaine (some things alas should never be invented), antiviral drugs, antidepressant drugs, LEDs, LCDs, air bags in cars, fuel injectors in cars, or global warming.
In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan McCoy couldn't cure Kirk's age-related farsightedness. But Dr. Yeh cured mine!
In 2003 the FDA approved the CrystaLens eye implant. It was a life changing [slashdot.org] technology for me; as the linked journal says, I was very nearsighted all my life, and in middle age I became farsighted as well, using contact lenses AND reading glasses. I wear no corrective lenses at all now.
They invented the flying car in 1903, it's called an "airplane". There is more energy than I can use coming from the wall sockets in my home, is that not "limitless" for all practical purposes? And they can in fact cure many cancers these days provided it is caught soon enough.
To this geezerly nerd, I'm living in a science fiction world. You might be interested to read Growing up with computers [kuro5hin.org]. I think you are likely to see as much progress in your life by the time you reach my age as I have. Unless I croak soon I expect to see even more technological miracles.
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Re:I got news for them (Score:4, Insightful)
You're absolutely right -- people just get jaded. The comedian Louis CK has a bit where he asks when flying went from man's greatest dream to a dreaded bore, and points out how people whine that their choices of movie is quite limited and their chicken was overdone while they're hurtling along from continent to continent at 30,000 feet. "It's A MIRACLE. You're FLYING! The airlines shouldn't even have to advertise anything other than 'WE can FLY!!'".
I still have a sense of wonder that we can get voice recognition and optical character recognition to work.
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