Smart Power Grid Could Wreak Havoc On Itself 331
MrSeb writes "Smart power grid monitoring that lets you pick the exact cheapest time to run the dishwasher or recharge your electric car may put too much power (so to speak) in the hands of the consumer, according to a new study by MIT. Researchers say that users receiving minute-by-minute pricing information might cycle off-peak power use more rapidly than utilities can spool up their power plants. In other words, it's OK if you're the only person charging your Chevy Volt at 2am in the morning, but if a whole town does it exactly the same time... there will be issues."
Re:if everyone is using off peak hours (Score:3, Interesting)
well I can assure you most places do not shut off their AC when they leave, do you know how much time it takes to get the office back down to 60? (no seriously thats a fad here AC must be 60 so you get a chest cold when you walk in from 103 degree temps, cause little Susie secretary has not spent a day outside since school)
Re:One way to solve this (Score:5, Interesting)
The question I raised was basically "Yep the technology works, but how are you going to change the mindset of people away from ME ME ME to US US US?".
The same way - and the only way - you usually get large numbers of people to engage in apparently cooperative or altruistic behaviour: bribery. Offer people a small reduction in electricity rates (or a cash rebate, or some other real-money incentive) in exchange for allowing the utility to remotely adjust/control their consumption.
Many utilities (in the United States and elsewhere) are already doing this with air conditioner thermostats. They offer a rebate or rate break in exchange for giving the utility the ability to remotely shut off your air conditioner for a set period of time (generally no more than one hour per day, and often less) during high demand periods. Some have gone to even 'smarter' systems, which allow the end-user a small number of 'overrides'. (Usually you can go without the A/C for a few minutes, but if you're hosting a party and need the cooling, then you can have it on a handful of occasions each year. This little bit of added flex)
I see no serious technological, political, or social barrier to implementing a similar system to regulate charging systems for electric vehicles. If anything, there's even more flexibility here--the car (and its owner) don't care whether it does its six hours of charging between 9pm and 3am, or between midnight and 6am, or as a dozen 30-minute blocks spread over the whole night.
My wife wrote her thesis in E&E in 1990 on thi (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically, as part of her graduate work in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (about 1990), my wife (Cynthia Kurtz) did computer simulations of digital organisms, and discovered that sometimes being "dumb" is really being smart, because you don't stick with the smart crowd who ends up competing over the same resource. People did not want to believe her results because they went against all the "foraging theory" of the time. She only got an MA out of that, not a PhD. She presented her results at an early ALife conference. Now people rediscover that effect in smart power grids...