Arizona Trialing System That Lets Utility System Control Home A/Cs 393
AzTechGuy writes "Arizona Public Service Co., Arizona's largest power company, is implementing a test program that would put customers' thermostats under their control to help balance power needs during critical peak usage times. APS will be able to remote control the customers' thermostats to control power draw from their A/C when there is a critical power transmission issue on the grid. Customers will be able to override these settings if they desire."
Maryland already has this (Score:5, Informative)
Old news (Score:1, Informative)
They've been doing this in Toronto for a long time.
Re:Maryland already has this (Score:3, Informative)
Works well in Iowa (Score:2, Informative)
I've been in this program in central Iowa for 6 years. Has been no real pain and I get about a $40 check each year for the times they throttle me...
Re:Maryland already has this (Score:5, Informative)
Austin Energy has been giving out free 7-day programmable thermostats for years, with the caveat being that they can control them when necessary to balance load.
This is nothing new to see here, move along territory.
Re:Maryland already has this (Score:5, Informative)
Except, at least with the deal we got from So Cal Edison, we give them the right to shut off our air conditioner in exchange for a discount on our summer electric bill. I don't recall exactly how much of a discount on the energy they gave us, but considering that they never once actually killed our air con during the summer, I have no complaints whatsoever.
Ontario has had this program since 2008 (Score:5, Informative)
When can peaksaver be activated? on weekdays (Monday through Friday), most likely between 12:00p.m. to 6:00p.m. from May 1 to September 30. Never on weekends or holidays. for a maximum of ten activations during the summer and only for a total of four hours during any one activation. As an example; in 2008, the peaksaver program was activated only five times.
http://everykilowattcounts.ca/residential/peaksaver/understanding-electricity-demand.php [everykilowattcounts.ca]
Re:Don't cry monopoly. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Look.... (Score:3, Informative)
You aren't paying for it, though. You're charged a fee, which very likely doesn't cover the costs of delivery. And it certainly doesn't remotely cover what they would have had to pay for right-of-way access without the government monopoly status...
You see, there are plenty of people out there who need electricity, and CAN'T pay the fair-market value of it. Saying you should be able to do whatever you want with it is simply saying you want to price OTHERS out of the market. Sure, poor people just shouldn't have heating and air conditioning... Those medicare leeches should just suck it up when their power gets cut for non-payment, and their kidney dialysis machine stops working. Sucks to be you. Welcome to the free market, suckers!
Somehow I don't believe for a second you'd be singing the praises of the free market if you were forced to pay for a new electric meter which records peak/off-peak usage, and charges accordingly. And when you found yourself paying 100X as much to power your AC in the afternoon, you'd be clamoring for the power company to cut your AC by 2% to get that bill back down.
And it's certainly not just electricity. Just wait until you run into a drought, and you are no longer allowed to water your lawn... Then again, this same system forces those that live around the lake you're draining to give you water, no matter how much they might want to charge you for their water...
But hey, you can go buy bottled water to do the job, right? And car batteries are only $50 a shot, just connect them to a massive inverter and your AC will churn right along until it comes time to swap the batteries. No monopoly there, that's for sure...
Re:Only one problem I can see.... (Score:3, Informative)
The cost of getting that house to a 5-star energy rating would probably have been more than bulldozing it and putting up a pre-fab house of the same size with a 5-star rating. Yes, doing the windows and insulating the floors would have paid for itself in about 5 years or less, but a single mom raising a family couldn't afford that, even though it cost more in the long run than having it done. Which is another reason the government is offering grants and such for work like that, so people who wouldn't have gotten it otherwise can afford to pay the up front costs for the savings in energy.
Instead, you tack on a 5 ton A/C for a modest 3-bedroom house and air condition the neighborhood. And no, the 5 ton unit wasn't enough to cool the whole house on the really hot days, so we'd shut rooms off and block the vents to cool just the core.
Re:Maryland already has this (Score:2, Informative)
This is rather reminiscent of the arguments about healthcare. Opponents of reform have claimed that it would institute 'rationing' (which, actually, the reform that has passed so far hasn't, but meaningful cost controls, which we desperately need, would). What they ignore is that the current system also limits available care; it just do so on a far less efficient basis because, since nobody wants to openly admit that rationing goes on, it can't happen based on an open and transparent cost/benefit analysis.
So, yeah, you can reject remote shutdowns of central AC units on an ideological basis... but 'rationing' is going to occur anyway when demand exceeds capacity. It will just take the form of rolling blackouts/brownouts. Which are, of course, much worse than carefully managed short-duration AC shutdowns because they effect all devices in a house (they can even damage equipment) and there's no way to make sure they don't happen to houses where they could cause really serious harm because people rely on life support equipment, etc.
Re:better suited... (Score:3, Informative)
If this were used for recharging Chevy Volts, or cooling deep freezers.
Don't you know? When you use the grid to charge an electric vehicle, the power company can recognize this and uses jellybean fields and unicorn wheels to generate the power.
Re:Just build nuclear power plants already... (Score:3, Informative)
It's a good idea but it solves a slightly different problem.
Nuclear plants are base load. This air conditioning throttling system, which is in use already in many power markets, helps the power companies minimize the peak load, a large portion of which comes from a bunch of workers across an entire region coming home and turning on the A/C. The power from peaking generators which can turn on and off quickly like gas turbines is necessary to avoid brownouts and blackouts from this variable load condition.
Adding more base load doesn't help you when everybody turns their AC on at once, because you can't turn off the base load plants once power consumption drops back to the average.
Re:Since customers can override the system.... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:People leaving Aircon on even when not at home (Score:1, Informative)
As an American who just returned from being an expat in Thailand, let me tell you that the US has really backwards ideas about a lot of things because of a cultural inability to comprehend efficiency. There is a systemic problem that reinforces bad habits and conventional wisdom, blocking progress.
No, due to the laws of thermal dynamics, running an AC continuously is not more efficient than running it when needed, just like keeping a hot water tank full and hot is not more efficient than heating as needed at point of use. Our house in Thailand was divided into six zones each with their own AC and compressor units. We did a little remodeling to add a few wide doors at the ends of long hallways, so that the large downstairs area could be divided into separate air zones or left open when not using AC. There were not "window units" like you see in poor areas of the US, and not central AC. Rather, units sized for each zone in the 8k to 18k BTU range, as appropriate, with the indoor and outdoor halves of each system connected by plumbing. They were "inverter" units, meaning they had modern power controllers to run the compressors at variable speed (via AC-DC-AC conversion, rather than just running at the fixed utility power frequency of 50 Hz). They could bring a room to comfortable temperature in about 10-15 minutes and then maintain a pretty stable temperature without a lot of cycling.
In practice, we'd turn on and off AC units when we moved about the house, e.g. run the dining room AC for family dinner when we had guests, run the living room AC much of the evening, and run individual bedroom units starting when we retired to bed. We also had compact-fluorescent lighting throughout, and our power bill could be in the $25-50/month range even in the hot season. We also tried to acclimate, so we'd throw open doors and windows during the day and use free-standing fans to circulate the air, while our sensibly planned garden with lots of shade trees and broad-leaf tropical plants would help produce a cooling effect (physically and psychologically). We closed up and went to AC in the evening/night mainly because of mosquitoes and theft concerns.