Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US grid
- Reference: 1657724407
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/07/13/smart_thermostat_strain/
- Source link:
A paper from Cornell University brings bad news for renewable energy enthusiasts – smart thermostats are secretly taxing the grid.
Smart thermostats, which [1]the paper said were present in around 40 percent of US homes in 2021, are programmed by default to have different night and day modes. In hundreds of thousands of homes across the US that means a sudden jump in electricity use right before residents wake up – if people aren't changing default settings, which the paper suggests is the case.
[2]
Those hundreds and thousands of smart thermostats, typically configured to switch to day mode around 6am, "can cause load synchronization during recovery from nightly setpoint setbacks, increasing the daily peak heating electrical demand," the paper said.
[3]
[4]
Cornell professor Max Zhang and PhD candidate Zachary Lee, the paper's authors, wrote that most studies predicting electrical demand fail to account for smart thermostats and the stress they can place on the grid.
"As we electrify the heating sector to decarbonize the grid, this so-called load synchronization will become a problem in the near future," Zhang said.
[5]
To address the problem, Zhang and Lee built a dataset from publicly available smart thermostat logs [6]collected by EcoBee that contained anonymized temperature, set point, runtime, and home occupancy statistics.
They used the data to examine energy costs during a New York City winter, and found that load synchronization often occurs before renewable resources, like solar, have had a chance to kick in and take stress off the grid. That stress is actually aggravating peak demand by 50 percent, the paper said.
Zhang and Lee also found that energy-saving mechanisms built into smart thermostats are less effective than advertised, with most homeowners only seeing energy savings of 5-8 percent, as opposed to the 25-30 percent they're capable of.
Thinking outside the home
The world is electrifying at an ever-quickening pace, and environmental problems have cropped up along the way. Electric cars create [7]battery waste , as do other electronics, and removing carbon emissions from homes doesn't mean power plants have dropped coal and gas in favor of sustainable solutions.
[8]Hive to pull the plug on smart home gadgets by 2025
[9]Smart homes are hackable homes if not equipped with updated, supported tech
[10]Insteon's vanishing act explained: Smart home biz insolvent, sells off assets
[11]Hive View security camera customers left in the dark as some gear gives up the ghost
Those solutions, like solar and wind, "require a considerable amount of real estate, and the right weather, and as a result they're typically located far from the cities they would serve," the Washington Post 's Will Englund [12]wrote .
Smart thermostats increase frequency and magnitude of peak energy demand, and without more tenable ways to store energy from renewables, Lee said, they could offset greenhouse gas reductions from electrification.
[13]
Energy Fairness, a nonprofit [14]allegedly funded by gas and oil interests, thinks that the challenges of electrification require emphasizing [15]energy reliability above all else. Zhang and Lee's paper, while not arguing for the retention of fossil fuels to support grid reliability, does suggest that close monitoring will be key.
"Future energy system planning must consider the interaction of weather, generation capacity, and energy management tools, show a large performance gap between potential energy savings and actual energy savings," Zhang and Lee wrote.
Zhang suggests there may be an easier way to ease grid stress from smart thermostats: educate consumers on how to use them so default settings are changed. Even that may have its limits of effectiveness, though.
"In the end… we have to make smart thermostats even smarter," Zhang said. ®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306261922007243
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Ys7sJZrZYEdcZW-9IJe4HwAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ys7sJZrZYEdcZW-9IJe4HwAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ys7sJZrZYEdcZW-9IJe4HwAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ys7sJZrZYEdcZW-9IJe4HwAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.ecobee.com/donate-your-data/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/21/toyota_redwood_materials_battery/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/12/hive_camera_support_end/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/01/which_smart_tech_advice/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/22/insteon_shutdown_explained/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/24/hive_view_issue/
[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/29/power-grid-problems/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=wp_main
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ys7sJZrZYEdcZW-9IJe4HwAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/politics/os-ne-net-metering-bill-20220121-lrt6np4icbdyldhnvjb23wyete-story.html
[15] https://energyfairness.org/the-twin-challenges-of-increased-electrification/
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
If switch-on time is so predictable that they generate a surge, why not rev up ready for it, as has always been done for advertising breaks ?
I strongly doubt the 40% market penetration, too.
I would be more worried that probably majority of these thermostats are Chinese and connected to internet.
Which means, in theory, someone in Beijing may have a big red button ready to turn the heating to the max at all US homes.
Or, on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-on-off-CLACK! and there goes the grid for a week.
Knowing there will be a peak is different from having the ability to always have low carbon power to put in the grid at the peak.
Back in the day. we didn't worry about bringing another coal fired power station online for the ad breaks in "The Price is Right", but nowadays, we'd rather not do that, especially for a short period (I do recognise that it's more likely gas nowadays for transient peaks).
The paper is observing that if the peak was lower, by having a little more randomness in the demand, there would be fewer problems supplying the overall demand as it would be spread over a greater period of time.
"why not rev up ready for it"
Because supply capacity is not the only problem. A few days ago at tea time, smoke started pouring from a street manhole in our area. It turned out that the combination of an overload and very hot weather had caused the insulation of the final distribution cable to melt and the cable had shorted, blowing the substation fuse. Nobody had any power for almost four hours while they fixed it. I spoke to the repair crew and was told that the cable was 'fairly new' (1980s vintage). So there's going to be a huge amount of upgrading needed all over the entire country if we move exclusively to electricty as an energy source.
Smart?
These thermostats aren't "smart" they just try to do whatever you program them to do. That's not smart.
That being said, just watch when everyone is going to plug their electric cars. Ah they won't! Nobody will be able to afford these bloody things.
Pope is catholic, bears defecate in woods..
And there's nothing new under the sun. Other than 'experts' wanting to take control away from customers. So here's a thing-
https://www.schnap.com.au/timers/mechanical-timer.html
That people of a certain age are probably familiar with, because it was the standard kind of timer control used pre-'Smartbollox'. But..
...show a large performance gap between potential energy savings and actual energy savings," Zhang and Lee wrote.
Easily demonstrated just by looking at your electricity bill and wondering why, if energy supply has gotten 'smarter' and 'greener', it's also got a LOT more expensive. Hence why there's so much focus on demand management, because the supply side is a complete shambles due to regulatory capture by the ecofreaks.
But sure, let's throw a few billion at some new grid management company that could randomise control over people's thermostats, or energy in general. Alternatively, politicians could start asking why the 'renewables' lobby has failed to deliver any cost savings, or reliability.. All it's done over the last couple of decades is increase costs, complexity and reduce reliability.
It'll be interesting to see if the Texas electricity grid collapses. Having 'renewables' responsible for power failures both winter and summer would be quite the achievement. Especially as Texas is considered ordering it's industry to curtail demand.. ie stop producing fuels and stuff, so increasing shortages, prices, and inflation.
Re: Pope is catholic, bears defecate in woods..
"the supply side is a complete shambles due to regulatory capture by the ecofreaks."
The amount of money being poured into "renewables" would make a VERY big hole in the carbon problem if it had gone into molten salt nuclear reactor R&D instead (and then building MSRs)
I tend to agree with Lester (RIP) that once the bugs are ironed out and MSR+thorium (LFTR) tech started being widely deployed, nuclear power has a good chance of being the "cheap solution" we were expecting in the 1950s, possibly to the point of rendering wind+solar redundant+expensive boondoggles
Click
PG&E creates incentives for subscribers to limit power usage from 4 to 9 PM, and I'd been wondering what was happening at 9 PM when everyone's air conditioners click on in synchrony. Now I know.
So a "smart" thermostat
is a time switch.
I suppose today that a Teasmade would be labelled a "smart hot drink machine". Except it would need a cloud connection and a recurring subscription fee, else you don't get any more tea or time service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teasmade
Re: So a "smart" thermostat
Doesn't a Teasmade generate steam and therefore its own cloud?
I think Economy 7 "solved" this problem decades ago. Surely they can't be that dumb... no, wait, yes they can.
After looking at all the smart thermostats...
I replaced mine with a dumb on that had 7-day schedules and -finally- separate controls for hot water and heating. Common sense applied to the schedule.
Saved me plenty and no downtime when a service goes offline.
I do like em but everything has issues and "with most homeowners only seeing energy savings of 5-8 percent, as opposed to the 25-30 percent they're capable of."
capable of? I'd read advertised as capable of, I doubt any smart thermostat would ever save you that much unless you previously never set a schedule..