Your utility rate still implicitly contains a cost for providing peaking power and frequency support amongst other things.

If your appliances do some of the work silently then some of those costs go away for your supplier / ISO.

Rgds

Damon

Storage is still expensive, but is competing against demand response in that market.

I have been pricing up MW-scale batteries for an electricity company for precisely that role.

Rgds

Damon

1) It is already being done.

2) A better engineered device is capable of doing a better job. It costs me pennies to get a low-power sensor with precision of 1/16 C. That's bags of headroom.

3) I don't necessarily accept the narrowness of the band you claim, but that's by-the-by.

4) Don't forget the freezer.

Rgds

Damon

As I'm pointing out in the (real) situation that I am describing there is NO network connection nor data flow to or from the appliance. There's a multi-million mount market out there already working on that basis. Possibly multi-billion.

Rgds

Damon

Sorry, but that's just straw-man paranoia.

Almost all of these schemes (a) adjust within a preference (b) allow you to override and (c) don't allow anything to be broken remotely. And you can stay out of them entirely. In fact these schemes don't need everyone to participate nor in the same way. But if you play passive-aggressive you're going to get some oversized bills for no gain in effective control or comfort.

Conversely there are plenty of dumb pure-commercial solutions out there. Including the one with fixed user name and password "admin" and "1234" exposed to the Internet. No "government" nor "utility" involvement in that one.

In our case you set a desired base temperature and any adjustments are relative to that, so you can be as warm or cool as you like relative to the next person.

We also take security seriously and will not allow any remote access however much the bling might sell it until we've had enough scrutiny to get it right.

A well engineered system should actually improve comfort and control while being deft enough to slip in savings.

Rgds

Damon

As it does currently for most of the UK retail market, but that is hardly universal and is not true already for many non-domestic customers.

Time-of-use charging will become increasingly important and widespread, and people who roll with it will save serious cash (and help the grid).

Rgds

Damon

So, think of the converse; when the grid has capacity to spare and/or power is cheap pull the set-point *down* a little and let your fridge's thermal mass ("coolth") help it stay off a little longer without worry during the next peak. There is a market in being able to respond within a couple of seconds of grid wobbled and for reducing demand for as little as 30s; all well within the normal operations of your fridge compressor (ie delaying running it 30s from usual may be necessary for other reasons anyway).

Rgds

Damon

Over which attempts to transfer data have not been an unalloyed success (ask radio amateurs, for example)...

Rgds

Damon

PS. There are clues available to appliances just listening to grid frequency on that hardwired connection, I agree, but that is not the entire story.

Doesn't even have to be about lowering 'total' usage at peak times, it may simply be about moving usage away from times of grid distress. That's worth very roughly £100k/MW in the GB market, for a few hours per year of displaced (not reduced) consumption.

Rgds

Damon

1) There are respectable predictions that those who ignore peak-based savings will have bills 3x higher than necessary. We only recently got rid of peak-time phone charges 3x off-peak, so hardly impossible. And wholesale prices can certainly vary by more than 3:1.

2) There is no invasion of privacy necessary at all. Listening to mains frequency is a decent clue as to when to widen a temperature deadband for example.

3) Why wouldn't you do insulation AND other measures? I have taken several and have energy bills (even ignoring my solar PV) a fraction of what they used to be while adding two kids to my household. Insulation is part of the picture but not the whole story. I haven't even finished yet.

Why be so reactionary about something unobtrusive that probably implies a better engineered system that will work better all round?

Rgds

Damon

Not within the deadband/hysteresis of the thermostat they don't.

Rgds

Damon

Neither your house nor your fridge maintain an absolutely constant temperature; they cycle in a "deadband" about a set-point.

Neither your house nor your fridge instantly go to pieces thermally if you cut the power; they both have (valuable) thermal mass.

Simply widening the deadband a little, too little for there to be any functional difference, and probably for you to never notice, can make a significant difference to the grid and to your bills. The point is to slightly adjust an automatic cycle that you pay no attention to anyway to better share a scare resource.

People who are prepared to let these things happen are likely to have bills significantly, even 3x in some predictions, lower than those that don't, in a matter of a few years in some cases.

Rgds

Damon

PS. I have skin in the game. The OpenTRV project that I lead (http://opentrv.org.uk/ and http://www.earth.org.uk/open-s... for a more geeky page) aims to as much as halve space heating costs and footprint by this sort of trick while aiming to *improve* comfort by delivering heat when it is actually needed/wanted. There will also be a simple tie-in with the grid that could save up to ~2GW of peak electricity demand from UK domestic *gas* space-heating systems without most people ever noticing. That's bigger than our biggest nuke.

a) I'm quoting from one of the sources from the summary.

b) The quote is saying that it's "too early to tell" and is thus neither (1) nor (2).

Rgds

Damon

I think that the current low price is all about the Saudis making life hard for Russia and Iran. Everything else is insignificant.

Rgds

Damon

Which is how my new router arrived. Very sensible.

Rgds

Damon