Posted on 07/14/2022 11:21:07 AM PDT by FarCenter
Smart thermostats, those unassuming low-power gadgets designed to keep homes at comfortable temps, are having an impact far wider than most might have considered, according to recent data.
A paper from Cornell University brings bad news for renewable energy enthusiasts – smart thermostats are secretly taxing the grid.
Smart thermostats, which 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.
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.
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.
To address the problem, Zhang and Lee built a dataset from publicly available smart thermostat logs 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
Can a hacker set all thermostats to turn on at the same time?
Ping.
I prefer dumb thermostats.
They could be programmed to start randomly up to 15 minutes before to 15 minutes after a specific time.
The local highway I’m by also has an appointment/schedule demand variation.
Like a CONvid shot. Declined!
No worries! they can just pull power from your fully charged electric car!
what? now the car is dead?
oh well.
Planned blackouts and brownouts to save power do the exact same thing, except they synchronize everything that uses electricity.
Citizen: Turn yourself off, HAL. I don’t need this heat now.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Thermostats could be replaced by comfort level controllers based both on temperature and humidity.
Smart thermostats can override you. Can’t go lower than 78° to conserve the grid.
I use a dumb thermostat in my home. When my wife complains about the temperature, I turn the dial a bit in one direction or the other. No batteries to replace, no computer programs to update, ... But I do wonder about how to dispose of that mercury filled switch when the dumb thermostat craps out. By the way, I have two more dumb replacement thermostats in boxes in the garage next to my incandescent replacement lightbulbs.
“load synchronization often occurs before renewable resources, like solar, have had a chance to kick in and take stress off the grid”
Slow realization that renewables don’t operate on the same energy schedule as first-world society.
Thermostats could also be synchronized to alarm clocks, cell phones and even to a utility company’s control or billing rate system.
Whoopee. Someone has to create a program to anticipate a surge that happens at the same time of each day, every day. Wow, the pearl-clutching that goes on here!
I am sure the EcoBee, Google Next and Honeywell smart thermostats could be programmed to have thermostats change from nighttime to daytime operation so they could randomly do the change plus or minus 15 minutes from the set change time. That way, you distribute the load of the change to reduce teh possibility of a morning brownout or blackout.
So blame the consumer not the crappy product (solar energy).
So we need to start the workday at 10am, so that solar can kick in. Got it.
Hey green idiots! Here’s a HINT for you, it gets colder when the sun goes down. So in Winter expect people to require more heat.
My power company was offering free Nest thermostats in exchange for the right of the power company to remotely control the thermostat and change the setpoints temporarily to even out grid loads.
We went on vacation a few years ago in the middle of winter, forgetting to turn off the “smart” thermostat. As a result, the heat clicked on repeatedly during a cold wave in an empty house keeping it at a toasty 70 degrees during the daytime and no less than 66 at night. At least the mice stayed warm but I wonder how many other times this happens.
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