Unfortunately, this is a rare exception and most people have no idea how much their power costs. Many electricity markets are now deregulated, which is nice in theory. But in order for true competition to flourish, willing buyers and sellers must both have reasonable knowledge and agree on the ‘market price’. Clearly, in the case of our electric grid, the distinct advantage lies with those who make and distribute power. With such an advantage, don’t hold your breath for free hourly meters from your local utility, especially owners of traditionally filthy and profitable peaking units.
As the City of Chelsea begins to evaluate a proposed new diesel plant which is being built solely to deal with peak load, I expect that we’ll hear much about the need for ever more power generation. In my opinion, it would make more sense to ask ourselves WHY we need more power and address it from there.
It’s catching on in Illinois. Check this out:
But as awareness of ”smart meters” grows, so does demand for them, not only from consumers and environmental groups but also from government bodies responding to public anger over rising power prices. In Illinois, for example, the legislature passed a law in December requiring the program Ms. Kinch joined four years ago to be expanded from 1,100 customers to 110,000.
The law also required that Commonwealth Edison, the Chicago utility, hire a third party to run the program. It chose Comverge Inc., the largest provider of peak-load energy management systems in North America.
I can’t resist pointing out here that the utilities have ironically kept consumers in the dark in order to keep them in the light. That needs to change and it needs to happen fast. RGGI is a great step in encouraging clean energy generation but there’s nothing cleaner than not producing it in the first place. Perhaps that tantalizing feature in today’s RGGI announcement of 100% of the allowance money put towards demand reduction can find its way here. Am I missing any downside? Sign this consumer up for a smart meter!
The question is: Where does the line form?
here in Massachusetts? I truly don’t know but suspect it’s been attempted. For an elected official truly responsive to the voters (aka ratepayers) who put him or her in office, more for less certainly appears to be a political and environmental win-win. I say with all sincerity: What am I missing?
There is no mechanism currently in Massachusetts to allow the smart metering as being piloted in Chicago. Currently only very large industrial users of electricity have demand type metering.
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Right now there is no incentive to run your major appliances during low load periods. Residential rate payers are charged the same rate whether they run these appliances at 5PM or 5AM.
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The DTE would need to get involved in this to set standards and rates for any pilot program for smart metering. It would be a worthwhile experiment.
It was a program from Mass Electric that used a remote device attached to the residential hot water heater that shut the 2nd element, of a 2 element system, off during peak hours, on demand from Mass Electric.
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For some reason, they discontinued it. I still have the gizmo, but it just takes up exterior wall space.
maybe a week or two ago? I seem to recall Charlie MTA posting it…
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Bueller?
Some sort of blathering about knowledge and power
Excellent “blathering”, Charley and the comments were fascinating. I rarely miss your posts so I’m guessing that was around the time the stomach flu went through the house. Added context in this piece however includes the RGGI news today featuring Patrick’s stated focus on electricity demand as well as the proposal of a brand new diesel plant in Chelsea to address our little, ahem, peaking problem.
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…Charley didn’t have the cool purple graphic! (nice local spin, lori)
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I wonder, though, how can a discussion of Electric Company policy not include Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno?
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We’re gonna Zoom, zoom, zooma, zoom. 0-2-1-3-4. Perhaps this show, The Electric Company, had more of an impact on me in my tender years than I ever suspected. Thanks for that, tblade.
I was particularly partial to Letterman, and not the late night talk show guy who stole his name.
This is actually sort of interesting. Check this out: Here’s a Letterman segment where the villain (a small mideastern looking guy in a turban) terrorizes a train full of people by turning their “Train” into “Rain”.
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Letterman, our hero who clearly worked for Homeland Security back then, saves the day. Ever feel like we are raised on a steady diet of fairy tales and prejudices, only to grow up and live them out?
I think he may have been in more than that one spot.
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Not very 2000s PBS, though.
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I think he looks like a Sikh.
Disclosure Im a MA resident/U Chicago student
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Yeah Im in Chicago so our dorms are having a challenge to see who can use less energy and get our dorm usage down by half, and apparently its simply using it at different times and a little less and it has wide ranging benefits, the hall that saves the most gets a prize, but more importantly our tuition bills go down and the environment becomes a little bit cleaner.
Nothing like the competitive spirit, and of course the ultimate incentive–$$$$. Thanks for that, jconway.
Keep in mind power usage has a couple of components. Demand is how many kilowatts you are using per hour. Turn on all of your appliances and your demand goes up. Usage is how long your run your appliance, without regard to timing, and it is measured in kilowatt hours.
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Many commercial customers (all?) are metered not just for use, but also based upon their peak demand, without regard for its timing. (The meter has a needle that gets stuck at the highest load for the month.)
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The advantage of moving your demand to different time slots is that it can make use of excess capacity in the base load generation system (the big nukes, those run of the river hydro plants, wind turbines, coal plants and the like) which run 24/7, and may produce unused electricity at night. And they are very expensive to build. Peak demands are met with gas and oil generators, which are turned on and off during the day. Expensive to run, but cheaper to build.
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So ideally, you don’t just run the same total load at different times of the day (though that helps); you reduce the total needed as well through conservation.
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Another thing which I used to hear about, but have not in a long time is load shedding, where big customers can get knocked off the load for a while in peak periods, such as turning off AC chillers on hot summer days for fifteen minutes here and there.
Thanks for clarifying that. I’d be curious to hear if you and CNN (see my comment below) are talking about the same thing.
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Load shedding sounds like it would really piss off the big customers!
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It sounds like what is needed as indicated in one of the comments above, is a complete overhaul of the rate structure for consumers. DTE and other state regulatory bodies will need to get involved to bring about such fundamental change, not just the utilities which have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
(Not mine–but they appear to have regurgitated from the same NYTimes story as Charley and I.) It’s a surfacy story and leaves me screaming out for details like the wisdom found here at BMG. It did bring up something I hadn’t heard much about: Time-of-Use meters. They presented this as an alternative to the smart meters being used out in Chicago that are saving people a ton of money and reducing demand. She said that you have to call your utility to opt in to the program. She also said that if you opt in, you may also find that this program ends up costing you more.
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Ummm, not quite what I had in mind…
Check the earlier thread I linked to, or just follow this hyperlink… Ramblings on time-of-use metering including price discrepancies, etc.
I couldn’t find it mentioned before, but I recomed checking out the PBS documentary Edens Lost & Found, specifically the episode focusing on Chicago becoming a green city. It made me jelous and I wish Boston would adopt the same direction.
Most of the land area of Boston is paved, either directly (sidewalks and streets) or due to traditional roofs (rubber, tar & gravel, slate, etc). This means that most of the rain has to go to the gutters, and then into the Charles or other body of water. End result: lots of pollutants finding their way, erosion, etc. It ends up being costly to the environment and the taxpayer.
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One way to reduce the impact — and this is things that Seattle and Chicago have made progress on — is greenroofs. The gist: you have a roof garden. Not a veggie garden, but something that more closely resembles prairie.
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This allows the roof to absorb plenty of rain. It also has a positive impact on birds (who eat insects!), and on reducing the heat absorption of the city.
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One thing Chicago did was require large roofs (think: big box store and other strip mall anchor stores) to be green. A great example of where this would work is the South Bay shopping center between Southie and Dorchester — with the Target, Home Depot, Super S&S, etc. Check out the amount of surface area “paved” by these stores and parking lot. It’s significant, and it puts extra stress on water runoff systems. It could be reduced with greenroofs, and at very little added cost.
…I wonder what square footage (mialage) of Boston/Somerville/Quincy etc are tripple decker roofs? Imagine a significant portion of those roof tops as “prairie land”? Let alone the roofs of commercial space.
The problem is that they’re not structurally designed to withstand the extra standing weight of soil, water, and plant material.
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New three deckers could be required to be, but I’d bet that older ones couldn’t handle it.
but not necessarily for snow and ice and soil and plant matter.
it’s been around for decades in various forms, it’s not a bad thing, but it has some obvious limits.
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The reason demand peaks during a heat wave (for instance) is that people are running their air conditioners. There is some potential to save without much inconvenience or discomfort by shutting down compressors for 10 or 20 minutes, but people run their AC at peak because they are hot.
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There is also an equity issue. The customers most likely to be able to take advantage of information about what electricity costs during each 5-minute block are the large industrial users. Those least likely to be able to do so are low-income customers.
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It would be unfair to use this new rate structure to shift costs from big manufacturers to poor people. (And, time-of-use does not have to be implemented in a way that does. But the details are very important.)
the peak plants that are loud, emit nasty nasties, and are generally yucky get built in poor neighborhoods. So, helping large industrial users shave demand at the peak helps reduce or eliminate the need for society to place these big uglies in the middle of poor people’s neighborhood.
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That’s good for poor people, right?
Do the Chicago suburbs have this for residential, for instance?
served as a “pilot” for this in Chicago and now that the program is legislatively mandated, it opened up the market from 1,100 customers to 110,000. I suppose those customers could still be city dwellers, but there’s no reason that I can see why ALL customers of the utility can’t participate.
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This post is probably going to disappear into the ether shortly but before it does, if anyone’s still hanging around, be sure to read this article in The Globe about the proposed new Chelsea peaking diesel plant.
that’s the same one I linked to above.
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It’s planned to run 100 hours a year. These are exactly the kinds of power plants that demand shaving helps eliminate the need for. Furthermore, they really help reduce the cost of electricity, because those plants that only run 100 hours per year get lots of money per kW generated. After all, it’s got to cover all the capital costs on only operating for 100 hours per year!
…come up with a way to do demand shaving legislatively. I’m serious. I need to cook up another post but have no time today. Stay in touch, stomv, and thanks for your commentary here.
Here’s some ways…
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1. Require that the customer fee for time-based metering be less than or equal to the customer fee for conventional one-price-fits-all-hours metering. For N-Star, the former is $9.99, but the latter is only $6.43. By making the customer fee equal (or advantageous for time-based), you’ll help convince more people to move to time based, and then economics will induce them to shave their own demand.
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2. Advertise the heck out of time-based, once you’ve accomplished (1). Explain which kinds of users stand to save (folks who vacate the house during the workweek), and how they could save more (elec heat folks could install digital time-based thermostats, etc).
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3. Finance and roll out more solar installations, both directly (put ’em on gov’t buildings at state and local level) and through tax credits, grants, and other methods. I know, you said demand shaving… but solar cells increase supply at precisely the instances where demand peaks — so increasing solar cells effectively provides more buffer during the peaks, which functions in a very similar manner to peak shaving.
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4. Improve building codes for commercial buildings. This ought to be done for residential as well, but if you’re particularly interested in shaving peak, you’ve got to improve the energy efficiency of commercial space. The larger the space, the more likely they are to be in tune already, so you’ve got to use building codes to require good energy efficiency at the time of construction/renovation. If commercial spaces reduce their demand for electricity, you’ll shave demand on that M-F 9-5 cycle, which is where the peaks always live.
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5. In the long run, work to get every customer on time-based metering. The fact is that electricity costs more to generate on Thursdays at 3pm — why shouldn’t all customers pay more at that time? Putting all of us on time-based metering will really help smush that peak into more of a plateau, which is exactly what’s needed to reduce the need for peaking plants.