I think the higher demand for AC is predictable as well, no? Climate change has been known to be a thing for a while now… And every home could have solar to offset the local powersurges (which would lead to problems as well, but what I am trying to say is: its not our fault that the state has not prepared)
I’d love solar to offset electric costs but realistically i don’t have a way to get solar. Contacted 4 companies who all told me the shape of my roof is not good for solar (1890’s house with several extensions not thinking about roof space.
In Germany there is a discussion going on about a stock exchange price for electricity. Ie cheaper price during overproduction and higher price during high demand. Then you don’t need solar to benefit from everyone else having solar. Then you could e.g. “just” fill up a local battery with cheap electricity and use it when power is expensive.
You don’t have rates like that? In Austria you can just get a rate that will charge the 15 minute spot market price. That can be even negative during the day, but then also might be quite high at other periods.
That would be a solution. Public trading of energy by power companies throughout the day has existed for decades (see e.g. EPEX spot). It’s just a matter of exposing these dynamic prices to consumers. This already exists in the Netherlands.
In the US, some of us already have dynamic pricing options available, and they end up with thousand dollar power bills sometimes, because this is America!
Funnily enough AC usage is very easily modelled because it’s a well understood distributed load, directly linked to weather. Plus large modern buildings should be built with grid aware AC that adjusts load based on grid demand anyway. I know Siemens and Ericsson both have commercial solutions for that, so I imagine there’s more I don’t know about.
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I think the higher demand for AC is predictable as well, no? Climate change has been known to be a thing for a while now… And every home could have solar to offset the local powersurges (which would lead to problems as well, but what I am trying to say is: its not our fault that the state has not prepared)
I’d love solar to offset electric costs but realistically i don’t have a way to get solar. Contacted 4 companies who all told me the shape of my roof is not good for solar (1890’s house with several extensions not thinking about roof space.
In Germany there is a discussion going on about a stock exchange price for electricity. Ie cheaper price during overproduction and higher price during high demand. Then you don’t need solar to benefit from everyone else having solar. Then you could e.g. “just” fill up a local battery with cheap electricity and use it when power is expensive.
You don’t have rates like that? In Austria you can just get a rate that will charge the 15 minute spot market price. That can be even negative during the day, but then also might be quite high at other periods.
That would be a solution. Public trading of energy by power companies throughout the day has existed for decades (see e.g. EPEX spot). It’s just a matter of exposing these dynamic prices to consumers. This already exists in the Netherlands.
In the US, some of us already have dynamic pricing options available, and they end up with thousand dollar power bills sometimes, because this is America!
AI datacenters are very far from the typical electrical load of a cloud datacenter, no existing data center has planned appropriately for this because we’re only now discovering the bad effects it’s having on the grid
Funnily enough AC usage is very easily modelled because it’s a well understood distributed load, directly linked to weather. Plus large modern buildings should be built with grid aware AC that adjusts load based on grid demand anyway. I know Siemens and Ericsson both have commercial solutions for that, so I imagine there’s more I don’t know about.
Even if it’s predictable, it’s still a big strain on energy production and transportation.