Author Topic: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green  (Read 4727 times)

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Online langwadt

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #25 on: April 11, 2022, 09:57:59 pm »
I'm curious how much energy is being used to maintain that control center.  Looks like just another intrusive solution looking for a problem.

Probably not much more, than they are managing to save.
Although stated in jest, I quietly suspect it may indeed be the reality. At their offices/premises, how much does all the lighting, PCs, Servers, Electronics, Air-conditioning, Heating, etc use, compared to the (presumably) modest/slight savings in electricity per socket ?

reminds me of this
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/03/this-new-eco-gym-is-powered-by-your-workout
 
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Offline Someone

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #26 on: April 11, 2022, 10:51:07 pm »
Quote
The Electricity supply organisations, can decide to turn various things (loads), in your own homes, off, e.g. at peak times. With the householders, being unable (legally), to do anything about it.
smart meters already give them this capability
Well no, that gives them control over the entire installation. Which they won't exercise because they would be liable for any injury which could occur as the result of loss of power.
Never heard of rolling blackouts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout
Its great if you aren't one of the blacked out group! Giving finer grained control is a win, losing your HVAC in winter when its well below freezing is much more serious than losing your refrigerator, or lighting, or plasma TV, or [other nice to have appliance]. Zero HVAC can be an actual threat to life (given how poorly people insulate their houses.... another rant), cold more so than heat, but excess heat is also a threat to life particularly for the old/infirm.
Those are scheduled. Also, we don't do them.
In the UK, you do them but scheduled. Elsewhere they do happen without schedule. Nice attempt at a run-on sentence to make a misleading point. Actual facts limiting to just the UK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/mce/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MCE-Disruption-Finding-Sheet.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-17/u-k-s-green-push-leaves-country-at-the-mercy-of-the-weather
A history of planning ahead and introducing behaviour change in the population, and a predicted shortfall needing some solution in the coming years (has been "predicted" as being this year/next year for many years now, but never seems to arrive in force). Do you have evidence large industrial or commercial users aren't accepting short notice curtailment contracts? I bet they are. Around the world residential consumers are somewhere in the middle of the electricity priority queue, big customers often have penalty clauses so can be blacked out with agreed compensation (usually having negotiated lower pricing for the rest of the year).
 

Online Monkeh

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #27 on: April 11, 2022, 11:04:05 pm »
blather

Please tell me the date of the last rolling blackout in the UK. Also, please explain how a scheduled rolling blackout is equivalent to cutting an individual customer off without knowledge of their circumstances.
 

Offline Someone

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #28 on: April 12, 2022, 01:38:17 am »
Please tell me the date of the last rolling blackout in the UK.
Trying to walk this further away from the actual point? Well there is a well documented case of the 9th of August 2019:
https://www.eprg.group.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/2006-Text1.pdf
Poor granularity of demand control, leading to a widespread blackout. The automatic load shedding was an emergency response to maintain stability of the grid, in a non-granular fashion by indiscriminately (and without warning/scheduling) dumping a large group of customers into a blackout. Want to argue its not rolling because it was only a single on-off event? Go back to the original quote:
Quote
The Electricity supply organisations, can decide to turn various things (loads), in your own homes, off, e.g. at peak times. With the householders, being unable (legally), to do anything about it.
smart meters already give them this capability
Well no, that gives them control over the entire installation. Which they won't exercise because they would be liable for any injury which could occur as the result of loss of power.
Never heard of rolling blackouts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout
Its great if you aren't one of the blacked out group! Giving finer grained control is a win, losing your HVAC in winter when its well below freezing is much more serious than losing your refrigerator, or lighting, or plasma TV, or [other nice to have appliance]. Zero HVAC can be an actual threat to life (given how poorly people insulate their houses.... another rant), cold more so than heat, but excess heat is also a threat to life particularly for the old/infirm.
Granular+fast control right down to the house or appliance level would have massively improved that specific example, in recent history, within the UK. Thats a whole lot of constraints, and still correct/true. In a more general sense such granular load control is very useful/valuable and will be a net win for most consumers.
 

Online Monkeh

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #29 on: April 12, 2022, 01:49:07 am »
E: On second thought, why bother. You'll twist anything for an argument.
« Last Edit: April 12, 2022, 01:54:59 am by Monkeh »
 

Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #30 on: April 12, 2022, 04:33:23 am »
Around the world residential consumers are somewhere in the middle of the electricity priority queue, big customers often have penalty clauses so can be blacked out with agreed compensation (usually having negotiated lower pricing for the rest of the year).
Bring that as an option to residential as an incentive to invest in some sort of backup power.
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Offline djococaud

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #31 on: April 12, 2022, 06:00:44 am »
Actually the plug could be decoding the peak/off peak hours signal (on top of the 50-60Hz mains)...It just needs a small microcontroller...

...But It can also be a complete scam (with a random powered led...) !

Please send one to clive ! ;D
 

Online tom66

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #32 on: April 12, 2022, 08:18:46 pm »
Actually the plug could be decoding the peak/off peak hours signal (on top of the 50-60Hz mains)...It just needs a small microcontroller...

...But It can also be a complete scam (with a random powered led...) !

Please send one to clive ! ;D

Most likely it has a wifi module in it and it's tied to GridCarbon or similar.
https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/alex.rogers/gridcarbon/
 

Offline MK14

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #33 on: April 12, 2022, 08:47:24 pm »
Actually the plug could be decoding the peak/off peak hours signal (on top of the 50-60Hz mains)...It just needs a small microcontroller...

...But It can also be a complete scam (with a random powered led...) !

Please send one to clive ! ;D

I also wonder, how many people in a household, are actually going to bother to take notice of the colour changes, on the LED.
If you want something done, such as switching on a radio, charging your mobile phone, shaving, hairdryer, PC use, etc. A person is rather likely to just want to get it done and not want to wait around for this tiny LED light, to decide to turn green, maybe, later that day.

I suppose what is really needed, is the device itself, such as a dishwasher or washing machine. To have an option, which when on (set), doesn't start the units wash cycle, until the cheapest electricity units (usually off-peak), are available.

The button/feature would be called something like "Delay start, until low cost, GREEN Electricity, is available" - ECONO WASH CYCLES.

I suspect the success rate, of a small red/green LED, showing the best times (Green electricity, off-peak, etc), to switch on, would only be successful, perhaps 10% or 20% of the time.
But, it would probably be close to that way, without all the smarty pants mains sockets and stuff, through sheer timing luck, anyway.
I.e. Sometimes people would switch something on during peak-time, and others off-peak, just through sheer coincidences.

So the actual possible savings, could be rather minute, at best. Unless it is an extremely green/eco orientated person/family.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #34 on: April 12, 2022, 09:31:11 pm »
The only point made here that confused me, is around avoiding using energy during peak times.

Why?

I mean, yes, that helps your pocket if your supplier offers you the discount to use power "out of hours".

But that says nothing about the environmental aspects of the generation, it's purely economical.  Power stations have one purpose.  If they are not generating power they are losing money.  So, it makes sense for them to run all night long offering a discount to temp people to use it.  Rather than shut down a few or all turbines overnight. 

Whether they generate it a tea time or at 3am, it's still generated the same way.   Actually peak time in summer is far, far more likely to be high solar output times.

Moving your heavier loads to the wee hours probably ends up costing more environmentally in the long run.
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Online tom66

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #35 on: April 12, 2022, 10:05:08 pm »
Peak time energy is generally worse because it's supplied by less efficient 'peaker plants' - either they are open-cycle gas turbines or they are closed-cycle gas turbines, but are started up only for the peak time, which reduces their efficiency. Also, in some cases, it's supplied by oil or diesel, especially if demand is beyond original estimations.

In general, in the UK at least, there's a bias towards using renewables, but they are currently only able to provide a significant amount of power during the off-peak periods (with some exceptions for very sunny summer days with lots of wind at 5pm.)
 

Offline Someone

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #36 on: April 12, 2022, 10:46:30 pm »
Power stations have one purpose.  If they are not generating power they are losing money.  So, it makes sense for them to run all night long offering a discount to temp people to use it.  Rather than shut down a few or all turbines overnight.
You forget that it is a commodity market, a consumer doesn't care who produced the electricity, its interchangeable. Being a market (auctions/bidding/trading) the price paid for electricity varies depending on supply and demand. When its windy the UK can see an excess of power being generated and the price paid collapses (even negative). That can end up lower than the marginal cost of fuel to power a conventional power plant. This makes the people who invested in baseload generation unhappy as they expected to be running all the time like you imagine, spreading out the fixed/capital/investment costs over more hours of live operation. So their profitability goes down, and they need to get higher prices when operating to break even.
 

Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #37 on: April 13, 2022, 09:30:50 am »
The UK running an excess of wind energy only happens in limited geographic areas when the moon, stars and harry potters wand all line up!

Scotland has over produced a few times, due to warm sunny weekend days with lots of wind.... everyone's out for the day, no body has heating on, lots of solar and wind, so for an hour or two Scotland is literally paying people to take power off them so they don't need to shut things down.

Shutting down, powering up plants takes a lot of time.  Spinning them on the grid idling is more likely what they do, maintaining the 50Hz heartbeat if nothing else.  But nobody wants to see a Scottish 1950s power nuclear reactor venting turbine steam to not over run it's turbines and allow the wind turbines their "hay day".

I'm fairly sure those "over production" events include the nuclear base load as it's "non carbon"
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Offline paulcaTopic starter

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #38 on: April 13, 2022, 09:40:51 am »
On "Smart" crap.

In the 1990s, if you bought a washing machine or dishwasher et. al. it had a big knob on it, spring latched power switches and you could set the program, load the thing and later just switch it on at the wall and away it would go.

In the 2000s they have "soft power", microcontrollers, control state machines and literally force physical interaction to run the thing.  If you switch it off and then back on an hour later, it is extremely unlikely it will pick up where it left off and carry on.

So, my prediction of where this is going...

By the mid 2020s almost all "heavy powered" home appliances will have a cloud/wifi/smart gubbins installed.  This will feature the ability to turn them on remotely, or even on schedule and many more glorious things.  However, hotpoint will have their system, bosch will have some crazy german system, google and amazon will team up with philips and zanussi and all of these devices send ALL your habbits and data back to the cloud.  All your devices become susceptible to hacking.

The by 2030s the energy providers, the regulators and thus the gubberment will get involved, maybe slowly introducing incentives to subscribe to load management schemes.  "Allow us to schedule your Class A and B devices this fall and get 20% off your off-peak kWh rate!"

By 2040 I doubt it will be a choice.  Hopefully if it has to be manditory we have a sensible gubberment that does not privatise it and therefore make it something only the rich can do... run high power electric devices whenever they want... or at all.
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Online tom66

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #39 on: April 13, 2022, 12:30:15 pm »
The UK running an excess of wind energy only happens in limited geographic areas when the moon, stars and harry potters wand all line up!

The UK doesn't have enough wind power to run in excess, ever.  So not sure what your point is?

The grid is slowly reducing its dependence on fossil fuels.  This chart summarises it pretty well:



Whilst I'm skeptical of the 2025 claim that we'll be fossil-fuel free for some days, I think 2035 is probably achievable.

 

Offline SeanB

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #40 on: April 13, 2022, 12:41:09 pm »
On the continue when power fails, I bought a new Defy washing machine, which actually will carry on the cycle when the power fails, and comes back. What can I say other than "Designed in South Africa", where rotational load shedding is a way of life, and water shedding is also really common. Currently the city i live in is no longer getting load shedding, mostly because more than half the electric grid just was taken out by a cyclone that moved through, and thus the city is already well down in power consumption. Unfortunately also massive damage as well, and if you were expecting a RHD Toyota in the next 3 months, sorry, they are all under 1m or so of water, along with most of the Toyota assembly line.
 

Online tom66

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #41 on: April 13, 2022, 01:04:14 pm »
My Bosch dishwasher is the same.  It remembers after a power cut to automatically resume.  The Indesit washing machine on the other hand does not.
 
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Offline coppercone2

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #42 on: April 14, 2022, 10:05:54 pm »
What if we made 60Hz be dirty power and then run 45Hz green power and put band reject filters on everything? Or run DC and AC and put coupling caps on stuff. That might work.
« Last Edit: April 14, 2022, 10:07:46 pm by coppercone2 »
 

Online langwadt

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #43 on: April 15, 2022, 12:01:15 am »
What if we made 60Hz be dirty power and then run 45Hz green power and put band reject filters on everything? Or run DC and AC and put coupling caps on stuff. That might work.

what would be the point? as long as there isn't more green power than the total need for power, you using green power just means more "non-green" power needs to be generated to meet demands
 
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Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #44 on: April 15, 2022, 12:42:59 am »
The point is to pretend we are doing something good.
 :popcorn:
 

Offline Brumby

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Re: This plug socket tells you if your energy is green
« Reply #45 on: April 15, 2022, 04:01:22 am »
What I find most exasperating is that it is obvious that most people posting on this topic haven't at least watched the video (that is less than 3 minutes long).  If ignorance is bliss, then there's a lot of really happy people here.

There are some points worth discussing, but they are decidedly absent - so far.
 


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