Redhill_qik
Active Member
It sounds simple, but I don't think that it really is. To be able to respond to dynamic pricing you need both a way to communicate that pricing machine-to-machine (SmartHome++++) and the customer/machine needs to have a reason to want to consume that power. If the weather is fine there is no reason to run a HVAC, if the car is already charged it won't take more charge. Right now, I don't have anything that I would want to turn on in my house even if I knew that electricity pricing was negative.That's just stupid, and can also be solved with dynamic pricing. Announce that electricity is either extremely cheap or free and watch as people turn or shift usage of pool pumps, HVAC systems, and start charging their cars.
In the article, the South Australian grid turned of residential solar panels for 12,000 customers that dropped exports to the grid and increased imports to the grid. I could see that happening in the future in the same way as a reverse PG&E SmartAC program. A partial solution might be for customers with solar+ESS to take them off-grid, which would drop the exports to the grid so they can continue to use free energy without the benefit of keeping the load the same. The article mentioned no compensation and that it might have cost AU$1/hour, to which I would counter the imports should have been free for those solar customers.
BTW, I'm sure that there are a few Gilfoyle's, but even his system was manual