Eminent domain would not have been even necessary with PG&E, they literally went bankrupt a few years ago. Instead of giving up ownership of the grid, they were bailed out with taxpayer money for little in return.
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CPUC NEM 3.0 discussion
- Thread starter jjrandorin
- Start date
Bankrupt or not, they're still entitled to be paid the fair market value for their property that was seized by the state, and their lawyers will try to make arguments that it's worth a lot of money. Where this clashes with their narrative is when they simultaneously argue that the grid needs a lot of work put into it and need to raise rates, in which case, it can't be worth that much.
Added a reservation for a Sierra EV. Where these trucks attttt we're all going to die in WW3 before these EV trucks come out
I wonder how this will affect NEM 3.0 - with the right (or wrong, depending on your viewpoint) rate structure, TOU rates could kill solar without batteries on it's own without adding solar demand charges or other draconian rate structures based on supposed cost shifting by solar customers.
I agree that finer grained TOU rates would be the best way to shift loads and encourage more batteries to be installed.
I have not read the details yet - if anyone has other information, though would be great.
www.utilitydive.com
I agree that finer grained TOU rates would be the best way to shift loads and encourage more batteries to be installed.
I have not read the details yet - if anyone has other information, though would be great.
New California load management standards, including retail rates that change hourly, are a ‘huge leap’: CEC
The new standards could reduce annual peak hour electricity use by 120 GWh, according to the California Energy Commission.
Rates that can change hourly like during the Tx winter grid events? That worked out great for some people...I wonder how this will affect NEM 3.0 - with the right (or wrong, depending on your viewpoint) rate structure, TOU rates could kill solar without batteries on it's own without adding solar demand charges or other draconian rate structures based on supposed cost shifting by solar customers.
I agree that finer grained TOU rates would be the best way to shift loads and encourage more batteries to be installed.
I have not read the details yet - if anyone has other information, though would be great.
New California load management standards, including retail rates that change hourly, are a ‘huge leap’: CEC
The new standards could reduce annual peak hour electricity use by 120 GWh, according to the California Energy Commission.
The problem with TX wasn't that rates can change hourly or even instantaneously. It was that consumers were not notified of the changes in real time.
The material says that this will "save" $267M over 15 years which is $17.8M/year and if this is across 4M customers then is an average savings of $4.45/customer/year. Woohoo!I wonder how this will affect NEM 3.0 - with the right (or wrong, depending on your viewpoint) rate structure, TOU rates could kill solar without batteries on it's own without adding solar demand charges or other draconian rate structures based on supposed cost shifting by solar customers.
I agree that finer grained TOU rates would be the best way to shift loads and encourage more batteries to be installed.
I have not read the details yet - if anyone has other information, though would be great.
New California load management standards, including retail rates that change hourly, are a ‘huge leap’: CEC
The new standards could reduce annual peak hour electricity use by 120 GWh, according to the California Energy Commission.
The purported benefits are dubious:
- Increase grid reliability by facilitating automated load shift during emergencies such as wildfires, extreme heat, or earthquakes.
- Facilitate optimization of building performance by giving owners and occupants the necessary data or signals to automatically shift appliance
electricity usage according to price, GHG intensity, or a Flex Alert - Reduce summer peak hour energy use by as much as 120 gigawatt hours
- Save consumers a total of $267 million over 15 years, at a cost of $24 million
- The amendments may advance energy equity by creating bill savings for customers of all incomes with consistent demand levels.
- Reducing peak energy demand through automated shifting or reduction can lower energy costs for customers.
I foresee a time down the road where higher income households have investing in new smart HVAC/appliances to avoid the high demand real time pricing and are then villainized for causing higher rates for lower income households and not paying their fair share to the IOUs. The doom loop sucks.
No, it does not. It requires the creation of new control systems for those appliances. And there's only one type of appliance that really causes issues with the grid: air conditioners. And we already have control systems (smart thermostats) that can be connected to information pricing sources with little more than a software update.
Pool pumps are another big energy user, especially around here where everyone has a pool. I've switched mine to run in the early afternoon now that its my "off-peak" time. With dynamic pricing I'd like a little more control over it. Doesn't have to run 3 hours continuous if the demand charge changes... but pool control equipment is not yet on par with smart thermostats.
Perhaps add a raspberry pi to poll whatever the real-time electrical costs are and modulate the pool pump accordingly?
All the best,
BG
I think even with dynamic pricing, the lowest price time of day is likely to remain so. So you'd just program your pool pumps to run during those hours. The big challenge with HVAC is balancing minimizing your bill with comfort, which might require running the HVAC during peak hours. But of course you want to minimize the amount of time it runs during peak hours and this requires pre-cooling, but the extent to which you should pre-cool depends on both the current and expected prices of electricity.
Not sure how creating "new control systems for appliances" is any different than creating "new appliances". Is your view that there would be control plugs or controllable breakers for everything, because I don't think that most people will go along with that? If you're paying $2+ kWh then you want to turn off just about everything that you can. Adding the functionality to refrigerators, freezers, water heaters, washers, dryers, pool pumps, and anything else with a motor in addition to HVAC and EV would be the right end state IMHO.
The HVAC use case is already covered and I have one of those boxes on each of my A/C compressors, which reminds me that I need to call PG&E and opt-out of the SmartAC program. That kicked for the first time during the last Flex Alerts and while it stalled my compressors the furnace fans were still running and pulling about 1.2 kW, so I had to manually turn those off. Yes, if it was integrated into my Ecobee smart thermostat that would have been the better solution.
As I said in my prior post this needs to be more than just a single house case and multiple houses need to be aggregated the smooth out the peaks of systems turning on at the same time. This is something that the evPulse is reportedly handling with staggered times for EV charging so that at 9:00pm and 12:00am there isn't a sudden spike as thousands of EVs start to charge at once as Off-Peak starts.
That is a big problem if this new control tech is not designed to consider those other users.
But this whole demand tariff or rate proposal is really not suited to residential customers because there is too much to factor into the decision with pumps, HVAC, EVs and any other large loads.
The only requirement the CEC has is to get this out as an option by April 2023, not a forced mandate. Heck, the CPUC hasn't even been able to get residential customers on TOU, as tiered domestic rates are still available (as our favorite moderator knows all too well). How are they going to get folks to signup for this without any supporting control tech to integrate with it?
I can build a custom controller for my pool, and I've done that already for my thermostat, but this is just not ready for the average homeowner to deal with.
I think you are stretching in the opposite direction here - it's not much of a stretch to see how hourly TOU rates could lend itself to these benefits.
Wholesale energy costs are dictated by supply and demand. California currently tends to have more supply than demand from 9-3 PM thanks to all the solar on the grid. California needs more supply from 4-9 PM.
California curtails a lot of solar energy from 9-3 PM - this is basically free energy that could pull demand away from the peak hours of 4-9 PM with load shifting, if people had the appropriate price signals.
By matching demand with energy availability, this improves the overall efficiency of the system which reduces costs for almost, even if they do not have the ability to shift loads. (OK, people who are able to only use energy during off-peak rates, might see their costs go up since there would be less capacity available, then, so not everyone would necessarily see their costs go down).
As shown above, I don't agree with your assessment here. The effect of this is not the same as NEM opponents who say that NEM shifts costs to non-NEM customers. In fact, it's the opposite. Yeah - people with the ability to shift loads will benefit the most, but overall costs should come down.
Smoothing sudden spikes are easily handled by randomizing the start time a bit. The original Chevy Volt did this, and I'm not sure why other manufacturers didn't do the same thing. Another algorithm would be take your available usage window and spread out the demand over the time period. Not a hard problem to solve.
Ok, let's take the first bullet:
- Increase grid reliability by facilitating automated load shift during emergencies such as wildfires, extreme heat, or earthquakes.
The second bullet is really just a statement of the program versus a benefit. The third bullet on "reducing summer usage during peak" is a natural outcome of higher prices resulting in lower demand and can be achieved without real time pricing.
The fourth bullet works out to less than $5/customer/year in "savings" and in order to get that they will need to buy new equipment that exceeds that amount. My assumption on the $24M cost is that is the IOU expenses to implement the real-time pricing, billing and communication mechanism. A smart thermostat costs around $100 and there is usually an IOU rebate of around $50, so $50 for the customer and $50 for the IOU in year to save $65 over 15 years?
No argument on this, there should be super off-peak pricing from 9:00am-3:00pm during the summer to encourage the use of that abundant resource to reduce any curtailment. Most of that would likely be going into batteries (EV, home, utility scale) other industrial type usage I think is more difficult to time shift.
Energy generation costs range from 29.6%-45.5% of the full price across the PG&E E-TOU-C, E-TOU-D, and EV-2A tariffs with 54.5%-70.4% in transmission and distribution. Since, most of the touted benefits are for grid reliability I would expect to see that as the main knob that is being adjusted. When customers with solar+ESS and/or smart real-time HVAC, EV and appliances stay off the grid during the spikes resulting in less revenue to the IOUs I expect to see the shills come out of the woodwork. The fourth bullet point first sub-bullet says "may advance energy equity by creating bill savings for customers of all incomes" and if/when that doesn't happen fingers will be pointed.
My local water utility added a "water revenue stabilization fee" in August because of the water reductions that we have all been asked/required to implemented due to the drought. If water sales are reduced by 10% it is $0.32/unit, 15% is $0.51/unit, 20% is $0.72/unit, 25% is $0.96/unit and 30% is $1.23/unit. The first month was at the 10% level, the 2nd and 3rd month has been at the 15% level. The IOUs are making the same argument for needing to increase rates due to solar and energy savings reducing their revenue.
Agreed that this is easy enough to implement, but I think it is better when it is top down controlled versus relying on end points attempting to do this individually and indendently.
No, you actually need real time pricing. When it gets hot, demand for electricity soars, but supply does not magically appear compared to when it's not hot. So you need to raise the price to ramp down demand during peak hours. They should give people an incentive to precool as well, by reducing prices in the 9am to 4pm time window. Otherwise, I will only do minimal pre-cooling that simply shifts usage from peak hours to off-peak hours. But I won't "cold soak" my house which would increase overall electricity usage and might end up costing me more.
RKCRLR
Active Member
My latest was due in like July and still do not have. PGE sent snail mail saying working on it. Sometimes can take 6 months, but it will all work out
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