[sambroner]

Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was.

Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load.

Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?

[Klathmon]

It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now.

Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).

Still, i'd love to see this concept made a lot easier for the average consumer. Many people already have smart thermostats, why can't that talk to my power generation company and allow me to over heat/cool when the impact is lowest? Why can't my dish washer run automatically when it would impact the world the least? Why can't my EV automatically charge when power is most available?

I know most of those things are possible, but they sure as hell aren't easy, and IMO they won't truly have an impact until they're on by default and don't require the user to do much of anything.

These things seem like they are easily doable, but we just need the different industries to work together to come up with ways to have all of this stuff interoperate.

[floatrock]

> Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).

Fun fact: this is a big reason why aerospace congregated in the pacific northwest during WWII (eg Boeing in Seattle).

Aluminum is key to aircraft because it's lightweight, and at the turn of the century the US went on a dam-building spree with a lot of hydro (ie large consistent baseload) being located in the pacific northwest.

[skummetmaelk]

Another fun fact: in 2018 the US produced 890,000 tons of Aluminium. Iceland (population ~350,000) produced 870,000 tons.

[saagarjha]

Is it Iceland’s insatiable desire to produce aluminum, or an abundance of geothermal energy?

[eisa01]

It's hydropower ;)

Geothermal energy is mostly for district heating and hot water

[hnburnsy]

Some power companies are integrating with your smart thermostat and may pre-cool in some case. Example, APS in Arizona... --- During an event, how will my thermostat be adjusted?  At the start of an event, your thermostat temperature will be automatically adjusted up a few degrees above the current temperature.  Each event will typically last an average of 2 hours, and will typically occur between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Events typically will not occur on holidays.  In some cases, your thermostat temperature may be adjusted down a few degrees prior to the event to pre-cool the home and ensure your comfort during an event.  Once the event is over, your thermostat will return to its normal set point and/or schedule.

[ocdtrekkie]

ComEd in Chicago can do this with Nest thermostats as well. At the time I had a Nest thermostat, they actually paid people to enable this. And I basically made back most of the cost of my Nest that way. (Before selling it off for a less cloud-connected thermostat.)

[ARandomerDude]

My electricity provider does the same. It's opt-in and you get a $200 credit at the end of the summer if you stay in the program. Pretty good deal, I think.

[plorg]

I believe some aluminum smelters can even bid into electrical markets, either directly as dispatchable load(/negative generation) or as ancillary services for grid stabilization.

[beckingz]

That's awesome. Do you have a source for that?

[mschuster91]

At least in Germany some huge consumers (cement mills, huge refrigerated warehouses) are classified as "Lastabwurfkunden" ("load shedding customers"), where the grid operation center can remotely shut them down. Information is scarce as Google has a lot of copies of the Wikipedia article trashing the results, but at least I found an insurance company that asks if the applicant is classified as such (http://www.energyprotect.eu/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Risik...).

[nomadluap]

There are already some solutions around that try to address this on a consumer level. I recently watched a teardown for a piece of test gear that utilizes frequencies injected directly to the mains supply in order to control home hot-water heaters in Australia[0].

That's the great thing about standards -- there are so many to choose from!

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po4b7JhpxKQ

[awild]

I imagine this could result in a feedback loop between the power plants scheduling and your devices scheduling if enough people use it.

[generatorguy]

Wind, solar, and run of river hydro are unscheduled so if load ramps up due to renewable generation ramping up there is no change in load to be accommodated by dispatchable scheduled units.

If the load responding to increased renewable generation exceeded the generation then the excess load should have just run whenever it was convenient since it isn’t using renewable power anyway.

I’ve omitted nuclear and large hydro from my discussion even though their fuel doesn’t emit carbon.

[cdmp]

It tends to work the other way around - at least in the markets I'm familiar with.

If you're a large consumer of energy and can turn that consumption on or off at short notice (on the order of seconds) then the grid operator will pay you to allow them to scale your consumption up or down.

The classic example of this is cold storage. If you have a warehouse full of freezers which need to be kept within a certain temperature threshold then it doesn't really matter when you run the freezers and you could switch off at several points during the day.

[user5994461]

Having worked in a factory before, I can tell you that the factory was calling the electricity company before shutting down or turning on the factory. It is consuming a noticeable chunks out of what the whole surrounding city is consuming.

Given how much electricity a datacenter consumes. Google surely must have a direct support contact within the electricity provider and they better start working both ways, if they don't already.

Quick math. A datacenter is 60 000 servers, so 6 MW consumption at 100 W per server (moderate load). That is 1% of the peak output of a nuclear reactor. You bet the electric company wants to know when they need to adjust their reactors.

[saagarjha]

And reactors aren’t generally easy or desirable to adjust.

[stcredzero]

Seems like an intuitively good idea to me!

Seems like getting rid of the middleman at a basic, physical level. Power is available for very low cost at certain times. So let's time-shift computation that doesn't have to be done at a specific time! Really, it's just the same trick as time-shifting your EV charging and other power draws. It costs money to run battery banks and inverters. Let's just take them out of the process, where we can.

"The best part is no part." -- Elon Musk