[nicoburns]

> This article seems to suggest the answer is a fully automated smart home, with some kind of AI to intelligently manage your power usage. Sounds awesome, but I don't think that's ever going to be a reality outside the valley.

It's not the answer yet. But I'd be very surprised if it wasn't the norm in developed nations in 10-20 years. It's an obvious response to inconsistent generation from renewables, and the technology itself is straightforward.

[pintxo]

Also, how is this going to be cost effective? I just had an offer to include smart home capabilities in my new home. Some 16k EUR for a very basic installation, with only a tiny part of the home being fully automated. My electricity bill is less than 1k/a on a fully renewable energy contract. using AI smart home technology seems to be far from an economical solution as of today. Prices for smart homes would need to fall 1-2 orders of magnitude for his to start making sense.

[nicoburns]

> Prices for smart homes would need to fall 1-2 orders of magnitude for his to start making sense.

I mean, this seems pretty likely to me over a timescale of a few decades. Smart homes are currently a niche product for the rich. They've barely started on their journey to being mass-market products. That will look like the products you are already buying being smart-home capable because that's considered standard.

[phicoh]

I don't see how that would work. Suppose there is no wind for a couple of days, do you expect homes to shutdown everything and wait for wind to return?

Solar in a desert is easier, if you only have to cover the night then install a big enough battery. But a battry in every home is probably less efficient than a huge battery next to the solar panels.

So most likely, renewables come with storage. And the smart grid idea with mostly fade. Possibly with the exception of car chargers that charge faster or slower depending on conditions.

[ajford]

The solution for things like this is a multi-facet power grid, with renewables, nuclear, and (small ammounts of) fossil fuels, paired with grid-scale energy storage.

For example, the pumped hydro station in Wales [0] can store up to 9.1GWh and can push 1.8GW peak, with a spin up time under a minute.

Systems like these can serve both as buffers until fossil fuel or nuclear reactors can spin up to peak in the even of wind/solar shortage, and can even serve as overnight generation to replace solar if large enough (given the usually much lower demand at night).

If each state was required to implement their own (presumably smaller) grid-scale storage this would have the benefit of removing a single point of failure and spread the cost. A construction project of this scale would also serve to create hundreds or thousands of jobs in various areas, stimulating the economy.

Having grid-scale storage would be drastically improved with a smart grid, since it would have much more real-time data on power demands and allow more seamless management of capacity.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI