[asdf333]

there are stories of many empty office buildings fully powered with the lights on throughout the whole thing. Its possible if they were on a more price sensitive system those commercial property owners would have opted to shut off more of the power.

[salawat]

You need to keep in mind what caused that.

In Austin's cade, Austin Energy built out way too much off of essential circuits. Office buildings stayed lit because they trunked off a circuit feeding medical centers, emergency services, that type of thing.

So the only place Austin Energy could go for load shedding was their residential customer base. Even then; they didn't execute true "rolling" blackouts, because that implies dividing the supply of power you have somewhat evenly across your entire customer population in a reasonable time based multiplexing scheme so that everyone gets their chance to run the heat. To minimize the amount of time people go without any heat, and at regular intervals so people can plan their consumption.

Can't speak for other metroplexes, and the co-op I get power from did a perfect job.

[sokoloff]

If they were (and knew they were) being charged $9/kWh for days on end, the occupants of those buildings would have shed the wasteful lighting loads for you.

[Robotbeat]

Precisely.

Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.

[to11mtm]

This would have the potential for nice second-order effects.

I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.

This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.

[sokoloff]

Or could cause a clawback of some of those by companies realizing that if they went back to 5x8, one of their days would be cheaper power because the 4x10 companies wouldn’t be operating on one of those days.

Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.

I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.

[Robotbeat]

Well, you’re making my point for me! With better control and response over energy usage, the power companies would be able to cut power to non-essentials, and businesses would be both incentivized and empowered to do it themselves voluntarily.

[SilasX]

Yeah, calling them “rolling” was a complete joke. Many people in Austin (like me) lost power for a solid 3 days, while low-rise, wealthy Westlake was almost entirely untouched.

[Traster]

We can have a totally different attitude towards commercial property, I agree.