[bee_rider]

Intermittence really has always had the flavor of an engineering problem instead of a physics problem (it is about putting the energy when/where humans want it, rather than having enough of it). IMO load shifting seems like a cleverer and more engineer-y solution. Imagine a giant smart system where all of our appliances talk to each-other and can optimize the timings of their workloads. It’s a magnificent society-wide scheduling problem! The papers we could write!

Throwing batteries at it is a kind of blunt and uninteresting solution (I guess the market will prefer that one!).

[epolanski]

I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want.

I pay low energy prices during night than day, that's normal, but I'm still not gonna do laundry at 9 pm, I'd rather pay the 10/20 cents more during the day.

[lejalv]

I do time my dishwasher and washing machine to align with peak solar where I live.

I'd like to appeal to you to evolve that frame of mind. To help avoid first world problems (I can't wash a dish by hand, I need it now) devolving into third-world ones (power cuts, crop failures, torrid tropical nights on mid latitudes, mountains disintegrated).

Sometimes its important to remind we're on a generational mission, and it's not maximising Netflix time.

[_carbyau_]

> Sometimes its important to remind we're on a generational mission, and it's not maximising Netflix time.

Get that into the society's rules and then we'll talk.

I like to think I'm modest and sensible but I'm not bending over backwards while my neighbours get to do what I perceive as ridiculous things.

I used to live in a two bedroom unit, conserving things for the environment and next generation. But next door the neighbour in his huge house, 5 SUV's, heated pool streaming heat into the air all winter can just pay for it with money.

My actions are shaped to societies rules and monetary incentives. I'm not going out of my way to "roll coal" or anything stupid. But I'm not wasting my time either.

[phtrivier]

You can't ask anyone to change society's rules by themselves. That being said, you are part of society. If you live differently than your neighbors, you might actually be the model that people will emulate, and not the gaz guzzler.

Sadly, that's pretty much the extent of your control, unfortunately (that, and maybe voting for people to change the laws, which would indirectly change the rules of society - although, usually, the relation goes the other way.)

In this case, if it's even in people best interest to change the "timing of dishwashing" to align on cheap hours - I trust people will do.

The trick is to not overpolitize it - my mum has always launched her dishwasher during "heures creuses", not caring a damn about why the electricity is cheaper at this time. If the cheapest hours end up being earlier, lots of people will just adapt to save a few bucks - it may be smarter to NOT mention solar power, or environment, or whatnot.

[mlrtime]

This whole thread (up and down) is why a lot of people like me don't do any of this mental gymnastics to 'lower my footprint'. It's exhausting, I mean if I bike to work today, that offsets that steak I ate. Just no (just an example).

When we are serious about this issue, we'll price it all in. The only way to affect change for most humans is incentive based decisions right in your face.

[bee_rider]

You should bike to work every day so you’ll be fit for the Climate Wars.

[epolanski]

I don't like your feedback, it's condescending and you know nothing about me.

1. In my area 96% of energy is gas-based. I live in Rome, Italy. It's written in my energy bill. I ain't got no solar. Night or day it's mostly a matter of relatively small changes of demand.

2. If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet! I'm sick of this neverending focus on energy when the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular. On that I am very sensitive. And me deciding to have less burgers and steaks across an year has magnitude of order more impact than your silly dishwasher. Do the math. As I am on transport where instead of pretending to be green by buying 3 tonnes electric SUVs on a lease from US lunatics I use public transport and use my old beaten car sparely in the weekends.

Spare me your nonsense because I ain't gonna be thinking about running a noisy dishwasher in my living room at 9 pm, the only moment of relax and peace for my family because of negligible-to-nonexistent impact on the environment.

And just to add, I don't even own AC, and I can assure you it gets 40C/100+ Fahrenheit, with high humidity in Rome at summer. That's how sensitive I am to the topic.

You know nothing about the people you interact with.

[ordu]

> And just to add, I don't even own AC, and I can assure you it gets 40C/100+ Fahrenheit, with high humidity in Rome at summer. That's how sensitive I am to the topic.

This addition doesn't really add anything. Your tone says it much clearly. You don't like advice, do you? I'm sorry, but I can't help myself. I'd recommend you to try to lower your sensitivity.

But really I can't understand you. You've said:

> I ain't gonna use the dishwasher when the system wants me to, but when I can or want.

I need a bit of a guesswork to understand what you are implying, but still... I think you are sure that system will do no better than you from an effectiveness standpoint, while making things less comfortable to you. So you are enraged from mere proposition of such a system. It seems to me like a hyper sensitivity.

You see, if such a system would work as proposed and your allocation of resources is close to an optimum, then the system will do the same or something close to it. Nothing to be enraged of.

Also, I like how you combined:

> If you want to do something real for the environment change your diet!

with

> You know nothing about the people you interact with.

There was nothing about their diet but you kinda guessed it just by looking at their writing?

[ericd]

Pretty sure your diet is a relatively small part of your carbon footprint.

[danans]

Like everything else, it depends. In the extreme case, if you eat beef every day but use a bicycle for transportation, live in a mild climate with little need for heating and cooling, and rarely fly in an airplane, your diet could be a significant part of your carbon footprint in percentage terms.

[ericd]

Eh, it's just that the entire supply chain that keeps them alive means that their per-capita carbon footprint is almost certainly not dominated by their diet, let alone by beef alone (it's an outsized fraction, but it's just not that significant compared to other stuff). But yeah, hard to talk accurately in broad strokes about a very varied audience.

In this case, they said they live in Rome. Concrete, heavy machinery to make it livable, trash movement, maintaining their public transit, household goods, electricity via nat gas, etc. Sounds like they're making a good effort, though, and in terms of just the discretionary part, they might be right.

[asymmetric]

I think you’re wrong, especially if you consider more the just carbon (eg land use, deforestation, …) https://woods.stanford.edu/news/meats-environmental-impact

[ericd]

That says 14-18% of global GHG emissions is due to cattle, the person I was responding to said "the biggest impact you can have is by eating way less meat, cattle in particular". That doesn't seem like the biggest impact possible. For Americans, their entire diet is attributable to about "5.14 kg CO 2 eq. per person per day" https://habitsofwaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-CS... (UMich Center for Sustainable Systems). For a family of 2.5, that equates to about 4.5 tons CO2e/year. The average American family footprint is about 48 tons CO2e/year. So slightly less than 10% for their entire diet. Of that, maybe a bit more than half is attributable to cattle, or 5% total.

By comparison, driving a pair of gasoline cars their average of 10k miles/yr is something like 16% of the average American family's yearly emissions, or 3x the beef.

Switching from heating with natural gas to a heat pump would also make a bigger dent for the average American family, let alone if they're living somewhere that gets properly cold, like New England. Or just spending $2,000 on air sealing and a layer of fiberglass, for those living in a leaky house - more impactful than not eating beef.

Looking into it a bit for Italian families, it looks like cattle might a larger proportion, partly because their overall carbon footprint is lower. But it's still a relatively small proportion (<15%).

Pretty sure if landowners weren't raising cattle, the alternative isn't going to be letting it return to nature and lowering the value of their land, without big government programs that essentially pay them to do that, so that whole thing seems kind of moot.

[crote]

I couldn't care less when it runs, as long as it's done when I want to unload it.

The diswasher will by full after dinner, so I close it and press "start". It has to be done at the latest by next dinner. Does it run immediately, during the night, or during the day? Irrelevant, let the damn thing pick the best (cheapest) time.

Same with laundry. On average I run less than one load a day, so I'm happy if it finishes either when I wake up, when I get home from work, or when I am about to go to bed.

[ragazzina]

Laundry and dishwashing are completely different though?

Recent dishwashers can open by themselves and dry the dishes, washing machines need a (awaken) human to remove the wet clothes when they finish their cycle.

[bee_rider]

If I had a combined washer/dryer and could just load the clothes up and say “do it whenever” I’d go for that. But that’s very dependent on only needing to do one load per day.

[lambdaone]

But it's not you, it's everyone. And some people will be swayed even by that 10 to 20 cents. Put them all together, and you have a substantial "virtual battery" capacity, and all you need to do it is to make sure people have price awareness.

Don't knock small gains like this. Even a couple of percentage difference is worth having; all the marginal gains add up to make large scale gains.

[jopsen]

Yeah, but your dishwasher or washing machine isn't the big electricity eater.

Your car is. And honestly, you'd rather charge the car at night so that you don't blow a fuse when you're running the dishwasher, microwave, dryer, oven, induction stove and charging your car :)

I have never blown a fuse being getting an EV, and so far still only once.

But charging at night is preferable for that reason, and I couldn't care so long as it's ready by 7am.

Load shifting EVs is easy, and this moves a lot of load. It was never about moving all load.

[jijijijij]

It would be preferable to charge the car in solar panel shaded parking lots at work during the day. You have to charge it at home, because charging EVs has only recently entered architectural and city planning. For the most part, EVs are the battery to buffer peak sun energy.

[ViewTrick1002]

But you will charge your car when it’s cheaper. And add a cheap home battery to remove expensive peak usage.

[matthewdgreen]

A typical dishwasher load requires 1-3kWh, so you'll just use your home battery and do it whenever you want.

[DoctorOetker]

a lot of that energy could have been recuperated with a heat exchanger when the water is refreshed, also in laundry machines.

[matthewdgreen]

That's more or less what heat pump clothes dryers do. They draw in air, heat it, and then blow the humid air back over the cold side of the heat pump loop to condense it. They save tons of energy. I don't think there's anything similar for water (in clothes or dish washers) but the quantities might just be too small to bother with.

[DoctorOetker]

a counter current heat exchanger might be more reliable than a refrigerant heat pump and more efficient than peltier heat pumps, but yes in theory you can quasistatically move the water out for almost no energy (only the adsorption / mixing energies). And peltiers can be much more efficient at tiny temperature gradients, so a theoretical frictionless positive displacement pump, and a heat pipe between the condensing compartment and the evaporatig compartment (so keeping the 2 compartments at ambient temperature (so no heat losses).

Compressing humid air releases heat which marginally increases the temperature of the condensing compartment, and marginally cools the evaporating compartment with the wet clothes; thus the heat pipe will quickly equilibrate the 2 compartments.

[salynchnew]

It's a great idea, but I feel like that way ends up with the nightmare scenario of each of us managing an AWS-style admin console for washing the dishes, etc.

That way lies madness, although I suppose there might be one or two family members I would want to lock out of the dishwasher.

[terj74]

This is already happening with market pricing of electricity energy demands that can be shifted. Our car charges, and our dishwasher/clothes washer run when pricing is low. The price differential is not big enough yet between high and low demand times for us to invest in a battery to soak up cheap power. If battery prices continue to go down, or if the price differential goes up that equation will change. The other main expensive energy user is HVAC and we don't have a way of moving that demand to a different time of day other than a batterv. :(

[evan_a_a]

In engineering the simple solution is often the best solution. Creating a demand-side network of devices is not that.

Plus, such a system would provide even more ways for nefarious actors to sabotage the grid, by influencing the demand side. For example, setting every appliance to run its load at the same time. The grid would be fucked.

[pcchristie]

I don't disagree with your broad comment but it's not hard to fix by slightly dispersing the control/responsibility.

1. Electricity moves for 5/10 min clearing intervals with defined caps at either end (currently in Western Australia it's simply 2 intervals, peak & off-peak). 2. Expose the pricing/market data via API 3. Develop existing home automation frameworks/tools/device IOTs/routers to access that. 4. End user grants permission/configures it on their smart phone when they set their dishwasher and washing machine on set up ("would you like to enable this smart-go button by connecting to Wi-Fi? It could save you $150 per year").

No control ceded to third parties to turn on equipment whenever they want, just allows the end user to cue jobs for when the PowerCo anticipates lowest prices.

PowerCo not any more of a honeypot for attack, at least not more than they are now with control over critical generation/tx/dx infra.

[tsimionescu]

If the devices are accessing a 3rd party API over the Internet to get this info, that control is still ceded, and attackers can still exploit vulnerabilities in all of these devices to attack large swaths of the network at once.