4/14/2023 0 Comments Smartday pgeDuring the roughly four-year pilot program for these meters in Palo Alto, water leaks were detected in 30% of the homes!Ĥ. Residents can save money when the utility alerts them to potential water leaks or other significant anomalous use. This should help to make home batteries, for example, more affordable.ģ. Power contributions are more valuable when supply is scarce, and reimbursement rates should reflect that. A resident can contribute power to the grid from rooftop solar, a home battery, or even an EV battery in time. The utility will be able to reimburse power contributions from residents more accurately. For this to work well, the rate design has to be effective, which is covered in the second part of this post.Ģ. Residents and the utility will then save on cost. When power rates better reflect the true cost of energy, residents can choose to shift their use, as convenient, towards cheaper hours. Power is generally more expensive in the evening and less expensive midday. The utility and residents can buy more inexpensive power. There are even a few benefits we will derive automatically. Once we have well-designed pricing plans, there are many benefits we can expect from these smart meters. We want to even out (and lower) that “net demand” curve to reduce the amount of peak capacity we need to build. The result is steep differences in “net demand” (red), which is demand minus solar and wind. Winter has less solar and more wind than summer. Summer has greater demand, increasing through afternoon and evening. If we want an affordable and clean power supply that closely matches our demand, then our rates must include a time component, and smart meters are the infrastructure that enables that.ĭemand in California (blue) varies by hour and season as does the amount of solar (yellow) and wind (green) available. A time-invariant rate does not price power correctly, which means that we are not using power efficiently. The cost (and emissions) of electricity vary significantly throughout the day and the year. The main reason for my enthusiasm has to do with electricity rates. I am really looking forward to this change. The rollout will be complete by the end of 2024, at which point the utility will be able to roll out time-of-use rates in 2025. They will also retrofit all 45,000 gas and water meters to detect and transmit hourly usage information. The City of Palo Alto Utilities (CPAU) will begin replacing all 30,000 legacy electric meters in earnest in two years, along with 9,000 older water meters. Many of you reading this already have smart meters and are getting started with time-of-use rates. I will talk briefly about both parts here. This part is pretty easy to mess up it’s happened many times. The harder part is developing time-based rate plans that are widely adopted, fair, and will help customers and the utility save on cost and emissions. I say this part is (relatively) easy because it’s hard to mess up too badly. The easier part is installing the new meters and radios and associated software. There’s an easier part and a harder part to a smart meter rollout. I love spending time outdoors, and feel deeply our responsibility to this incredible planet that we call home. After working in the tech industry for about 25 years, I retired a few years ago to better align my time with my priorities. I studied math and neurobiology on the east coast before moving out here in 1987 for grad school in computer science. My background is not in climate science, and I'm not even particularly green my hope is that helps to make this blog more relatable. It is important that we develop a shared understanding of the basic science and impacts of climate change, to make sense of our actions and policy options going forward. My hope is that readers of this blog will develop a better understanding of how our climate is evolving and how they want to respond, and will feel comfortable asking questions and exchanging comments on the topic. About this blog: Climate change, despite its outsized impact on the planet, is still an abstract concept to many of us.
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