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from the is-your-meter-smarter-than-a-5th-grader? dept.
Electricity companies increasingly install smart meters in order to stabilize the grid. The idea is simple: When there is high supply, the price goes down, while when there is little supply, prices go up. People therefore are more likely to wait for cheaper prices, thus the demand in low-supply times is reduced, and the demand in high-supply times is increased, resulting in a better match of supply and demand, and thus a more stable grid.
However now research at the University of Bremen shows that the smart meters may actually have the opposite effect. From the phys.org article:
"Our work examines the, at first sight, great idea to use smart electricity meters to dampen fluctuations in the electricity power nets," Stefan Bornholdt at the University of Bremen told Phys.org. "However, we find that under some conditions, consumers with such meters start competing and create a new artificial market which exhibits properties of real markets, such as bubbles and crashes. Thus, instead of dampening out fluctuations, it may create new ones. In this way, interacting smart meters may generate chaos instead of stability."
The mechanism they describe as follows:
"When laundry piles up, users (or algorithms in advanced machines) can adapt the threshold to a higher allowed price. When the fluctuating price then drops after a while from higher levels, those consumers who postponed their activity will then join the 'happy hour' of cheap electricity, leading to an avalanche of demand (reminding of some crowded bars at happy hour). This is a dynamic phenomenon which econophysics models, but not standard economic models, can represent."
The original article in Physical Review E is also freely available from arXiv.org.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Alfred on Thursday July 30 2015, @05:42PM
Having worked for a place that designed and built powerplants and distribution isaw that they were all for the smart meter thing. They gave some stats on the number of meters and total bandwidth of data coming from them and it was like 30 kB per meter per day. WTF are you going to do with that much data? Even with per phase current and power factor, total cumulative consumption, network address and overhead, status bits and so on you are communicating all of that hundreds of times a day. Why?
The conspiracies about using this to monitor you and regulate you and spy on you are entirely possible. The tech is there and established. Like other utilities (phone) it is only a matter of time before it is used in nefarious invasive ways. You can easily leverage the EPA or environment causes to mandate extensive regulation or controls on individual power consumption to do it.