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Posted Thu Aug 4 2011: from
MITnews:
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The too-smart-for-its-own-good grid http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1312476063
In the last few years, electrical utilities have begun equipping their customers' homes with new meters that have Internet connections and increased computational capacity. One envisioned application of these "smart meters" is to give customers real-time information about fluctuations in the price of electricity, which might encourage them to defer some energy-intensive tasks until supply is high or demand is low. Less of the energy produced from erratic renewable sources such as wind and solar would thus be wasted, and utilities would less frequently fire up backup generators, which are not only more expensive to operate but tend to be more polluting, too....
in MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, however, shows that this policy could backfire. If too many people set appliances to turn on, or devices to recharge, when the price of electricity crosses the same threshold, it could cause a huge spike in demand; in the worst case, that could bring down the power grid. Fortunately, in a paper presented at the last IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, the researchers also show that some relatively simple types of price controls could prevent huge swings in demand. But that stability would come at the cost of some of the efficiencies that real-time pricing is intended to provide....
But, Litvinov adds, an accurate model of the dynamics of energy consumption would have to factor in consumers' responses, not only to changing electricity prices, but also to each other's responses. "It's like a game," Litvinov says. "People will have to start adopting more sophisticated strategies. That whole dynamic is itself a subject for study."
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