Draft:Automatic Load Shifting

• Comment: Potentially something here for an article but the way you have written it is all wrong: this is an emotive essay. Please find sources FIRST and then simply paraphrase them in your own words in a neutral way. qcne (talk) 09:08, 11 November 2024 (UTC)

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Automatic Load Shifting is a technique that moves energy consumption automatically to another time. In energy, and especially electricity, load is referred to as an amount of energy being consumed. People can shift loads, for example if they decide to start a washing machine at a later time rather than at present. Automatic load shifting is not done by people but by machines instead.

Worldwide energy change

Green energy on the rise

Solar and wind energy sources are volatile: They are dependent on sun and weather. As a result the energy they produce varies over time. Solar energy especially is very appealing, as it is abundant on earth, and can be captured locally, and capturing solar energy is becoming cheaper as solar panels become cheaper due to mass production. As solar energy is electrified it is available to many existing electrial devices. Today most solar energy produced is directly connected to energy transport, the electricity grid, which makes the energy produced locally available elsewhere. As the share of produced solar energy is becoming a bigger part of the overall energy mix it varies also the available energy of the overall mix, and by simple commercial rules of offer and demand it ultimately varies the price of energy available to all parties connected to the energy infrastructure: Energy prices become more volatile.

Everyone gets variable energy

Variable energy prices will not only apply to owners of solar installations who experience the energy variance first hand but everyone, every party will experience variable energy. Connected to the same grid also parties that do not own a residential solar installation are affected by varying energy prices as energy supply is becoming volatile. Volatility is increasing for energy prices With increasing deployment of variable energy sources, their share of all energy in the energy mix present on interconnecting electricity grids is increasing, and as a consequence the energy price volatility is increasing, too.

Worldwide

The beginning of the wave of deployment of green energy has started but international targets to meet climate targets means that the wave of deployment will continue until 2050, at least. Deployment of solar energy generation is happening worldwide and strongly growing in China, Europe, California, Australia, and other places: Volatile energy prices are a worldwide phenomena and volatility is increasing worldwide as long as green energy production is being increased.

Energy price segments become smaller

Nowadays energy spot markets work with hourly changing prices and recently move to even lower resolution of new pricing every 15 minutes. On household level the variation of solar production is even on second granularity, e.g. a thick cloud moving in front of clear sky can reduce solar production by 75% within 20 seconds.

Human selfishness as basis for grid balancing

The vast majority, if not all, people act selfish before they act for the benefit of everyone, the common good. As a result, people will act for their benefit when presented with variable energy prices: They will try to use energy when it is cheap and avoid to use it when it is expensive. In short, there is no need to intervene by central entities to manage loads in homes of humans, they will do it themselves when presented transparently with energy prices. Autonomous energy management by selfish humans will beat centrally managed control over their consumption, as they have much better knowledge of their local environment, and their future needs than a central entity might have. As a result selfish individual management of energy beats centrally controlled energy management as outcome for efficiency. There is one potential for failure of selfish energy management: It is becoming difficult for human to deal with small price segments that vary over time. Their task to act selfish is becoming more difficult when energy prices are varying very quickly. Noone is following minute-level price changes to alter energy consumption behavior. It is difficult, and time-consuming.

Benefits of Automatic Load Shifting

Automatic load shifting moves energy consumption automatically to another time where energy is cheap. It helps selfish humans to automate the task of reaping the benefits that come with variable energy prices. Faced with increasingly volatile prices, and shrinking time segment for varying price segments humans need automatic load shifting to help them to adapt the consumption to the cheapest price. Automatic load shifting works best for loads that have inherent energy storage, fortunately this is the case for the big energy consumers in the home:

• Water storage heaters: Water heaters with storage capacity store the energy in hot water, and have a buffer of capacity that dissociates the time of heating the water from the time of consumption. The heat loss of a standard water heater during an entire day is only a few percent.
• Electric vehicle (EV): EVs have a an electric battery with energy storage capability. Average batteries is enough for three days of driving without recharging for average drivers.
• Swimming pool filtering is another load that is a big consumers but that can be time-shifted without loss of convenience. It does not matter if a pool is filtered in the morning during the day or in the evening, as long as filtering runs its required time.

Automatic load shifting works only for loads that have the flexibility to be moved in time without loss of comfort. Recent (2024) commercially available systems now claim instant return on investment for automatic load shifting, superior to the multi-year return on investment of power-shifting with residential home batteries, such as Tesla Powerwall.

Complexity of Automatic Load Shifting

Optimal placement of loads in time into variable-price energy volume is a resource allocation problem, equivalent to the knapsack problem. The knapsack problem is a NP-complete problem, which means there is no known algorithm that is both correct and fast (polynomial-time) in all cases.

Automatic Load Shifting versus Power-Shifting

Batteries help to power shift for all consumer devices but do not shift the load. They simply act as an intermediate buffer for electricity. Automatic Load Shifting works well also in the presence of batteries. Automatic Load Shifting is superior to batteries due to its abilities to look-ahead. Batteries simply release power when power would otherwise be consumed from the grid, and batteries charge when energy is cheap. Unlike automatic load-shifting with look-ahead and forecasting, battery-only based systems miss optimisation opportunities. In addition, batteries are more expensive, at the time of writing (2024) battery systems are an order of magnitude more expensive than automatic load shifting.