Re: [gpm] Demand Response

["Bryan Quigley" <gquigs gmail com>]

On 7/5/07, Richard Hughes <hughsient gmail com> wrote:

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 15:01 -0400, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> Hello,
> "In electricity grids, demand response (DR) refers to mechanisms to
> manage the demand from customers in response to supply conditions, for
> example, having electricity customers reduce their consumption at
> critical times or in response to market prices." -Wikipedia
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

News to me. :-)

> I am interested in knowing if anyone has considered adding this
> capability to Gnome-Power-Manager.  It would need to be location aware
> amongst other things.

Hmm. Is this not a security flaw? How would this be implemented?

No, I hope not.  Perhaps as simple as checking a website...

> And if not, how difficult do you think it would be to implement?

Using stuff like avahi you would still have to do some sort of RMI or
RPC protocol.

> (I would be using some sort of web-based communication with the
> utility, instead of any communication over the power lines.)

Instead of thinking of the system as a 'high power user that we can tell
to reduce power' we are aiming for a model that is a 'low power user
that only becomes high when the user is actually working'. I.e. what I'm
trying to say is that you can only save at most a couple of watts if you
dim the screen as everything else should be throttled down, even when on
AC, and then most users would turn the screen back up anyway.

>From a powersaving point of view, it's like turning down the heaters in
winter or the air conditioning in summer - users are always going to
complain and turn it right back up. :-)

The idea would only work (I think) for businesses and only when they explicitly set it up.  Say you have a business with 1000 laptops.  Peek time for power is somewhere between 2-3:30pmish.  You get a significant discount when you reduce your power usage during those periods (you need to sign-up for it).  Let's say your laptops usually get 4 hours battery time.   I see the following possibilities:
Hot day: Screens get dimmer, processor operates in lowest setting
Really Hot day: laptops go on battery power for the worst 30 minutes.
(I'm envisioning they have an internal website to control this, aka laptop checks the site every X minutes)

I think 1000 laptops all doing this would save (move to another time) a large amount of grid usage for one business.   Although the user would (almost always) need ultimate say about it and you are right, they would probably just turn it back to AC / brighten the screen, etc.

-Bryan