<story><title>California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard</title><url>https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day critical in energy consumption.&lt;p&gt;IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition.  If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery.  And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.</text></item><item><author>nippoo</author><text>The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there&amp;#x27;s so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jvm</author><text>If consumers paid close to wholesale rates for their home energy they would be highly incentivized to do these sorts of things: they&amp;#x27;d pay almost nothing (or maybe even less than nothing) in the day and big bucks from 5 PM to 8 PM. There would be whole industries helping people shift consumption to daylight hours. Unfortunately legislatures have consistently been acting to shield consumers from variable time of day costs, preventing behavior adjustment.</text></comment>
<story><title>California Electricity Mix Live Dashboard</title><url>https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s interesting how renewables have suddenly made time-of-day critical in energy consumption.&lt;p&gt;IMHO, not enough attention has been paid to how important better insulation + workplace EV charging are to the energy transition.  If homes were insulated like they are in Northern Europe (where you can go a week without heat and your home will still be tolerable when you get home) rather than Northern California (where your furnace cycles on after an hour despite it being 55F out), you could run basically all residential HVAC during daylight hours, when solar is producing abundantly, and turn the housing stock into a giant thermal battery.  And similarly, if everybody charged at work rather than at night, you power transportation on solar rather than on natural gas.</text></item><item><author>nippoo</author><text>The fun bit here, for those who missed it, is the spot price being negative - ie there&amp;#x27;s so much solar being generated that industrial consumers are being paid to consume electricity!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>a_wild_dandan</author><text>There are gobs of fascinating battery ideas like this! Pumping water uphill, heating up enormous piles of insulated carbon, spinning monstrous flywheels, etc. Their plausibility is highly dependent on the environment. So I hope that we&amp;#x27;ll eventually have a constellation of these wild batteries supplying the world&amp;#x27;s storage needs. I suspect that we&amp;#x27;ll see the idea you described gain more adoption. The result: fleets of &amp;quot;air battery&amp;quot; homes climate controlled by municipalities via opt-in smart thermostats (and credit incentives) to ease grid loads.</text></comment>