Smart appliances learning to save power grid

In the Brous household and others throughout Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, smart water heaters and thermostats provided updated electric prices about every five minutes, depending on what was available and needed (most utilities instead charge a flat rate per kilowatt-hour, regardless of cost fluctuations). Homeowners could adjust their settings to decrease power consumption and save money during peak demand or override the controls at any point, like when they were hosting dinner guests or a fussy relative.

"The traditional value is mitigating wholesale market prices that trickle down to the customer. But we can also cut peak demand with great precision now," Pratt said. And precisely controlling electrical loads can assist new eco-friendly technologies such as wind-generated power. Wind has a bad habit of fluctuating on short timescales, he said, but manipulating power loads over five-minute intervals can help smooth out those fluctuations.

For the behavioral study, which will be released this month, Pratt and his collaborators analyzed how Brous and other volunteers reacted to the costs of energy delivery by giving them something all too familiar to homeowners: electric bills. Unlike the real world, however, the bills were only simulated with pretend money kept in fake accounts. As a perk for participating in the GridWise program and reducing their electric consumption, though, the volunteers’ savings could be converted into actual cash.

As part of the experiment, the researchers found that they could cut the peak electricity load among participating homes by half for three days in a row. “That was astounding,” Pratt said. The homeowners were rewarded for the inconvenience, but the study suggested that a similar power reduction might be feasible during a prolonged grid emergency.

Overall, Brous said his electricity load dropped by 15 percent, and he compiled his own Excel spreadsheet to determine the percentage of power flowing to his water heater, heat pump and dryer to pinpoint how he might save even more. He also received quarterly checks from the program reflecting his savings, including a recent one for $37. During several camping trips, Brous could tell his house to “go to sleep or wake up,” simply by logging onto an Internet site and remotely turning his heat and hot water heater on or off.

Richard Katzev, an expert on social and environmental behavior and president of Portland, Ore.,-based Public Policy Research, said merely providing more information to consumers would be ineffective without also giving them incentives to act. Homeowners will readily accept money-saving devices that require fairly easy lifestyle adjustments, he said, like delaying a dishwasher or dryer run to obtain cheaper rates.

“The evidence is clear that those devices do promote electricity conservation on the aggregate,” he said. And adding a social element to the decision-making can lead to even bigger behavioral changes.

How might Brous’ friends and neighbors greet a similar project? “I think they would welcome it with open arms,” Brous said. “I don’t think there would be any question about it. If you give people the tools, they’re going to put them to use to save electricity.” And perhaps the power grid in the process.

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