Thermostat
Energy specialists have long known that programmable thermostats (PTs) have the potential to save homeowners money, reduce the need for new power plants and shrink the amount of pollutants and climate-altering CO2 pumped into the atmosphere. Originally deployed during the oil crisis of the 1970s, PTs and their digital descendants permitted consumers to instruct their thermostats to turn down the air conditioning at night when occupants were sleeping and during the day when no one was home.
News from US: Energy Star, a government-backed program that gives efficiency ratings to appliances, last year withdrew its “high” rating from PTs because their owners either find them too confusing to set, or just don’t bother to try, says William Burke, the lead grad student on Auslander’s team. That reluctance and confusion cost California and energy consumers billions of dollars each year.
“We expected those early thermostats to save a lot of money and energy,” says Ronald Hofmann, a senior advisor for the California Institute for Energy and the Environment and advisor to the California Energy Commission (CEC), which funded Auslander’s research. “But only if people used them. And unfortunately, fewer than 20 percent of Californians took, or take, the time to program their thermostats.”
Some time over the next five years, California’s major utility companies will install in homes new electric meters that can record usage on an hourly basis. The new communicating thermostats would receive hourly updates about electricity prices through a built-in module, Hofmann says; consumers would be able to program them to automatically minimize cost while maximizing comfort. Data entering the PCT can come from the utility through the meter, from the Internet through a router or over the airwaves.
PCT
The most dramatic savings to the state may come long before the utility companies succeed in actually installing smart meters, though. The new thermostats could receive FM-radio data system (RDS) transmissions, for instance, informing users when the grid is approaching peak load. This happens only on a few hot summer days each year, but meeting the demand is very expensive to the state.
A better strategy, the CEC believes, is known as demand response: using communications and information technology, utilities can signal consumers’ thermostats that the grid is stressed and ask them to reduce consumption. To speed the transition to residential demand response, the CEC backed Auslander’s project to include the creation of design standards that would work for industry, consumers and utilities.
A customer could set his or her thermostat so that, when it receives a warning from the utility that the region is nearing grid capacity, the PCT would automatically raise its temperature setting by a few degrees. If they choose to pay the price, customers can ignore the signal and set their own thermostat; they, not the utility or the government, retain the final say in the temperature set point.
Most customers, Auslander predicts, will gladly cooperate by adjusting their set points. And the combined effect of one degree or two of adjustment spread across large regions will often be enough to avert rolling blackouts.
