YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Google will pay people to use less electricity so its data centers can use more

18 points mikelgan 1 hour ago 11 comments

benoau 1 hour ago | parent

> adjusting tens of thousands of smart thermostats at once, effectively moving their electricity usage to a time when there is less demand

Somewhere amongst this was a great opportunity for reducing consumption of electricity from dirty sources, mass-optimizing millions of thermostats, car and electric bikes/etc charging, refrigerators, computer power settings etc to reduce emissions... but now it sounds like it should be illegal.

superb_dev 54 minutes ago | parent

Actually there are some utilities out there with programs like this!

aDyslecticCrow 48 minutes ago | parent

Sweden have by hour and more recently by 10 minute electricity billing. Companies use it in automatic load balancing, car chargers use it, and IoT pilled dads in their 50s make home assistant schedules based on it.

It's pretty good! The need came from the high variability of wind power. Less dystopian than ... data centers... urgh.

It's of course optional. If you optimise well you can beat the monthly or daily tables and save quite a bit. If you don't care; you pay whatever the grid operator estimates.

stvltvs 30 minutes ago | parent

My local utility has basically this program.

Vaushite 1 hour ago | parent

(They'll still pay more for electricity, but less than if they hadn't taken the deal)

Edit: why is this comment suddenly grounds for an auto shadowban??????

Jtsummers 53 minutes ago | parent

> Edit: why is this comment suddenly grounds for an auto shadowban??????

Your previous comment was the one that first got auto killed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50216326

I don't know why it was. Reach out to the mods (contact link at the bottom of the page), asking the question here won't get you an answer.

BLKNSLVR 1 hour ago | parent

All these decades with little, slow action on climate change, and all it actually took was the seven largest companies in the world wanting more power than is commonly available and, yes, we can find ways of making the average household more efficient right away!

It's a sad, but true, indictment about how scaled humanity works.

bagacrap 17 minutes ago | parent

Funny because the way I look at it is, all the things I've ever done or will do in my life to reduce energy consumption, including shipping efficiency improvements to billions of installments of consumer software, means nothing because suddenly the investors of the world have an insatiable appetite for compute and all of big tech's talk about social progressivism is thrown out the window.

mikestorrent 55 minutes ago | parent

I have an EV charger that already pays me an offset, apparently selling the carbon credits I am not using by not driving with gasoline? It doesn't pay a ton, but it's interesting.

I have heard of efforts to link thermostats etc. with this virtual power plant idea so that when there is an energy demand one's home appliances stop working so hard and use less energy. This of course could lead to hot/cold houses for people, so there must always be the option to manually override if the discomfort is a problem. So many of these efforts come from e.g. California... other places in the world have wider weather extremes to worry about!

Izikiel43 51 minutes ago | parent

It would be interesting if google started to offer deals on getting people solar and having an exclusive contract with individuals on the output.

Basically, you get solar and battery, and google gets the excess power.

gnabgib 24 minutes ago | parent

Source article: We are working with Voltus to build a 1-gigawatt virtual power plant (2 points, yesterday) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50198487

Origin 5 months ago Google and Voltus sign agreement for smart energy capacity (3 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48371484