‘We Are Energy Nerds.
The relationship between utility and customer is usually a one-way street: The utility offers a price, the consumer pays it and uses the energy supplied. But as power grids move away from fossil fuels, matching demand and supply is becoming more challenging. Utilities are pushing customers to optimize their energy use according to the grid’s needs and around periods of peak demand, while customers are starting to supplement the grid with devices that generate and store electricity at home.
Technical know-how isn’t required; neither is much math. For Chris Morgan, 35, a church operations manager in Durham in the north of England, three is the magic number — 3 kilowatts. That’s how much his home battery can discharge at any one time, so Morgan’s family of four tries to keep their energy consumption under that cap. They use the grid to charge the battery and their EV between 12:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m., when electricity is cheap.
“You can always see the exact electricity consumption that you have at the moment,” Wehr says. “This leads to thoughts where you say, ‘Man, how should we go about using the dishwasher?’ You can suddenly see how much the kettle uses. It totally blows me away when you turn it on.
The final boss of home energy nerdery is automation. A computerized system can time power use down to the second based on pricing, time of day and user habits. It might be programmed to send cheap grid power to a plugged-in EV overnight, for example, or to fill a battery from solar panels once the homeowner drives to work, then release it to the kitchen at dinner time.
Sarah Chambers, a 52-year-old mother of three from south Wales, realized that her family could save a “substantial amount of money” by investing in a car charger, solar panels and a battery. Her next project is to set up a home assistant computer to automate the household energy flow. Chambers also opted into a pricing plan with her utility, Octopus Energy, that automatically sends power to her EV when prices are low.
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