Direct Load Control – the SA option?

DLC - just stick your finger on A every ten minutes

As mentioned in the last post, South Australia has a greater percentage of air-conditioners in homes than any other state, by a long way, and this is the main reason why we’re the nation’s most inefficient electricity user, and Adelaide is ‘peak city’.

So ETSA here has developed a technology known as direct load control. It’s based on American technology and is already being used in some 10 million homes there. The South Australian adaptation utilizes a peak-breaker, a simple device connected to air-conditioners that turns off the compressor for five to ten minutes every hour, leaving the fan running. The technology’s proven, ETSA’s only concern is consumer response. They’ve already tried it in 20 homes, and the response was outstanding – the consumers didn’t even know it was operating, were delighted with the savings and felt it should be imposed statewide. ETSA are now about to trial it in 2000 homes.

These devices cost only $26 per unit, and La Luna could easily buy a unit for every home that requires it. They reduce the electrical cost of air-conditioning by about 20%, and, if introduced on a large scale, would reduce peak load, bringing the overall price of electricity down. That’s the theory anyway.

Apparently, there’s a battle going on between the proponents of smart meters, and the advocates of direct load control. Victoria has already backed the use of smart meters (which are considerably more expensive than our local peak-breakers), but ETSA argues that the direct load control approach is fairer. The argument goes thus: the direct load control technology operates within a fixed price system. The variable-price-dependent smart meter system will put peak prices up so high that people will turn things off because they can’t afford electricity at that price. Now, peak prices operate at certain hours – namely late afternoon to early evening. The people who will suffer from having to turn their aircons off in these hours will be the aged, the infirm, the sick, the housebound.

There’s also an argument that people don’t want to obsess about their electricity usage, and there does seem to be a falling-off-of-enthusiasm factor with smart meters, but I myself feel that there’s a place for both technologies. It’ll be interesting to see how things pan out in South Australia.

Here’s an account of the trials ETSA is conducting. It also provides a rationale for South Australia’s choice of direct load control rather than critical peak pricing.

In Victoria meanwhile, the government is promising that taxpayers won’t have to foot the bill for its smart meter technology roll-out. Other commentators are skeptical, but the government hasn’t properly trialled the system yet, so again we’ll have to wait and see.

smart meters

a Canadian version of the smart meter - best I can do

The smart meter is a device tied to a user pays system, where the price of electricity can vary between 7c per kwh in low general usage periods, to 39c per kwh during peak periods. Current usage for most Australians is based on a flat rate. As mentioned in the last post, I currently have three almost identical rates of between 16c and 17c per kwh.

The smart meter is about the size of a lunchbox and it sits in your kitchen – or anywhere you want to put it. It replaces the usual rotating disc meter, and consists of a set of traffic lights, green amber and red, corresponding to low and peak general usage periods.

What’s essential to note with this item is that it’s tied to an overall grid, and it depends on a retailer who works with a user-pays highly variable rate system. When the light is green, that’s the best time to switch on and use your big-ticket electrical items, such as dishwashers, air-conditioners, dryers and the like, if you really have to use them. It’s the sort of device that works well with kids – they’d take great delight in policing adults and their peak and off-peak usage, but also it’s a great educational and awareness tool for them, creating a more or less permanent sense of the importance of electricity usage, and hopefully spilling over into other areas such as the energy efficiency of individual appliances.

Still, in the current situation with a more or less flat rate operating, the smart meter has limited applicability (I was thinking of a similar sort of device, again replacing the often none-too-accessible spinning-disc meter, which simply monitors household usage rate – that’s to say, it goes into orange when the usage is higher than say, 3 revs per minute in the old spinning-disc measurement, and red when it reaches 6 revs per minute, or whatever. Why hasn’t anyone come up with such a device? Sounds simple to me).

One of the strange things about electricity meters, as it seems to me, is that they’re largely kept hidden away from prying eyes like a dirty secret. It’s almost as if we’re not supposed to worry our pretty little heads about how much electricity we’re using. Let’s bring the electricity meter out of the shadows and into our kitchens and living areas, attach bells and whistles to them, and properly raise awareness of our usage. Yay.

electricity matters

I’m writing this piece for my own benefit and for my co-op. It’s about energy saving, and it’s based on a ‘background briefing’ radio program on electricity usage. A while back I got an electricity bill that rather shocked me, and made me determined to properly monitor and reduce my consumption of electrical energy.

Domestic electricity usage is measured in kilowatt hours (kwh). My ‘green earth’ electricity bill from Origin, described for some reason as an estimated account, covered a 92 day period from July 4 to October 4 2006. During this period I apparently switched from ‘saver choice’ to ‘green earth’ tariffs (I can’t remember doing so, but, hey, sounds good).

For the first 67 days I was on ‘saver choice’, and was charged at two different rates. I used about 220.5 kwh at the low rate – 14c per kwh, and 349.5 at the slightly higher rate of about 15c per kwh. Total usage was 570 kwh for the period, at about 8.5 kwh per day.

For the remainder of the period, 25 days, I was on ‘green earth’ tariffs, at 3 different rates, 16.2c per kwh, 16.3c per kwh and 17.5c per kwh. I’m not sure what these different rates correspond to, but the real shock, to me, was that I was charged for 587 kwh for that period, at a daily rate of 23.5 kwh, almost three times my usage for the ‘saver choice’ period. This made no sense to me. I have lived alone for this entire period, and haven’t upped my usage in any way. It is extremely suspicious.

I meant to contact Origin, in writing, about this matter, but never got round to it. However, I became interested in checking the meter. Even more suspicious was the reading I made on October 14, which covered the ten days of the new billing period. My meter had ticked over to the tune of another 59 kwh. That’s a mere 5.9 kwh per day, much much less than the 23.5 kwh per day for the immediately preceding period. This cannot be right. I’ve since, through careful monitoring and usage, reduced my usage to an average of just on 4kwh per day for the last 40-odd days.

I’ll try to get an explanation out of Origin. I’m well aware that air-conditioner usage is more costly than all other household usages put together, by and large, but I have no reason to believe that the weather of the ‘green earth’ period, which covered mostly the month of September, caused me to use the air-conditioner more than the earlier period, and there are no other appliances that could obviously be the culprit.

So it was with this heightened interest in electricity that I listened to the background briefing program.

The focus was primarily on air-conditioners. A retailer interviewed on the program said that domestic air-conditioners varied in size, from 2.5 kilowatts to a more commercial size of up to 10 kilowatts. Later, a critic of the large air-conditioners installed in modern ‘macmansions’ claimed that some of these had a 30 to 50 kilowatt size. Which raises the question of how La Luna tenants can find out the size of their air-conditioners. I’ll have to look around for the instruction manual.

One of the main problems with electicity-guzzling air-conditioners is that they tend to get switched on at the same time, during very hot periods, creating peaks which ultimately increase the cost of electricity to all consumers.

Some 45% of electricity cost is absorbed in distribution, including the upgrading of networks to cover increasingly sharp or high usage peaks. Considering that the users of those big electricity-guzzling air-conditioners are paying no more for the cost of upgrades than others, some are arguing that a user-pays system be introduced.

There have been some interesting innovations of late, called demand-side response programs, designed to reduce electricity demand. The first of these is called a smart meter, and I’ll write about that in my next post, which I promise will be v v soon.

Finally, some very interesting data. Adelaide is the air-conditioner capital of Australia. Some 92% of South Australian homes have air-conditioners, compared to only 50-60% in NSW, 40% in Queensland, and a minuscule 30% in neighbouring Victoria. Now why would this be?

evolving truths

great excuse to post this promise of happiness

Well my next post has been a long time coming, but I’ve been busy elsewhere. And that’s probably a lie, or a post-hoc justification.

I mentioned last time Haidt’s four moral intuitions, or the four elements around which moral intuitions converge. They are: avoidance of suffering (the do no harm principle); reciprocity and fairness; hierarchy, respect and duty; and purity and pollution. He also argues that the first two elements are essential to liberal thinking, whereas the last two are much less important to liberals, by and large. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to emphasise all four elements, and in this sense ‘have a richer moral life’, though it might be better, especially from a liberal perspective, to argue that they merely have a more regulated one.

Haidt very much associates these intuitions with our evolutionary development. Our minds have developed to give us negative feelings and a need for avoidance when we witness people who cheat or are cruel to others, and positive feelings when we witness heroic or charitable acts, just as our tongues are equipped with receptors which cause us to avoid or embrace certain taste sensations. Our desire to bond with and associate with people who give us these positive feelings is socially adaptive. As an ultra-social species, social co-operation was an adaptive imperative for us. As Haidt says, ‘we are the descendants of the successful co-operators’.

In looking at the philosophical implications for his position, Haidt uses a distinction of the philosopher David Wiggins, between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric truths. Moral relativism is thus avoided by claiming that our moral intuitions, just like our aesthetic intuitions, may be true by virtue of what we are – what defines us as human beings. And we are defined by evolution. Thus, a male will define a beautiful female in terms of ‘the promise of happiness’ for him. The most evolutionarily fit will fulfill such a promise. Symmetry, unblemishedness, youthful vigour, proper proportion, these are things which can be measured objectively, pretty well, and they will result in a general agreement that Halle Berry is more beautiful than the fat woman down the road. This is an anthropocentric truth – not a truth by agreement, but a truth by virtue of human nature. And the same thing goes for our moral intuitions, though, as Haidt points out with his liberal-conservative distinction, there is room here for moral pluralism.

Of course there are many questions here worth asking, such as why purity and pollution are so much more important to some people, or some cultures, than to others, and where such differences leave the notion of anthropocentric truth. It also raises, for me, the question of what constitutes a non-anthropocentric truth (these are concepts new to me), considering the anthropocentric frame within which we must consider our universe.

Heavy stuff, so I’ll leave it there for now. I do like the quote from Max Weber though, which Haidt uses, and which I’ll paraphrase in a less gendered way: ‘Humans are animals suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun.’

Well my next post has been a long time coming, but I’ve been busy elsewhere. And that’s probably a lie, or a post-hoc justification.

I mentioned last time Haidt’s four moral intuitions, or the four elements around which moral intuitions converge. They are: avoidance of suffering (the do no harm principle); reciprocity and fairness; hierarchy, respect and duty; and purity and pollution. He also argues that the first two elements are essential to liberal thinking, whereas the last two are much less important to liberals, by and large. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to emphasise all four elements, and in this sense ‘have a richer moral life’, though it might be better, especially from a liberal perspective, to argue that they merely have a more regulated one.

Haidt very much associates these intuitions with our evolutionary development. Our minds have developed to give us negative feelings and a need for avoidance when we witness people who cheat or are cruel to others, and positive feelings when we witness heroic or charitable acts, just as our tongues are equipped with receptors which cause us to avoid or embrace certain taste sensations. Our desire to bond with and associate with people who give us these positive feelings is socially adaptive. As an ultra-social species, social co-operation was an adaptive imperative for us. As Haidt says, ‘we are the descendants of the successful co-operators’.

In looking at the philosophical implications for his position, Haidt uses a distinction of the philosopher David Wiggins, between anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric truths. Moral relativism is thus avoided by claiming that our moral intuitions, just like our aesthetic intuitions, may be true by virtue of what we are – what defines us as human beings. And we are defined by evolution. Thus, a male will define a beautiful female in terms of ‘the promise of happiness’ for him. The most evolutionarily fit will fulfill such a promise. Symmetry, unblemishedness, youthful vigour, proper proportion, these are things which can be measured objectively, pretty well, and they will result in a general agreement that Halle Berry is more beautiful than the fat woman down the road. This is an anthropocentric truth – not a truth by agreement, but a truth by virtue of human nature. And the same thing goes for our moral intuitions, though, as Haidt points out with his liberal-conservative distinction, there is room here for moral pluralism.

Of course there are many questions here worth asking, such as why purity and pollution are so much more important to some people, or some cultures, than to others, and where such differences leave the notion of anthropocentric truth. It also raises, for me, the question of what constitutes a non-anthropocentric truth (these are concepts new to me), considering the anthropocentric frame within which we must consider our universe.

Heavy stuff, so I’ll leave it there for now. I do like the quote from Max Weber though, which Haidt uses, and which I’ll paraphrase in a less gendered way: ‘Humans are animals suspended in webs of significance that they themselves have spun.’