What's the Big Deal With Load Leveling?

The problem is people have more electronic devices in their homes and consume more electricity.

Combine that with the fact that most people have the same sort of daily schedule and it causes big peaks/drops in demand.

Power stations even have to watch TV because when the adverts come on in a popular program a million people will go and open their fridge door at the same time and/or fire up the microwave oven.

This is where it would make sense for utilities to put radio switches on compressors -- at least refrigerator compressors. A refrigerator will stay cold several hours without power. When they try that with AC compressors they overwhelm the emergency rooms with the elderly on hot days.

And that's just on the load end. Supposing the wind dies and clouds cover the sun at the same time?

Anyway the problem is anticipating big high frequency transients, load and supply.

You can go big with pumped storage or you can go fast with flywheels with all the in between methods falling on a straight line, but big _and_ fast ain't gonna happen.

At least not without better materials.

Bret Cahill

That same logic applies to the telephone system during major sporting events - the traffic peaks between quarters and during halftime in the various bowl games.

A.T.T. monitors the news for events that would cause a large influx of phone calls to an area.They block incoming and allow outgoing. I have seen this in their master control center. Very impressive.

Tom

It's not really a "technical issue", it's social.

Anything, highways, public transport, electrical power, servers for popular websites, they have to choose between "reasonable" and handling peak. If they choose "peak" then a lot of the time, it's underused, in effect money wasted. Highways only get jammed during commuter hours, same with public transport, the rest of the day much of lies idle. People get up in the morning, demand power, then go off for the day, the only balance is that the place of work uses power during the day. Then they get home and want that power again, all at about the same time. Everhone gets to the grocery store about the same time after work, the store either has long lines or lots of cashes, yet during the rest of the day, they lay idle (at least they can hire accordingly, but either they have extra cash registers sitting idle during much of the time, or they don't have enough during peak time).

If you've got electrical power, if you can sell to another time zone then that evens things out. But the only way to be efficient with public transport, or highways, is to spread the users around, put incentives for people to travel during off-peak or give incentives to businesses to have varying hours so "rush hour" isn't such a large peak. THey can't do much about people needing the stove and heat when they get home from work, but if they can encourage people to do the laundry off-peak or whatever, then the peaks dont' get so large in comparison with the lulls.

Michael

Yeah, it's really impressive when their worthless, delapidated network can't handle known amounts of voice traffic without having to be shut down.

Hell, they're virtually blocking all calls all the time anyways. It's like they stole the Nextel runbooks and just replaced the idiotic "locating subscriber" message with silence or an instantly dropped call.

It's about a 25% chance a call won't even ring on their bogus com-bloc GSM network.

t's

That just happened a couple hours ago, both land line & cell phones. It wouldn't be such a problem if there was "no ring" box to check on the web page.

Bret Cahill

I've wondered what actually happens with those calls that never complete or do anything. What's really happening there, other than the billing system no doubt comes up with charges for some sort of activity.

I wasn't talking about cell phones. This was a good while back when ATT was the only game in town.