Silly Ideas

Negative electricity prices are a thing! Wait ... what?

Negative electricity prices happen when a power plant wants to pay you to use its electricity!

This happens when we have lots of cheap renewable electricity like solar & wind. Lots of solar/wind electricity is a good thing. The bad thing is that it doesn't last very long.

When the sky gets cloudy or the wind stops blowing we return to conventional power plants. Just one problem ... conventional power plants really don't like short, large changes in their output. They are more 'steady as you go' types. A large reduction in output for just an hour or two can be very costly, a right faff and they'd rather just not bother! So the power plant tries to prevent this by giving this electricity away (or even paying people to use it).

Trying to increase demand for short periods of time with negative prices works to a certain degree. But what is really needed is a guaranteed way of using any unwanted electricity. Our simple solution below does exactly that!

We can use smart light bulbs to get rid of unwanted electricity!

Smart light bulbs are becoming more & more common and they can be switched on & off over the internet.

Who cares if a light in the living room comes on for a while in the middle of the day?

Who cares if a light in the basement is on for a few hours in the middle of the night?

For each bulb simply decide whether or not it's okay for it to temporarily auto-switch on to use unwanted electricity. For instance, it would probably be inconvenient if a bedroom light switched itself on in the middle of the night. However, if a basement light came on for a few hours seemingly all by itself ... would you mind?

Let's say your house is shown in the image below. Note - Some rooms have more than one bulb ...

After careful consideration you select the green bulbs shown below for unwanted electricity. This means your electric grid operator can temporarily switch on these bulbs to use unwanted electricty. Of course, you can still control them too. Now we just need an app so folk can tell the grid operator about their bulbs. Problem solved. Simples!