In the US, at least, there are some utilities that charge based on maximum kW (demand) and total kWh used (energy). ComEd in Chicago is a utility with a demand rate plan option.
That tends to be commercial rates since businesses can have larger spikes in consumption, so the "pipe" needs to be larger. Industrial rates are similar.
There are some like ComEd that you call out that can apply the model to residential rates, though my (now dated) experience is that they are rarer.
Knowing the average of 108 W wouldn't help with knowing your peak demand, as fridges vary significantly from off to startup to running, so knowing the average isn't useful in that situation either.
It would be completely wrong for peak demand. I had to learn this the hard way. While the small fridge I bought only uses 80 W while running the compressor uses 800W+ for a second on startup which was too much for my off the grid inverter.
That strain does not seem to be reflected in the usage, which has been in a shallow decline since the 90s. Maybe they could consider using smart demand management, which is becoming popular with a lot of utilities to move usage away from peaks and into the quieter times.
I think these tariffs are meant to encourage exactly that. Note also that there are many levels of bottlenecks. One could be in your neighborhood, if all your neighbours have EVs.
Perhaps it will work. I'm just a bit skeptical because it seems unlikely to be a widespread problem. The average driver in Sweden will only need perhaps 6 kWh per day, which at L2 means charging for 35-40 minutes. A bit of demand management from the utility and everyone in the neighborhood can get what they need without stressing the local grid. Or just knock down the rate to something inconsequential and let it trickle all night.
Idaho Power’s local generation is quite clean. But…during the summer in Idaho, almost a third of energy comes from Wyoming and Utah where coal is still a substantial part of generation.
I'd be curious to test the GP's point. Since electricity maps doesn't have cost data for most US balancing authorities, you maybe could try figuring out power costs per balancing authority to end customers by using something like the https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/eia861/ "Sales to Customers Customer Sited" data. Revenue over Megawatthours for Industrial service.
I agree vision zero hasn’t been particularly effective in the US. In Boston, we have roads like Jamaicaway where the speed limit was lowered to 25mph and people regularly drive 50. Speed limits are functionally unenforced.
Human behavior as a focal point of blame is skewered in a book that just came out.
https://a.co/d/21guqjp argues that traffic engineering and design is what has resulted in the much higher death rate in the US than its peer countries. If lanes are wide (3.5m or larger), people will drive as fast as is enforced.
And degrade the quality of life of every resident who regularly has a car trip living in one of those neighborhoods by making them circle 1-3 blocks of 1-ways and right only intersections (or whatever other solution you implement for making it worse to drive through).
You're basically saying that thousands of people ought to have their lives made marginally worse so you can claim success because the city loses 1.24 lives per year to cars instead of the 1.39 before the change or something like that. This entire attitude is predicated on the idea that experts working at the statistical level know better than the people who have to live it. That's preposterous. Get bent.
Some people mistakenly call dynamic typing "weak typing" because they don't know what those words mean. PSA:
Static typing / dynamic typing refers to whether types are checked at compile time or runtime. "Static" = compile time (eg C, C++, Rust). "Dynamic" = runtime (eg Javascript, Ruby, Excel)
Strong / weak typing refers to how "wibbly wobbly" the type system is. x86 assembly language is "weakly typed" because registers don't have types. You can do (more or less) any operation with the value in any register. Like, you can treat a register value as a float in one instruction and then as a pointer during the next instruction.
Ruby is strongly typed because all values in the system have types. Types affects what you can do. If you treat a number like its an array in ruby, you get an error. (But the error happens at runtime because ruby is dynamically typed - thus typechecking only happens at runtime!).
It's strongly typed, but it's also duck typed. Also, in ruby everything is an object, even the class itself, so type checking there is weird.
Sure it stops you from running into "'1' + 2" issues, but won't stop you from yeeting VeryRawUnvalidatedResponseThatMightNotBeAuthorized to a function that takes TotalValidatedRequestCanUseDownstream. You won't even notice an issue until:
- you manually validate
- you call a method that is unavailable on the wrong object.
I recall a type theorist once defined the terms as follows (can't find the source): "A strongly typed language is one whose type system the speaker likes. A weakly typed language is one whose type system the speaker dislikes."
So yeah I think we should just give up these terms as a bad job. If people mean "static" or "dynamic" then they can say that, those terms have basically agreed-upon meanings, and if they mean things like "the type system prohibits [specific runtime behavior]" or "the type system allows [specific kind of coercion]" then it's best to say those things explicitly with the details filled in.
We could have all of our Martian colonists adhere to an Earth day of 24 hours, with sunrise and sunset drifting around the clock, or we could have them observe an extra 25th hour of the day that lasts 36 minutes.
Or, we could define the Martian day as 24 Martian hours of 60 Martian minutes of 61.5 seconds, with seconds the invariant interchange time between planets.
In turn, seconds stop being a unit of human timekeeping, and everyone just uses decimal minutes as the final subdivision.
On the northern edge of Jamaica Plain (east of Brookline in Boston proper), there's a pretty stark example of Brookline's accumulated advantages. On the Boston side of the pond that separates the two, there's Jamaica Way. It's a four lane road with few pedestrian crossings, and drivers regularly going way over the 25mph speed limit. The multi family housing on the Boston side is significantly cheaper and denser as well. It too has a trolley (the E branch of the Green Line), but unlike the Brookline side, the trolley on the Boston side isn't grade separated, so it's quite slow. It also typically runs older rolling stock.
I went to school at Northeastern and so spent plenty of time in that neighborhood. We actually looked at buying in Jamaica Plain because of the price difference. Ultimately we didn't because our kids had grown roots in Brookline and the Jamaica Way was too much of a barrier between the neighborhoods.
I think the biggest difference in the price between the two neighborhoods is the schools. Once you cross over the border (either into JP, or the less segmented allston) the prices drop. Brookline's got well-regarded schools (though they've been coasting), whereas Boston is a mixed bag with a lottery system.
