Smart thermostats activate grid demand spikes at bad times of day, according to a study by Cornell University researchers. “Many homes use smart thermostats to lower the room temperature during winter nights,” said Max Zhang, a professor in Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “Programming it to raise the room before you wake up — so you have A warm house. It’s smart. But if everyone keeps the default settings, say 6am, and the grid experiences synchronised demand spikes, it’s not smart for the system. It’s a challenge.” He “This load synchronization will be an issue in the not-too-distant future as we electrify the heating sector to decarbonize the network,” he said.
As utilities encourage adoption of smart thermostats, roughly 40 percent of U.S. households will have them installed in 2021, the paper says. The researchers studied winter data from more than 2,200 home smart thermostats in New York State, documenting climate conditions in cold winters, covering urban, suburban and rural communities. Homeowners who purchase smart thermostats can choose to share the data anonymously with the power company for research purposes. They investigated “set point behavior” and learned that most homeowners use the smart thermostat’s factory default settings. The authors say there is evidence that residents are still confused about how to operate their thermostats, often unable to program them. Their data shows that the owner saved only 5% to 8% of their energy consumption, well below the equipment’s 25% to 30% energy saving potential.
If hundreds of homes had their smart thermostats set to turn on at 6 a.m., the grid would see a power spike at 6:5 a.m., about an hour before dawn in New York state’s winter. While the set-point schedule was designed to achieve energy-saving benefits, demand peaks were concentrated during periods when renewable energy was unavailable — increasing peak demand by nearly 50 percent, the paper said. “Smart thermostat data shows an increase in both the frequency of daily peak heating demand and the magnitude of overall demand peaks.”
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