Seriously though, Daylight Savings introduces some interesting load shifting thoughts because people do what they do at certain times which can be divorced from the sun cycle, or the grid cycles for that matter.
Without going too deep, I assume there is clear evidence in Sense-wide data of Daylight Savings having kicked in when it does. e.g. Spacing between EV unplug/plug cycles and solar peak suddenly changes because EV use is governed more by time than the sun cycle.
I’m guessing the big boys managing The Grid deal with this in some fashion.
Based on my look at the mass of utility rates in the OpenEI database, it looks like most multi-period rates (different rates in different time/month periods) have breakpoints that are somewhat aligned with DST changes. About 6,700 out of the 26,000 current rates in the database are multi-period. When you push down into just those, and look at where the hourly and monthly changes in periods are, you get this 3D histogram.
X is months, from Jan to Dec.
Y is hours, from 0:00 to 23:00
One can see that the largest number of rate period transitions happen from May-June and Oct-Nov. And the largest number of daytime related rate transitions happens around 7AM and 8PM.
Let’s hope Sense doesn’t give you access to high-res historical data because I don’t think there’s a sufficient human-machine interface to comprehend the multi-dimensional time-space-continuum-splitting visualizations that would ensue.
The large-scale interplay between Water & Power (as in energy, but one can stretch that to power) is clearly visible there and in places like the Egyptian Nile Delta, Israel, Saudi Arabia and of course California. Everywhere. So I think as time goes by, DST will become more of a hot topic and data is going to be crucial to the inevitable debates.
