OhmHour Notifications: How far in advance is best?
MaxDunn
Administrator Posts: 6
Sometimes we have OhmHours that are more important than usual for everyone to reduce as much as they can. Would it help for you to plan ahead for bigger reductions if you received notification of the OhmHour farther in advance?
0
Comments
Yes! The more lead time given the easier it is to plan for and shift energy usage to improve event success.
What if the first notification was sent out as the OH is planned or learned about? Why not have a schedule posted (for each resource group)? Then follow up with the usual messages 25 hours and 15 minutes ahead. This would be great!
For normal OhmHours, OhmConnect is notified by the CAISO at 3pm the previous day that we need to call an OhmHour. Planning takes about an hour, and then we start sending messages at 5pm. So the announcements are sent pretty close to when we first learn about them. However, for special ones we may have an advance indication, sometimes up to 2 weeks in advance. Would it be helpful to get notifications that far in advance, or is that too much?
Yes, that would be awesome for those of us who do not have automated power shut downs.
Yes, more advance notice is great. 2 weeks, not a problem at all.
I only got 5 minutes notice of today's OhmHour (Mar 31 7PM). Was napping and didn't see the email until 40 minutes in. Sure hope they will invalidate it and not affect my streak of 28.
I also only got 5 minutes notice of today's OhmHour (Mar 31 7PM). Was eating dinner and didn't see the email until 30 minutes in, so was not able to turn off appliances in time. I will ask them to please N/A my opt in so this does not affect my streak of 2?
I'll second this
Yes. I've repeatedly requested this.
The same thing happened to me, with a Mar 31 2018 4 P.M. ohmhour and I found out about the ohmhour about 20 minutes in using my computer that I would have had off during that ohmhour had I been given any kind of advance notice. Fortunately, my water heater didn't kick in during any part of that ohmhour or I would have busted my streak of 17 also. As it is, a little more than half of the savings got eaten away because of the lack of advance notice. I don't understand why Ohmconnect isn't more flexible in getting the word out. Surely, it's to their benefit to have as many people as possible cut their usage as much as possible.
No amount of advance notice is too much. The ohmhour on 31 March 2018 was the first one for which I received no advance notice. All others have given me day ahead notice. I need that advance notice as I live in a rural area with very spotty cell service and ohmconnect won't send notices to a landline. The cost of the electricity required to keep the internet routers up for the amount of time needed in order to make smart plugs work with ohmconnect would cancel the savings I receive from ohmhours, since I normally use very little electricity and that means I consistently have low forecasts. I need to turn everything in my house off during the ohmhour in order to get any meaningful reduction, again because I normally use very little electricity.
Even with little advance notice, if that notice can be made reliable, then I'm happy to participate in those as well. But, for the above reasons, I need to know about those ohmhours in order to be able to save electricity during those ohmhours. Until this point, I had a 97% average reduction during ohmhours but this latest one is only going to be a 48% reduction and that's only because I was fortunate that my water heater didn't kick in during any part of that ohmhour. I tried to get this problem fixed with Scott at Ohmconnect, tried to make a workable solution by being on a team and also by being in the buddy program, but, so far, have gotten no results. I'm really looking forward to seeing this problem fixed.
Then I got a notification that my smart plugs weren't turned off... but instead a 100 points to compensate. Definitely a nice gesture, but maybe this should be a 10% bonus or 100, whichever is greater.
@dwoochild415 we do send notifications a day in advance and then again 10-15min before the event. We are working on it to change that. I am going to send you a private message to show you your records.
@anguye42 What are you working on to change? Will there be a different notification system coming out?
@No Pain No Gain no, it won't be a new system. we are fixing it to make it work as we intended it to which is to send notifications a day in advance and again 10-15 minutes prior to the event.
If @Max Dunn 2 doesn't log in as often to see this post, maybe @Anh, OhmConnect can help provide an answer?
In the absence of an official answer, here is the page from CAISO on demand reduction: http://www.caiso.com/participate/Pages/Load/Default.aspx
In particular, they say that demand reduction aggregators may "participate in the ISO day-ahead, real-time and ancillary services markets." Day-ahead is the typical OhmHour. Real-time presumably is the one that gets only 10 minutes notice. i'm guessing that ancillary services can be bid further in advance than day-ahead, thus theoretically if they bid in this market, they could (and would) give more advance notice. I haven't been able to find a clear definition of if this is the case or not, though.
I'm guessing they're using questions like this to determine in which markets to bid. It may be that the real question is whether bidding in the real-time market is feasible.
Interesting research from @cwohmcon, can @Anh, OhmConnect or @Claudia or @Max Dunn 2 post on this thread to give us more information about what's been done with the feedback from this administrator-started thread? What are thoughts about future notifications? Or anything else regarding notification?
If real time bidding with <15 minutes notice were an option, I think that would be a real thriller. It would have to be an opt-in program. If OC could make the payout worth it, I'd be willing to commit to a real-time OhmHour program. @Matt D @Claudia @Anh, OhmConnect
I haven't received any #ohmhour notifications since Friday august 3rd so I am not getting to participate
@adelarosa8907 please contact support so we can look into that for you.
We literally had 3 minutes of advance notice yesterday. (August 17.) There was no email notification, nothing came via text. 3 minutes before the Ohm hour, I got a text. We'd had an Ohm hour the day before too, so hopefully I didn't break our streak.
And we didn't get a Mega Ohm Hour this week.
I got no notification about tomorrow's Double Mega starting at 7pm. So glad I checked the website. If I could send everyone a text to remind them to check their dashboard, I would.
I think adding some sort of preference setting for last minute availability for some of us who are happy with our automation and family situations might be a good way to for those comfortable to participate with no notice would be a good idea.
Another 3 minute alert. We missed it totally as we were offline, so our streak is broken. I think my family is fed up with this and it takes everyone's help to participate. We had an Ohm hour yesterday as well. My assumption is this is happening to knock people off their longer streaks.
"My assumption is this is happening to knock people off their longer streaks."
I don't think this would make sense, since as far as I know streaks don't affect what OhmConnect collects. They get 20% of the revenues for a given OhmHour before any individual's share is calculated. The streaks only affect what other people who participated get.
I think the real reason this happens is because notifications are getting lost somewhere, or that OhmConnect is bidding in the real-time market (although that should have a 15 minute lead time).
@logansama1 Contact Support [email protected] and tell them what happened. If a large group of users aren't notified until the last minute, or even after the OhmHour starts, OC usually will put their Streak Shield icon on your OhmHour and you keep your streak. If you earned points, they are awarded. If you lost points, I believe they are set to zero so you don't lose points. If this is not what happened for you, contact Support.
@No Pain No Gain great advice as always! please contact us on the help channel or email address. we know we can be a bit slow but we literally only have 2 support staff members right now (we are a small team!) and we get hundreds are inquiries everyday. we apologize it will take some time for us to get to you but that is the best way for us to track your account information and organize our data. the forum isn't really the best spot for helping out individuals. hope to see everyone there!