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Comment by semi-extrinsic | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious, do you typically pay actual "hourly rate x hourly consumption" in a regular US household? Where I live (Europe), even though we have new fancy "smart electricity meters" with resolution of a few seconds, all the deals available from power companies offering electricity are based on "monthly average rate x monthly consumption".

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Where I live (Poland) it's possible to opt for cheaper electricity at night (10PM - 6AM), and over the weekends (Friday 10PM - Monday 6AM), in exchange for premium pricing during peak hours.

Example prices (probably a bit outdated, but to illustrate the difference): Flat rate metering: 0.55PLN / kWh, split metering: 0.71PLN / kWh peak, 0.26PLN / kWh night & weekends.

In California, the three largest utilities do charge hourly rate * hourly consumption. There are "Peak" "Partial Peak" and "Off Peak" periods defined by summer/winter and weekday/weekend. Paper bills as well as utility websites will show how much electricity (kWh) are used during each period. Websites will also show hour by hour usage.

How widely implemented is it? I lived in Los Angeles for over a decade, lived in half a dozen places (moving between Glendale Water and Power and LADWP). A few years ago, when shopping for houses all over the LA area I would peek to see if they had smart meters, too. I've only seen a few and never lived anywhere that had them.

There may have been seasonal price changes with dumb meters, but they couldn't have done weekday/weekend without them.

Smart water meters seemed to have decent distribution. Perhaps because of the droughts?

I believe most of Edison moved over to smart meters, and they're the biggest provider in SoCal. LADWP is rolling it out at a snail's pace.

That's good to know. Edison always showed up when looking for programs like solar or a smart thermostat, LADWP never did. I just never lived anywhere serviced by Edison. Looking at their service map, it looks like Edison covers everywhere around LA/Glendale and covers a very large area all the way to the Nevada and Arizona border.

I wonder if there's a better cost/benefit for rolling it out to a sparsely populated (or dense pockets with large areas in between)? Where LADWP may favor new construction or something?

Edison pretty much charges 2-3x more for peak usage, 30% more for "off-peak", and 20% less for sleeping hours compared to LADWP depending on tier. So they made a bunch more money since people don't just suddenly shift all their electricity usage to after midnight. I remember there being a lot of outage when they rolled out smart metering since most people had pretty drastic increases to their electric bill.

I still have this page bookmarked from when we were shopping for a Tesla. It explains it pretty well:

https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-o...

No electric car here, but most of the places I've lived have had dumb meters that get checked manually each month. However, growing up in Florida, there was a rebate program where the power company could shut off one of our circuits whenever they wanted so they could manage load. I'm pretty sure it was wired to our pool pump and maybe a few other things (like our water heater?) So I imagine power management varies by each area's need. I've heard about day/night costs, and that seems like a smarter way to balance the grid, but I haven't seen that widely implemented in the US yet.

I've had "smart" water meters in a couple states. I doubt water has the same day/night load concerns electricity does, but they only varied price between summer and winter. I assume this was to discourage watering lawns.

Where I live (Europe) I can use Tibber which has an api that shows future hourly pricing. This way I can tell the car to charge the cheapest

I live in Japan with a smart meter and we have the option for a rate split by weekdays/holidays and day/night, with different rates for each of the 4 combinations. The rates don't change hourly, just these buckets. http://www.kyuden.co.jp/var/rev0/0156/8971/graph_denkadenigh...

I live in Sweden and hourly billing is available here for everybody with a smart meter afaik.

the European market is, at most, at the quarter hourly resolution, so having a finer resolution would be pointless for the pricing

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