From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most.
They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.
Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.
But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...
> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.
I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.
It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.
But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)
the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.
but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.
in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)
and it varies regionally too
What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.
The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.
This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".
Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.
If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).
I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.
People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
...Mission accomplished?
Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.
I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.
Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.
For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.
Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.
I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.
Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.
Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.
This sounds.. astonishing. How can one consume so much in a house?
My average is around 500 kWh which results in a $200+ bill.
But it's also probably best for poor people, that will optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.
Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.
Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in absolute values, but they have more relatively to their income.
an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.
In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.
Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
teachable moment, all along you should have been using price