Secondly, I think “essential” will depend on the duration of the blackout. For a blackout of a few hours, keeping WiFi running so that work from home can continue probably is more essential than heating a water boiler. If the blackout takes a few days, that may change.
We already have interconnect devices for A/C and water heating and car charging in some locations.
This makes ZERO sense..
I live in a cold climate.. Our furnace is "essential" to prevent my family and i from freezing to death. Under your plan we should pay more for this?
And those who cant afford it? Let me guess, government rebates, making a complex program even more complex?
Any time your solution requires "rebates".. it is flawed from the start.
If seen that way, you wouldn’t pay more; you would have to he choice to get cheaper electricity.
I foresee high demand for electronics that seamlessly switch from the lower quality of service feed to the ‘essential’ one when that cheaper feed stops working, though.
The alternative as presented was some sort of compliance program hoping people wouldn't just run everything off the 'essential' feed regardless of need, or rolling blackouts as currently practiced.
It seems you agree that 'essential' loads have much more value to you and others, but you're not willing to pay the value?
what does taking what i wrote, then reworking the sentence to suit your purpose serve?
I did not agree that essential loads have more "value"... you did.
If you think that heating your home is not essential, come by in the winter and i can put a tent in the back yard for you. It reaches as low as -24C, but i'm sure you will be fine.
If you think that people should be forced to pay more to heat their homes.. you are mistaken. No one should have to choose between food and heat and any program structured such that "essential costs more" will NEVER work.
I said that it is UNFAIR to charge more for essential loads, and that if a program depends on "rebates" it is flawed.
There are many other alternative solutions, such as what we have here via "time of use" billing that is also seasonally adjusted.
this "pay more for essential services" logic is severely flawed, much as you twisting my words to suit your purpose was.
the persons below really made the point when they wrote "It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand "
what you are proposing is unethical...
In a similar sense that I'm not willing to pay more for "essential" food than for luxury food; or in the same sense that it seems unfair to have to pay for life-saving medical treatments.
It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand — the whole meaning of the word "inelastic" being that changing the price of it won't incentivize people to use any more/less of it.
Inelastic demand should, at the very least, be subsidized. This is why public healthcare exists; why food stamps exist; etc. But better yet, inelastic demand — because it is so predictable — should be optimized heavily for by suppliers (for power plants, this is "building out base-load capacity") such that economies of scale enable the supply for inelastic demand to be satisfied with lower cost than the supply for elastic demand.
With food, it's possible to manage supply through stockpiling. With electricity, storage is tricky, so when there's a change to supply, demand has to be changed to match. You can do that with blackouts or economics. Many large customers have contracts where they pay a lower rate in exchange for disconnecting their load when needed to reduce demand. Anything essential would be on another meter that has a higher rate.
Why is it a problem to apply the same principle to residential connections?
Of course, in my area, most of my utility outages are a result of interrupted lines and not supply issues, both essential and non-essential would be equally disrupted. And, it's not feasible to switch a significant number of residences to a two-meter system in any reasonable amount of time, so this is firmly in the thought expirement category.
WELL PUT.. the logic on this debate is astonishly bad..
"Charge more for essential services" just sounds terrible and you are correct, inelastic demand needs to be affordable, and subsidized if it is NOT affordable.
i dont understand how someone would advocate that "essential services has higher value to me and should cost more".
Essential services like heating my home does not have a higher value, it is an absolutely essential service to prevent death from cold temperatures..
This person should try living in -24C without heat and see if it changes their views.
As it is, I live in a climate that does dip below 0C from time to time, and having access to heat is important, so I have a backup generator for the house, and another for the well, because water is important too. When I use them, just the energy cost is much higher than utility power, so I don't use them when utility power is available. There's capital cost and operational costs to pay too. Many people who live around me don't have generators, so they have to hope outages won't be too long, or that they can make it to a warming center --- but outages are often coincident with locally heavy snowfall and our roads are always steep, so that makes it difficult to travel even short distances to get to warmth.
In my area, the issue isn't rolling blackouts, it's usually lines broken due to falling trees. Paying more for uninterupted utilities wouldn't fix that, but if it were rolling blackouts, I would certainly prefer to pay more for utility power for essential loads rather than paying more for local generation for essential loads.
Richer people likely also would counter this with battery or diesel powered backup power (already happens a lot in countries that have irregular blackouts). If they use batteries, their power usage would even go up dues to losses in the charge/discharge cycle.
If the light was on, people paid significantly more. It was very very effective at reducing peak consumption.
Consumer awareness of what appliances use the most power should really be a lot higher. It's actually pretty simple too - devices that generate a lot of heat are the ones consuming a lot of energy. That includes devices whose purpose may be to keep things cool - your fridge and A/C still generate significant waste heat even in the latter case it's vented externally. A rare exception would be a car-battery charger, which can obviously draw significant power but the heat is generated later when the power is drawn from the battery and in a dissipated fashion that's hard to detect directly but is still significant.
Have houses automatically heat up earlier in the morning before people start waking up and consuming more power
Prior to "Time of use" billing (and having to upgrade all our meters in like 2016) i dont see how this was possible.
The old meters simply measured how much power was used, they had no idea of WHEN it was used.
The electric company would go house to house and "read the meter" once a month and report this back to billing. Based on your usage a bill would be produced and sent to you.
How/when would a "high usage light" come into play?
I grew up in a house which was over 40 years old, there was no "high-usage" lights near the waster/dryer. Mostly because homes built back then had the waster/dryer in the basement and any "usage lights" would be ineffective.
But since it's been around since the late 70s, clearly you can do this without needing too much advanced tech - which is what I interpreted as being the perceived problem. (Perhaps incorrectly, but it looks like I wasn't the only one...)
I wasn't debating if these meters exist or not, it was that they were never used in Ontario.
Continuing your logic, did Canada ever use these "multiple-tariff" meters? If they did, what was the point of the light the OP mentioned?
Great for reducing electricity consumption; not great for reducing total energy usage.
- Make it for all energy use, not just electricity
- Give an extra allowance for electric car owners
During the Texas winter crisis, virtually no residential customers saw a financial incentive to wind down power usage. Only those crazies on Griddy, et. al. were impacted.
But most Texas utility customers now pay a surcharge every month to pay off the accumulated debt of that crisis.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2022/02/11/how-much...
https://www.yahoo.com/video/senior-asian-couple-california-g....
That's only a valid strategy if your customers can be more responsive, but in a freak cold snap where most customers are running heaters at 100% to keep their homes habitable, there's little they can go to reduce demand.
Many people have purchased generators after that crisis, but telling (and maybe subsidizing) millions of people to buy a generator and stockpile fuel because the grid can't handle cold weather is not good energy policy.
It'd be better if regulators required demand-response automation that would let them intelligently scale back demand of high-energy appliances before the grid reaches critical levels without heavy-handed rolling blackouts.
The complicated one is daily tiers - when power is more or less expensive at different times.
The solution is power storage either at a grid level or at a home level where the information is available to the smart batteries. And/or so much excess solar and wind that we just don’t care.
I'm also planning to add one or two small 800Wp PV systems "Balkonsolar" to our flat (we have plenty of space on the south facing side) this will also involves pre planning for energy intensive stuff including a planned AC in the summer... let's see how this works out :)
You’d have to do it on a day to day basis or hourly. That could actually work - use too much power in an hour or day and it shuts off for awhile.
This would require some additional infrastructure, but might be worth it if the blackouts are going to be too frequent.
Of course there's already a hard cap (usually ~9kW over here), but I suspect most people never reach it.
There are plans in Belgium to charged based on peak power (something silly like "max power used in any 15 minute period"), which would drive up the cost for the average consumer without reducing demand (as people tend not to have much choice in when they use their most power hungry appliances).
That is actually not a bad idea. Would only decrease power though, not energy consumption.
(Assuming the freezer is built to read the power meter and decide when to not run the compressor).
High power US home is 200 amp times 240 volts. More typical homes are 100 amp or 150 amp.
Houses in north America are fed with two 120V "legs" and so the 100A is actually at 240V.
200*220*sqrt(3)=76210 watts
The idea is to move "load" from peaks to avoid shortages by charging more to use power during peaks.
The idea of "priority customers" has a long standing principle. "High usage" customers often agree to be the first to be cut in return for discounts.
Targeting "residential customers" in this way is NOT effective as it takes a LOT of houses to equal the amount of power "commercial/industrial" users consume.
Time of use billing is probably the better option.