* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/
As if we aren't busy enough. I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them.
Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?
IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal
> IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal
It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.
This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.
> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them
In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.
> Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?
The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market
When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)
Because governments have let energy companies fail to invest in necessary infrastructure for decades.
And who is the "we"? Definitely not me
I think a much larger conversation needs to happen about people's schedules, commitments and whether it's fair to say those who have less time and less flexibility due to work, children etc are somehow actively choosing to not be a good eco citizen. It's incredibly unfair.
I'd rather go back to root causes and re-evaluate private companies failing to provide the necessary infrastructure
Well, regulating oligopolies isn't fun and it isn't popular with voters.
That's pretty rough. That should be about 14¢ per kWh which only a hair less than the median price per kWh in the US (~17¢).
Almost all households are on fixed tariffs, typically about 26p/kwh at the moment.
Don't forget it's also a tax for bailing out the failed energy companies
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
There is not “person” turning things on and off.
By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.
You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
It rolled this out in 1953:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak
It let coal plants run more efficiently and people could heat their water overnight.
Somewhat bafflingly they seem to have somewhat failed this same task with the solar rollout.
Presumably 21st century capitalism got in the way of the mid 20th century engineering.
The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.
This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)
I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.
I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.
At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.
My home state of WA is not a part of the same power netwrok.