And then a storm hits texas and without realizing it you run up a $30,000 electricity bill in a single night of not freezing.
In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.
Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.
It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen? And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.
Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.
Now every device in your home knows the price. For this to work, everyone must get the same price across the whole grid, and there must be sufficient grid capacity for energy to flow freely which isn't always the case. It will also cause issues with some very old (ie. 60+ year old) clocks with mechanical timers.
All of these issues can be fixed by updating the formula:
price_per_kwh = tan(min(max((-60 + system_frequency + published_offset) * 1000, -pi/2), pi/2))
The published_offset would be unique to each district and adjusted from time to time to keep old clocks working properly, and sometimes to deal with limited transfer properties of the grid...
But the neat thing is that even if you don't take into account the published_offset, you still make nearly optimal economic decisions.
People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".
It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.
Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
> I forsee the future lies in 'smart' electricity meters which can charge different rates at different times of day - perhaps with minute by minute live pricing.
That's what I was responding to, not the day/night predetermined pricing.
A max price guarantee would also give the supplier an incentive to have their planning in order.
Seriously though this was a huge issue a couple years ago with the freezing and blizzards that hit Texas.