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Comment by sigio | Hacker News Reader

In the Netherlands (and the rest of western europe), we have hourly and quarterly energy pricing (opt-in), next to pricing plans that have one or two fixed tariffs during the day/year.

I quite like the quarterly pricing, for example today the home-battery charged for 3 hours during the cheapest time (13:00 - 16:00), and discharged again for the most expensive hours (19:00 to 21:00), and kept my house's grid-input at zero for the rest of the day.

Feeding back a few kwh's during the most expensive hours gives me a big kickback, making electricity use for the rest of the day mostly free. (Since there is usually a 150-250% price difference between cheap and expensive timeslots).

(For price-charts, see https://jeroen.nl/dynamische-energie/stroom/prijzen/vandaag or price-predictions upto a week ahead there's https://wattwanneer.nl )

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In Chicago, we have an API where we can get pricing updates every 5 minutes. I recently set up my AC (largest power draw) to cut off when the price goes above a certain threshold.

I don't have long-term data yet, as I just implemented this about 6 weeks ago, but last month's bill was 10% lower than the previous month and the same month the previous year. I'm looking forward to seeing the results over time.

I've been trying to think of what other automations I can try out when the price gets high. I thought maybe shorter light timers for automated lights, but all of our lights are LED, so the savings isn't really worth it.

Do you have a battery so you can time shift and charge it when it's cheap and use the battery when it's expensive?

Many times the battery costs more than the savings, even if you charged it up for free, say at a mall or mcdonalds or something. If there was a large savings the utilities provider would be doing it already. Well that's also why people are looking into cheaper energy storage solutions.

I'm going to disagree with you although I'm not an expert so you might be right.

My understanding is that there are large savings available theoretically at the grid level but the capital to build it is limited and the grid interconnects to make it work are limited.

So globally there are huge amounts of battery storage being added to the grid but this is bottlenecked by capital and grid connections. Oh and land/planning permissions.

Long story short, house level battery storage may be worth it for some people

I guess it depends on how cheaply you can get your batteries and how you charge yourself for the space they take up.

As electric cars become more popular, we should see a deep market for second-hand batteries?

Is this what we call "net metering" here in the US? Unfortunately this region only has "buy-all-sell-all", no intraday prices, and and still not enough storage to store solar from peak at noon until evening commute: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45630917

A market economist might remark that perhaps that shouldn't be surprising given the lack of intraday rates and the buy-all-sell-all policies.

> In the Netherlands (and the rest of western europe), we have hourly and quarterly energy pricing (opt-in), next to pricing plans that have one or two fixed tariffs during the day/year

So your policies create incentives for residential customers to become net producers of electricity (with resilient local storage)?

What battery did you install and how much did it cost?

We have quarter-hour pricing here in Vienna and during the sunnier half of the year electricity is cheaper during the day.

It would be interesting to calculate how long it would take to pay off.

I've bought 14kwh of anker solix max ac for €3900, and added 2 zendure 800 plus's for €320 each (1.9kwh + 2 solar mppt ports each). It's all connected and managed through homeassistant.

I guess if your electricity use is (almost) free, the utility needs to bill you for the use of the grid itself separately?

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