Octopus and out-of-date meter

So you agree that it is a game? :-)

When is it cheap to produce?

Actually, yes I agree a bit, reducing peaks due to everyone cooking at the same time will reduce costs.

Or vice versa of course!?

When the wind is blowing or the sun is shining and not everyone is consuming. This morning at 5am it was £22.41 per MWh or 2.24p/kWh wholesale:

Today's peak was £120/MWh (12p/kWh) at 5.30pm, ie teatime.

Theo

The game now with intermittent renewables, and more to be installed, at times there will be a massive surplus of electricity being generated that cannot be stored. In times of (winter) shortage and in the past couple of years customers are being paid not to use electricity at peak times.

My guess is that in the near future those without a smart meter will have little choice on tariffs and will pay more.

The reluctance by some in this group with respect to having a smart meter fitted does appear to be that logical. Yes, your gas and electricity could be cut of remotely but if this situation is required for a whole area what is going to happen to those with a conventional meter? Yes, you smart meter may not work in the smart mode but then you are no worse off. Irrespective of a few individuals refusing a smart meter the saving of cost to the industry is zero, there is a cost to change the meter and a fine if they miss the target figures.

Shopping around for the cheapest energy deal is no different from shopping around for any other commodity.

Reducing costs equates to increasing profits. A better founded and regulated system simply wouldn’t have these wild swings in prices. After all, what is to stop contracts being let for a year’s supply of electricity, thus giving stability rather than this ‘chase the variables’

Of course, if those homes with battery storage could use it, when electricity prices rise above a predetermined level an inverter automatically kicks in and supplies the house that way. A 100kWh battery would power my household for about 12 days, almost enough to cope with a typical winter Europe-wide blocking high-pressure area.

That would make more sense than heat pumps or EVs, or eating dinner at

Perhaps all new houses will have to come with a Powerwall battery. The added cost will probably only amount to a couple of percent of the cost of a new house, so may be seen as acceptable.

I thought that we already did that!

I assume that your first sentence was intended to read "Does *not* appear to be that logical". Perhaps, but the problem was that we were all lied to from the start with the "Cheaper electricity" being pushed, and that we wouldn't have to pay for installation (at the time I wondered where all the "Smart meter trees" were growing!). Well, the "Cheaper electricity" eventually turned out to be all of £11 a year, so you could say that we were being told the truth, but only £11's worth!) And there was nothing mentioned about being able to switch the supply off, or even change the tariff, remotely. Once lied to on such a grand scale I just don't believe /anything/ I'm being told about smart meters by the government, utility suppliers, or the meter manufacturers (see

But the problem is that no matter what you do, the utility companies will screw you if they can. I choose to not have a smart meter or pay by DD, so I pay well over the odds. Yet I probably know what its costing me far more than those who pay by DD by fixed amounts monthly/quarterly. I think that we all accept the companies are overcharging and far more consumers are in credit than deficit. The of-quoted excuse is it allows them to keep some credit for when the bills cost more in winter, so they won't feel the extra charge so much. Well, to me it's just a way of letting someone else manage your finances because you don't seem to be able to do it yourself. Why pay the companies an extra £100 (or more) a month? Why not open a savings account and pay that £100 into it yourself, and get some interest on it? That's what the companies are doing with your £100 anyway!

What I can't understand is why it's taken so long for the utility companies to accurately measure monthly consumption using smart meters and bill you exactly that amount by DD every month. Yes, I know there are now more tariffs that do that, but companies seem to have been reluctant to introduce them. Perhaps it's because they won't then have your money to invest with the monthly fixed DD overpayment, but I could be being too cynical.

You'd be looking at £50k - 100k for a 100kWh battery. Even at £50k, for let's say 10 million homes in the UK (about 40% of the total number; flats could share batteries as they'd require less power), you'd be looking at £500B. You could build rather a lot of nuclear-powered stations for that.

The only sensible solution is nuclear power generation to cover those periods where wind and solar won't do it. Or you keep some gas-fired power stations available for those periods only, but how cost-effective they'd be I do wonder.

But people all cook and wash clothes at the same time because that it when they get home, do domestic chores and eat, before getting the kids to bed and having a couple of hours free to relax or do something before going to bed. Pricing people into eating at times that do not suit them is likely to mainly hit those with young children or the elderly (many of whom tend to go to bed early) - both the least likely to be able to afford high prices.

Of course, when they push us all onto electric heating, EVERYONE will want heating shortly before they get home, so as to arrive at a warm house. People are not going to sit shivering, waiting for cheaper electricity.

If you were to have enough nukes to provide all the power during those periods, then you may as well just run them 365 days a year.

There is no point once you install nukes *at all* to having any wind or solar power *whatsoever*.

This is why the advocates of 'renewable energy' are completely panic stricken about nuclear power.

If you have nuclear power sufficient with a bit of hydro to cover all needs when its a cold still winters evening then you have nuclear power sufficient at all other times, and the added cost of windmills and solar panels to generate ocasional electricity that isn't actually needed is lost money full stop.

An there is no point in smart meters, since electricity will not vary in cost markedly.

All this bollocks - smart meters, renewable energy, battery frequency maintenance, massive grid extensions - none of it is needed in a nuclear/hydro only grid. All that might be needed is a grid upgrade to allow electricity to replace gas wherever possible, and a light day/night electricity rate to enable and encourage the very few BEVs to recharge at night.

And since the cost of nuclear power is in the building, once built there is little point in trying to save electricity off peak anyway.

In Scandinavia, they run heating 24x7.

If you have any thermal mass inside the mega insulation, its the only way to have a warm house when you get home

Heat input rises as the sun sets and the solar gain falls away.

Yes, it's more efficient to heat little and often than to take a freezing house and put a big slug of energy into it to heat it up. That overrides the losses over the daytime when you might be out.

If you go on holiday for a fortnight you could consider turning the heating down (but not off, still want frost protection) and then it'll take some hours to come back to normal temperature when you get back.

With weather compensation, the heating knows that the outdoor temperature is falling and it needs to boost heat input. That means it does so in advance of the inside getting cold - means you get a constant indoor temperature rather than big swings when a traditional thermostat has finally noticed it's cold inside.

If you're on a time-of-use tariff, it's no problems to shift the heating to slightly earlier to avoid the expensive periods: with the 'saving sessions' I bump up the target temperature by 1 degree an hour before the session, then at the start of the session I drop it by 2 degrees (prevents the heat pump running during the session) and then at the end bump it by 1 degree to get back to normal. The difference is not noticeable because thermal mass smoothes it out.

I should program this so it does it automatically, but there weren't many saving sessions last winter so I didn't get around to it.

Theo

In message snipped-for-privacy@esprimo.zbmc.eu>, at 22:36:46 on Fri, 3 May

I doubt many consumers would contact their supplier to let them know that if they adjusted to estimates in such a situation, the consumer would be getting a higher bill.

If/when we have a significant use for spare, intermittent electricity (e.g. hydrogen electrolysis, desalination) they *may* be cost-effective.

Not when the cost of it exceeds nuclear power anyway.

Flip your thinking and see it from the grids point of view.

You have generators and you have fluctuating demand.

You *already* have times (cheap rate) when you have over capacity.

Adding intermittent renewables merely *adds* to the problems. To conventional generators you have simply made the demand /they/ see fluctuate *even more*.

Meaning their prices have to rise to accommodate the fact that they are now running their plant at a lower capacity factor, and yet their overheads are the same. As is the required total capacity.

Since you cannot rely on wind and solar to be there AT ALL at some point in time.

Add in the cost of transporting all that wind energy from Scotland to London, when the wind IS blowing, that is wasted money when it isn't, and you have a recipe for spiralling energy prices and economic collapse.

Such as we are heading into now...

Like, for up to five days at a time, roughly twice per winter.

Surely, as heat loss is proportional to temperature difference, keeping the house warm all day uses more energy than allowing it to cool for some hours and then heating it back up?