According to BBC R4's Today programme this morning, Octopus energy and two other suppliers are proposing 'surge pricing' for consumers, to be actioned via smart meters, by 2025, They say you won't be forced to have such a meter.
Well, we all knew that smart meters weren't about having bills that weren't estimated, didn't we?
I always thought they were to enable more flexible pricing systems and ultimately to encourage folk to time-shift power consumption when possible.
With an increasing demand for electricity anything that improves grid resilience sounds like a good idea to me.
Tim
Indeed, so why haven't they simply decommissioned all windmills and stopped paying subsidies on solar panels?
But the time shifting they are considering isn't necessarily over a 24 hour period. It's lower pricing when the wind blows and the sun shines and they don't have to buy in from other sources.
Could you then programme the EV charger to monitor the dynamic price and choose the best time to charge?
Er no, it will be higher pricing when they are forced to buy from
*those* sources.
Thank goodness the electric toothbrush operates off a battery then!
Unless Octopus have two trials running, the one I heard mentioned would give you free electricity during a 2 hour period, if you managed to cut your usage by
40-60% during that period.
The radio reporting was talking of pricing in half-hour segments.
Even during the sixties my mum would cook the evening meal at mid-day in case the electricity went off - a hangover from her experiences as a wartime mum with a young family - and to judge from the 1939 register, at least one of her younger sisters as well. Perhaps we're headed back to the good old days...
Assuming that you don't have to wait a week for the wind to blow :)
When everyone is charging an EV and we all have electric ASHP there will not necessarily be any off peak pricing. Peak demand may actually move to be during the night.
Forward to the past! This image is from a local UK newspaper in 1944.
It would need an algorithm that if the charge could not commence within a specified period, it should go ahead anyway at the higher cost (maybe only as a 50% charge)..
How will this work? Lower prices are only likely when there is a period when generation (by wind or solar) exceeds demand but then everyone who has configured their equipment to monitor for this cheap period immediately starts using electricity. Instantly demand exceeds supply.
Don't these types of tariffs only work when a few people take advantage of them but not when the majority of the population is doing the same?
I wasn't suggesting that lower price would be any cheaper than that charged by other suppliers. :)
Accord "Consumers can opt for electric vehicles, heating systems and smart appliances, such as washing machines and dishwashers, that can connect to the smart metering system to access pricing data. Activity can be programmed to automatically take advantage of cheaper rates, reduce the impact on our energy grid and save consumers money."
Buying such products is a challenge!
This was what I wondered about, but Alan makes a good point. What if everyone uses the same software? Could it be like the train tickets? x number of customers allowed to connect at one price, then the price goes up.
I do remember the power cuts which continued into the early fifties. Possibly because we had gas which is difficult to cut off, we did not suffer in the same way.
Octopus Agile already does this. They have a model that predicts prices for the day ahead (at 4pm the previous day I think). That's effectively the price you are contracted for each half hour period. You (or your devices) can then plan energy use.
The models already take account of supply and demand variations: the weather, the behaviour of consumers (industrial demand, people cooking their tea, etc), events which might influence demand (half time in the cup final).
Presumably, if everyone was on Agile, this would be broadly the same. Averaging over millions of consumers will smooth out the bumps: they know a million people plug in their cars to charge, it doesn't matter when a specific user plugs in. The model will take into account that user behaviour on the macro scale: it doesn't need minute-by-minute feedback.
Some of these big loads will also be adaptive. They tell the car not to start charging at 5.48 but to wait until later. They already have a tariff for that - you just say when you want it full by: https://octopus.energy/intelligent-octopus/ This thread is about 'surge pricing', but people don't realise that's exactly what we're on right now. Gas generation is a lot more expensive than renewables, but we're pricing every unit at the price of gas - which is why prices have rocketed. When there are cheaper renewables available, why shouldn't units be cheaper?
Theo
Not usually, one third the price or less
For the internal energy market (generators/retailers/industrial customers) but not for [m]any domestic customers ...
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