cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/127188
Have you ever heard of “net metering”?
It means that if your electric company gives you net metering, you can connect a generator or solar panels to your house and sell excess electricity back to the utility at the same price that they bill you for.
Sounds great right?
No, actually its a major problem for the utility.
The reason is that power plants take a significant amount of time to throttle up or down. If everyone in the area has solar power feeding back into the power grid, sudden changes in sunlight can cause major fluctuations and destabilize the power grid.
So what is the solution?
Dynamic pricing. Some areas already do this. How it works is that the price you pay (or receive) for electricity depends on the conditions on the power grid at the moment, updating as fast as possible.
When the grid has a deficit of power at the moment (maybe a power plant is struggling to throttle up to meet demand) the price goes way up.
If the grid has a surplus power at the moment, the price goes down, even going negative.(meaning you must pay to dump your power into the grid, or be paid for consuming excess power)
What this does is create an economic incentive for people to invest in equipment that actually stabilizes and supports the power grid.
For example if you have an electric car charging in your garage, it knows the price of power, and it can start charging faster when the price drops, or it can dump its battery power back into the grid when the price is high. The battery in your car is actually earning money as it sits idle!
Same with solar panels. Even if the installation doesn’t have batteries, the system can choose to stop selling power to the grid when it isn’t wanted.
Likewise, your heated pool can choose to absorb electricity when the price is low.
This is the future of the renewable energy economy in my opinion.
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Octopus energy in the UK https://octopus.energy/octopus-smart-tariffs/ has a variety of different “smart” tariffs on offer from raw market price (Agile) to EV specific tariffs. I’ve been with them for years as they’re one of the few energy companies here that seem to have a clue and have been consistently cheaper than most of the competition. We do seem to have a much better energy market in the UK compared to the US, but the system is still pretty bad. (see the whole debacle about energy prices during the winter)
I was in an odd situation last year of being on a cheap fixed import rate, but a market rate for export, and I was at one point being paid £1/kwh to export our solar and paying 26p for import. You can even be paid to use energy occasionally with the market rate tariff when the cost of energy flips negative.
We’ve got a Powerwall too and can charge the battery at night and return it to the grid during peak hours. I don’t do that at the moment as the rates aren’t worth it for the tariff we’re on (Flux). Instead while it’s sunny we can just remain off grid and export our excess using the battery to cover the evening.
I’d love for a way to drive the powerwall charge/discharge behaviour with an API, it would let me make the powerwall charge up when energy prices were lowest in any given 24h window and discharge our surplus when grid prices were at their highest. Tesla had a plan to do this (managed by octopus) but they shut it down earlier in the year, probably due to crazy winter we just had… I’d still prefer some control over it though as I have a better idea of what our usage could be if I want to intervene.
Its cool that you have those options
I like the idea until you start talking about paying to dump power back onto the network in times of low demand.
Why do you say that? It’s proven in areas with dynamic pricing, at least at large scale.
Tesla isn’t the only one doing this.
I worry about the potential costs as home based renewable energy becomes more popular that any savings could be wiped away for adding energy to the network, but I guess it all depends how much much the fee would be. I’d be okay with it if the power company invested in something g like this to try and minimize the time where consumers would be paying to produce electricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery .
Your home equipment will be aware of the current price and automatically adjust its behavior for maximum profit, which also happens to be maximum grid stability.
If that forces all my appliances to be ‘smart’ then that’s a no for me.
You can choose not to participate. If a fixed price contract is available then great, you can go on business as usual. If not, you’ll probably change your mind the first time it costs $50 to dry 1 load of laundry during a heat wave…
“When the grid has a deficit of power at the moment (maybe a power plant is struggling to throttle up to meet demand) the price goes way up.”
The whole concept is definitely intriguing, but I worry that this would disproportionately create negative conditions for the poor. Rich people would hardly notice… I’m talking about people who have money falling out their pockets and suck up electricity all day and all night powering their high-end lifestyles versus people who live paycheck to paycheck. I hate to think of even MORE people having to decide between buying groceries and gas versus paying the electric bill. It could conceivably damage entire communities, unless I’m missing something (which is entirely possible, lol, I’m not very smart).
The energy company I’m with in the UK offers this type of dynamic pricing. I’m not on that tariff, but the setup is a great idea.
The pitch is that they give you notice , sometimes half hour sometimes more, of price shifts. Then you can chose to maybe do you laundry later or sooner depending what’s going to be better. One of their use cases is even to have a rig where an electric car battery can supply energy to the house. You charge your car when power is cheap / free, run your home from the car’s battery when it gets high.
They even have an API that some people use to automate tasks to take advantage of the price shifts.
Done well it’s excellent, but definitely needs an ethical mindset behind it. Fortunately in the UK, Octopus Energy is nothing if not ethical, but they are very much notable by this difference!
Growing pains. The more efficient the power grid becomes, the less energy will cost for everyone. For now lets say that customers who want to install equipment that earns profit must agree to subsidize low income customers. As time goes on and the distributed systems mature, the price of bulk energy becomes so low that it doesn’t matter anymore.
Better pricing will make electricity cheaper for everyone.
It should be on the utility to handle the swings in load and generation. If it takes some time for your plant to start up, why isn’t there some sort of short term storage? Dynamic pricing causes solar to have a very low return and will cause us to continue to rely on fossil fuels longer. Utilities handle swings in load normally. A great example is there’s a massive peak of electric use in England during commerical breaks on the BBC. Everyone has gotten up to put the kettle on…
I believe the short term storage should be distributed. For one thing, moving electricity long distances over power lines is wasteful. If much of the energy is being generated, stored, and consumed locally, the power lines are carrying (and wasting) less energy.
And responding to those swings is a major challenge and expense for the utility
