Comment by Scoundreller
5 years ago
I just wish the negative electricity prices reached the non-industrial consumer.
If it reached me, I'll have an Arduino controlled hot water heater, furnace and fridge/freezer dynamically turning on/off to take the most advantage of prices pronto.
In some areas you can buy electricity this way, but the other end of the deal bites you, so beware of that.
When it seems like you might die from the heat but the price charged is $8.50 per kWh how much longer do you want to wait before switching on the AC? (If you live somewhere it never gets hot, figure on the same but for a midwinter freeze and deciding when to pay for your resistive circuit heat pump boost)
I figure it all averages out. But when I pay an average price, I have no incentive to lower demand when prices are high or raise demand when prices are low, contributing to even higher average prices.
There’s an Australian startup that sells electricity at wholesale prices to consumers
https://www.amberelectric.com.au/
It's all up to the charging algorithm. If your grid access is priced according to energy transferred, you pay a positive retail price no matter how negative the wholesale price is. If your grid access is a fixed charge, you could directly take advantage of the negative wholesale price.
In some places, industrial users have the second algorithm.
Reality is that grid access (transport/distro) should be more variable too.
Line sag is worst when demand is highest or it’s hot outside. Same with running out of transformer capacity.
When an upgrade is triggered, it’s to build more peak capacity.