Comment by cowboy_henk
2 days ago
* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit
2 days ago
* only in the middle of the day, when the real price of that electricity may be negative, so it's still sold at a profit
This seems like a great way to encourage the behavior you want, which is conserving when energy is emitting more carbon by shifting consumption. Do your laundry, charge a car, charge a whole house batter, run laundry, crank the AC, run your own aluminum smelter, whatever.
In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.
It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.
Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile
Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/
> Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff
That's pretty rough. That should be about 14¢ per kWh which only a hair less than the median price per kWh in the US (~17¢).
3 replies →
> It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.
As if we aren't busy enough. I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them.
Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?
IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal
3 replies →
In Australia, residential premises are prohibited from running aluminium smelters.
Dunno about where you live.
If you’re going to throw capital at large metal refinery infrastructure, you want it running 24/7, or have guaranteed subsidies from local, state, and federal governments.
And remember that subsidies are paid from the public purse.
still sounds like an incredible way to incentivize consumers to buy small-scale storage. if i knew i could get free electricity for an hour or two each day (or even each week) it'd be a very easy choice to drop ~$1000 on a home battery.
You'd spend $1000 to save $0.20 on electricity every day?
The average price of power in Australia is 34 cents per kWh. The average Aussie spends A LOT more than $0.20 per day.
3 replies →
7.3% return, not bad. As battery prices drop it will get even better.
2 replies →
Where I live, $1000 would get you about 3kWh of battery power, which would pay for itself in a couple years
The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off.
Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
> you can just turn solar off
Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs.
Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.)
If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
Basically every home in Australia, and certainly every home and business solar setup, has a smart meter that is grid connected and can be remotely shut down when needed. Or they even just limit the amount that can feedback to the grid if required I.e you’re making 8kw of solar, but it will only let you feed in 2 if the system determines that.
There is not “person” turning things on and off.
1 reply →
Also, turning off solar (known as curtailing) is just dumb. It's throwing away "free" electricity. The UK and Ireland is doing the same by turning off their wind turbines every now and then, and it's frustrating.
By making the price go negative, you are creating the market incentives for someone to do something about it: households will invest in BES systems to suck up all that free electricity to use during peak times, and some industrious entrepreneurs might even be convinced to do it on a very large scale to start arbitraging on the price fluctuations.
You don't even need the price to go negative to have a BESS buffer make financial sense.
Commercial solar fields are entirely automated, nobody is going to the site to throw a disconnect switch lol. For sites without hardwire internet, there’s 4G or satellite connectivity. A 4G cell comm module is a few hundred dollars. Adding in remote operations control is probably a tiny fraction of a percent of a solar field project.
Yes the article talks about consumers scheduling things like washing machines during the day, or even filling up a battery.
This is the “smart grid” idea, right? We just haven’t fully explored it yet.
Something I firmly believe is that there’s a ton of low hanging fruit for timing our energy use better. It is just hidden by the desire to present a uniform energy price.
Like why not run our water heaters when power is cheap? Then if that became a thing, we might even be interested in larger water heater tanks. Batteries cost per volume, you only pay for the surface are of a metal tank!
I'm on a time-of-use tariff, with a special "EV" slot between 02h and 05h. My car is programmed to only charge during this time unless I tell it otherwise.
The price difference is significant: About €0.08/kwh compared to the €0.2 - €0.4 I'd be paying during normal day/peak times.
This has made my day-to-day driving basically free, less than a euro per 100km (€0.08/kwh * 7kwh/100km)
I tried doing the same thing for other large(ish) loads in the house, dishwasher, washer & dryer, but the cost benefit was really really small when compared to the big savings from my EV charging.
I heat my water using an oil burning boiler, but if I had an electric water heater, it would make total sense to run that during the "EV" hours as well. If I could, I would then also invest in more capacity, and set the thermostat higher to have essentially a hot water battery that could last me the whole day.
At my old house I had an overspecced solar system, and I set it up to dump the remaining available solar energy after the batteries are done charging into my hot water heater. The thermostat was set to 75C or something, super hot. I'd then have piping hot water for most of the day, and maybe needed a small electric boost in the mornings, especially in the winter. Another 200L or so would have resulted in me not needing any grid power to heat up enough hot water for the household.
Power at peak times is cheap because load is distributed throughout the day. If everybody ran their heaters at the same time, power wouldn’t be so cheap and we’d reach the same situation we’re in.
4 replies →
Australia has some cutting edge tech that actually sends control signals through the electric wires.
It rolled this out in 1953:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellweger_off-peak
It let coal plants run more efficiently and people could heat their water overnight.
Somewhat bafflingly they seem to have somewhat failed this same task with the solar rollout.
Presumably 21st century capitalism got in the way of the mid 20th century engineering.
They could also run their AC to below where their normal set point would be to “bank” some of the free electricity. I wonder if we’ll start seeing other more passive energy sinks… if you lived in a hot area and could rely on several hours of free electricity each day, it enables all sorts of interesting options like turning on a secondary cooling system to “charge” a large boulder or hunk of metal that you could then pass air over to cool your house when energy is expensive again.
If you built homes with a lot of thermal mass, you could cool the internal thermal mass when energy is $0 and have that mass absorb heat the rest of the day. This is sort of the principle a lot of traditional architecture uses where evaporation, wind over a courtyard, or nighttime lows cool thick walls.
3 replies →
More countries where there's a surplus, are advising people to charge or use electricity during the day.
and only in a few states.
My home state of WA is not a part of the same power netwrok.