A floating price means smarter grids. Smart grids that don't exist yet in large swaths of the country.
We gotta upgrade all of those electrical meters in everybody's homes to take into account time AND price changes. We've gotta build the algorithms to distribute those price changes.
A lot of cities have that kind of infrastructure already of course. But lets not deny the monumental task ahead of us. The idea of "smart meters" that communicate with a central server (ie: requires perpetual and reliable internet access) was unfathomable just 10 years ago.
I don't think the meter needs to be that smart. First off, I'm using the existing day-ahead markets that many of the independent system operators are already using to predict demand. These markets clear once per hour, for the price of energy 24hr in advance in one hour windows. They also account for somewhat fine-grained regional variation (ie, power line usage). There are additional markets that clear only 15 min in advance (the "spot" price for power) and these can have much more volatility.
So, if I were king of the electric market, I would only expose retail customers to the day-ahead price. This way, existing web-scale publishing tech can tell people what their price will be up to 24hr in advance. Retail customers' price gets fixed at that time, and they pay a small energy premium for reducing their volatility exposure. Now, the meters only need to record a list of {kWh, hour-of-day} pairs, one for each hour between the last reading and today. So if the local electric utility reads off the consumption once a month, then you only store ~700 entries or so. That's much cheaper than needing a reliable Internet connection to the meter.
Anything smarter than that is considered a "smart" meter. A dude comes out one a month to see how many KWhr the meter has ticked up, then they send you a bill in the mail for you to pay.
All this talk about "spot" price and "day of pricing" simply doesn't work with current electricity meters that are deployed around the country.
And honestly, if we're going to be upgrading to "smart" meters... we should all have "smart bi-directional" meters to account for the ability to "sell back to the utility". (IE: Net Metering).
I haven't seen those meters in years (in the US, at least)
For as long as I can remember living in a suburban house (since ~2008), there was a smart meter. At some point it was replaced with another smart meter.
Neither have I seen a person come out and manually get readings, because that seems incredibly inefficient, time consuming, and costly for the utility, so it was probably one of the first things to get automated.
The smart meters are medium-range wireless for the most part. The utility still has someone drive around in a truck, but they just need to drive by. The driver doesn't need to get out or even stop.
We gotta upgrade all of those electrical meters in everybody's homes to take into account time AND price changes. We've gotta build the algorithms to distribute those price changes.
A lot of cities have that kind of infrastructure already of course. But lets not deny the monumental task ahead of us. The idea of "smart meters" that communicate with a central server (ie: requires perpetual and reliable internet access) was unfathomable just 10 years ago.