Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.
This would have the potential for nice second-order effects.
I'm thinking about places in AZ/NV where some companies and even some municipality groups (i.e. bureaucratic/permitting type) have moved towards four 10 hour days instead of five 8 hour days.
This is a bit better for those employees QOL (since they get 3 day weekends all the time) and also benefited the employers since they could lower their power consumption for an additional day.
Or could cause a clawback of some of those by companies realizing that if they went back to 5x8, one of their days would be cheaper power because the 4x10 companies wouldn’t be operating on one of those days.
Or “if we took Wednesdays off instead of Fridays, we’d benefit from Friday power being cheaper than Wednesday power”.
I still think market-aware power metering is a good thing for large users.
Residential areas should maybe be the ONLY places where a fixed rate would be allowed. Everywhere else (commercial, industrial, etc) should have to have real-time pricing. That would reduce the swings in price since demand would be much more elastic.