I wonder if it is cost effective going forward to install two meters and panels on every house with one being “essential” and the other being “intermittent” so the power company has the option of blacking out the intermittent boxes only. I’d rather have all my computers, lights, etc shut down than my whole house.
Firstly, how would you keep consumers honest about what’s essential?
Secondly, I think “essential” will depend on the duration of the blackout. For a blackout of a few hours, keeping WiFi running so that work from home can continue probably is more essential than heating a water boiler. If the blackout takes a few days, that may change.
A blackout is not just "someone shutting off your lights". It means the grid is down. And to bring the grid back up, there is a lot of effort (and energy use). If you're lucky the part of the grid with problems is just separated from the rest, but if you get 2-3 zones separated, you might end up with islands and then it will take hours and maybe days to bring it back up. Bringing up the grid from a blackout might not be possible/hard with a majority renewable power in the grid - the power source is just not reliable enough, for example the wind might stop blowing when you need the power to connect with the neighbouring region and obtain frequency sync.
You can also write “Charge higher rates for essential” as “Offer cheaper electricity that has lower quality of service guarantees”.
If seen that way, you wouldn’t pay more; you would have to he choice to get cheaper electricity.
I foresee high demand for electronics that seamlessly switch from the lower quality of service feed to the ‘essential’ one when that cheaper feed stops working, though.
You could have tarrif rules that the essential meter charges at the regular rate if the regular meter is energized, or near the regular rate. That would have the benefit of letting the power utility accurately forecast the essential load, and would disincentivize the transfer switches.
It would make sense to have say your stage 1 heating that could keep your house livable but rather cold on essential, and your stage 2 heating which made things comfortable on the less available feed. I'd also put refrigerators and minimal lighting on essential.
The alternative as presented was some sort of compliance program hoping people wouldn't just run everything off the 'essential' feed regardless of need, or rolling blackouts as currently practiced.
It seems you agree that 'essential' loads have much more value to you and others, but you're not willing to pay the value?
> It seems you agree that 'essential' loads have much more value to you and others, but you're not willing to pay the value?
what does taking what i wrote, then reworking the sentence to suit your purpose serve?
I did not agree that essential loads have more "value"... you did.
If you think that heating your home is not essential, come by in the winter and i can put a tent in the back yard for you. It reaches as low as -24C, but i'm sure you will be fine.
If you think that people should be forced to pay more to heat their homes.. you are mistaken. No one should have to choose between food and heat and any program structured such that "essential costs more" will NEVER work.
I said that it is UNFAIR to charge more for essential loads, and that if a program depends on "rebates" it is flawed.
There are many other alternative solutions, such as what we have here via "time of use" billing that is also seasonally adjusted.
this "pay more for essential services" logic is severely flawed, much as you twisting my words to suit your purpose was.
the persons below really made the point when they wrote "It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand "
> It seems you agree that 'essential' loads have much more value to you and others, but you're not willing to pay the value?
In a similar sense that I'm not willing to pay more for "essential" food than for luxury food; or in the same sense that it seems unfair to have to pay for life-saving medical treatments.
It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand — the whole meaning of the word "inelastic" being that changing the price of it won't incentivize people to use any more/less of it.
Inelastic demand should, at the very least, be subsidized. This is why public healthcare exists; why food stamps exist; etc. But better yet, inelastic demand — because it is so predictable — should be optimized heavily for by suppliers (for power plants, this is "building out base-load capacity") such that economies of scale enable the supply for inelastic demand to be satisfied with lower cost than the supply for elastic demand.
The point is not to exploit inelastic demand, but to separate inelastic demand from elastic demand when there isn't enough supply to fit both needs.
With food, it's possible to manage supply through stockpiling. With electricity, storage is tricky, so when there's a change to supply, demand has to be changed to match. You can do that with blackouts or economics. Many large customers have contracts where they pay a lower rate in exchange for disconnecting their load when needed to reduce demand. Anything essential would be on another meter that has a higher rate.
Why is it a problem to apply the same principle to residential connections?
Of course, in my area, most of my utility outages are a result of interrupted lines and not supply issues, both essential and non-essential would be equally disrupted. And, it's not feasible to switch a significant number of residences to a two-meter system in any reasonable amount of time, so this is firmly in the thought expirement category.
> It is both unethical and pointless to exploit inelastic demand
WELL PUT.. the logic on this debate is astonishly bad..
"Charge more for essential services" just sounds terrible and you are correct, inelastic demand needs to be affordable, and subsidized if it is NOT affordable.
i dont understand how someone would advocate that "essential services has higher value to me and should cost more".
Essential services like heating my home does not have a higher value, it is an absolutely essential service to prevent death from cold temperatures..
This person should try living in -24C without heat and see if it changes their views.
If I lived in -24C, it would be extremely valuable for me to have heat.
As it is, I live in a climate that does dip below 0C from time to time, and having access to heat is important, so I have a backup generator for the house, and another for the well, because water is important too. When I use them, just the energy cost is much higher than utility power, so I don't use them when utility power is available. There's capital cost and operational costs to pay too. Many people who live around me don't have generators, so they have to hope outages won't be too long, or that they can make it to a warming center --- but outages are often coincident with locally heavy snowfall and our roads are always steep, so that makes it difficult to travel even short distances to get to warmth.
In my area, the issue isn't rolling blackouts, it's usually lines broken due to falling trees. Paying more for uninterupted utilities wouldn't fix that, but if it were rolling blackouts, I would certainly prefer to pay more for utility power for essential loads rather than paying more for local generation for essential loads.
Your furnace will either use very little electricity if it burns something else or it is exactly the kind of thing to shut off since your home can already buffer heat quite effectively. Allowing room temperature to drop by 1 or 2 degrees is preferable to blackouts.
Sounds like a good idea, but would, IMO, split less along the essential/non-essential line than along the richer-poorer line.
Richer people likely also would counter this with battery or diesel powered backup power (already happens a lot in countries that have irregular blackouts). If they use batteries, their power usage would even go up dues to losses in the charge/discharge cycle.
Just cap the electricity output and let consumers decide for themselves to what to turn on. Turning on too much will flip the breaker. They’ll figure it out for themselves.
This is great, because it shows/teaches people what high-usage is.
So far, I've seen very little guidance and advice to citizens on how exactly they can contribute to lower energy usage. Only businesses say they will stop production or change opening times. Is this a missed opportunity?
> because it shows/teaches people what high-usage is.
Consumer awareness of what appliances use the most power should really be a lot higher. It's actually pretty simple too - devices that generate a lot of heat are the ones consuming a lot of energy. That includes devices whose purpose may be to keep things cool - your fridge and A/C still generate significant waste heat even in the latter case it's vented externally.
A rare exception would be a car-battery charger, which can obviously draw significant power but the heat is generated later when the power is drawn from the battery and in a dissipated fashion that's hard to detect directly but is still significant.
These days we have the tech to make this really smooth. Have a phone app with live prices, and integrate with iot makers so things like washing machines and dish washers can be set to trigger on the cheapest times.
Have houses automatically heat up earlier in the morning before people start waking up and consuming more power
Prior to "Time of use" billing (and having to upgrade all our meters in like 2016) i dont see how this was possible.
The old meters simply measured how much power was used, they had no idea of WHEN it was used.
The electric company would go house to house and "read the meter" once a month and report this back to billing. Based on your usage a bill would be produced and sent to you.
How/when would a "high usage light" come into play?
I grew up in a house which was over 40 years old, there was no "high-usage" lights near the waster/dryer. Mostly because homes built back then had the waster/dryer in the basement and any "usage lights" would be ineffective.
It's called a multiple-tariff meter. Of course it's easier to implement with modern electronics, but there's no reason you can't design an electromechanical meter device that has two different mechanisms to tally up "peak" and "off-peak" usage. I just did a quick Google search and found patents dating back to the 1970s.
Indeed! More secure that way than trying to do it locally, probably, and now BST is somebody else's problem.
But since it's been around since the late 70s, clearly you can do this without needing too much advanced tech - which is what I interpreted as being the perceived problem. (Perhaps incorrectly, but it looks like I wasn't the only one...)
I certainly didn't intentionally overlook anything. I took your "doesn't make sense" to mean that you were questioning the possibility of an "old" meter accounting for different electricity rates at different times. Since it seems that's not what you meant, I apologize for misunderstanding you.
isn't it much "easier" to implement some kind of progressive price on energy? first 1000kw/h are "cheaper" than market (per person in household), next 500kw/h double the price, next 500kw/h doubles again etc...
For things like heatpumps you usually have an extra meter with special day/night tarifs (in germany), the rest is metered as general consumption.
I always wonder through how much energy my peers burn, we have a 2 person household with 2 e-bikes which are used regulary + both in home office (heating is gas) and "just" need 1200kw/h pA (and our appliances are not all A++)
Something like that is currently proposed in the Netherlands, and will probably be implemented January 1st. Electricity and gas use up to the consumption of the average Dutch household (1100 m3 and 2200 kWh of the top of my head) will be cheaper than market.
I think we need to figure out how to de-complicate variable rates for residential customers. Forcing people to pay what electricity actually costs (ideally, in real-time) is a good way to make your demand-side much more responsive.
During the Texas winter crisis, virtually no residential customers saw a financial incentive to wind down power usage. Only those crazies on Griddy, et. al. were impacted.
Both in Texas and California recently lots of people voluntarily cut back but it’d be nice to reflect that in the billing in some way. The Griddy way may have been too extreme but encouraging conservation of energy is a generally good idea (imagine things like rebating permit fees based on sliding scale of how much you “beat code” on a blower door and insulation test).
It is actually the opposite. In California, police attack your home if you are thrifty and use less energy. Apparently you are placed on some sort of suspicious list and accused of stealing power.
Forcing people to pay what electricity actually costs (ideally, in real-time) is a good way to make your demand-side much more responsive.
That's only a valid strategy if your customers can be more responsive, but in a freak cold snap where most customers are running heaters at 100% to keep their homes habitable, there's little they can go to reduce demand.
Many people have purchased generators after that crisis, but telling (and maybe subsidizing) millions of people to buy a generator and stockpile fuel because the grid can't handle cold weather is not good energy policy.
It'd be better if regulators required demand-response automation that would let them intelligently scale back demand of high-energy appliances before the grid reaches critical levels without heavy-handed rolling blackouts.
just out of curiosity because I have no clue :D why is it regarded as complicated? For waste you already have a basic tarif + extra for every member in the household, and the "progression" is that you have to buy really expensive "waste bags" if you produce more waste
are daily tiers and dynamic pricing really needed for consumers, shoudn't it even out on the long term? Until recently it worked quite well for a energy supplier to supply me with a fixed rate for a year and still making profit (when I take a look at their yearly earnings report, I think I also subsidized heavy users with my low usage :D). over a year the price should average out quite nicely when I look at the energy mix in germany and the cost. The only "problem" we currently have is the merit order principle and the pegging of the (haywire) gas price to the energy price which makes calculations for suppliers difficult (and the absence of building renewable, and the maintenance and shutoffs of nuclear :D). Aside from that consumption is quite foreseeable and production also, so daily rates should not matter that much? I think paying by the hour/daily makes things just more complicated, I actually don't really want to time my laundry cooking with future prices on an hour/daily base :D
The goal with it is to encourage people to move load to coincide with demand. But it’s complicated and changes - during solar peaks the best time to do laundry may be midday but durning wind peaks that could be the middle of the night.
The solution is power storage either at a grid level or at a home level where the information is available to the smart batteries. And/or so much excess solar and wind that we just don’t care.
yeahh I see or just preload the washing machine and trigger it if the spupply is high .. but that means a lot of interconnected appliances.
I'm also planning to add one or two small 800Wp PV systems "Balkonsolar" to our flat (we have plenty of space on the south facing side) this will also involves pre planning for energy intensive stuff including a planned AC in the summer... let's see how this works out :)
My utility (SCE in the US) has traditionally had consumption based progressive tiered pricing for years (monthly basis). Recently, they have been pushing consumers to time of use pricing though (higher rates at peak time of peak consumption). So, consumers can adapt.
Do you mean limiting the size of the service to a house? Because unless you have massive batteries for intermittent loads that would prohibit dryers and ovens from being electric.
If we're going to the effort of having dual-service to each home, we could have the "essentials" service of 500W or something that we'd try to make very reliable, to operate the fridge, medical equipment, communications, or whatever the residents deemed essential. Then the other, regular service could still have whatever capacity was already there, but would be subject to intermittent blackouts as necessary to keep everyone's essentials on.
This would require some additional infrastructure, but might be worth it if the blackouts are going to be too frequent.
So your freezer shuts down when your toaster is on? A hard cap that's low enough to make a difference seems like a bad idea, there are many devices which shouldn't be cut off suddenly. And that's ignoring things like medical devices.
Of course there's already a hard cap (usually ~9kW over here), but I suspect most people never reach it.
There are plans in Belgium to charged based on peak power (something silly like "max power used in any 15 minute period"), which would drive up the cost for the average consumer without reducing demand (as people tend not to have much choice in when they use their most power hungry appliances).
I think you've got your units mixed up. 100A @ 120V = 12kW. Assuming the newer homes are 200A, that would be 24kW. 166kW seems ... unreasonable, especially over 120V, that's like 1400A. Toasty.
The idea is to move "load" from peaks to avoid shortages by charging more to use power during peaks.
The idea of "priority customers" has a long standing principle. "High usage" customers often agree to be the first to be cut in return for discounts.
Targeting "residential customers" in this way is NOT effective as it takes a LOT of houses to equal the amount of power "commercial/industrial" users consume.
Time of use billing is probably the better option.
