Even after ~15 years, most equipment still doesn’t care about time of use.
Most savings have been due to better regulations/promotions around efficiency. Subsidized LED light bulbs accomplish more than telling people to turn off the incandescent.
But you know, giving useful stuff to people for free is WeLFarE but forcing untested policies on them and making them pay for it is okay.
It depends very much on the weather, but in Denmark the cost can vary from around 1DKK/kWh (€0.14) to 5kr/kWh (€0.67), or a few hours a year even more.
I don't know of any studies done here, but anecdotally I do know people who have the app version of that webpage and will schedule their laundry/dishwasher accordingly. (And of course EV owners will configure their car to charge at the cheapest period.)
Personally, the saving isn't worth thinking about for me. I run the dishwasher overnight anyway and sometimes the washing machine, but that's to avoid the noise during the evening rather than any economic or environmental reason.
> But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost.
This doesn't surprise me a great deal. Personally, the price difference would have to be very high in order for it to affect my usage patterns. It would have to exceed the cost of having yet another complication for me to keep track of.
We’re getting the kids version of market pricing, but when you give people real market pricing without cross-subsidization, they tend to get confused/angry/bankrupt.
I still think they could do real-time pricing with some kind of cap that gets balanced out amongst all users, but the uptake still may not be there. It averages out for those that treat it as noise and still not a lot of equipment out there to take advantage of it at the personal residential level.
I checked my electric provider and although I said in an earlier comment that they don't do this sort of differential pricing, I was incorrect. They've been doing it for years now -- but it's optional and you have to opt in to it.
They say that the percentage of users who actually do this is somewhere around 10%.
Personally, I value having electric prices being stable very highly. I'd prefer pay higher rates (up to a point) to keep that stability.
if you have the choice, you'd have to run the numbers, but then you create adverse selection issues.
(Technically you can choose a tiered pay X for first kWh and then X+Y above that in my system, but if you're in a building, the building gets to decide which of the two every user is put on)
Even apartments where hvac, hot water and laundry are central, and the builder/owner chooses the big appliances.
But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost.
“Smart Metering Costs to Date Exceed Projected Costs and Benefits” says it all.
They did get/build a $249m centre to monitor all the data though.
https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports...
Even after ~15 years, most equipment still doesn’t care about time of use.
Most savings have been due to better regulations/promotions around efficiency. Subsidized LED light bulbs accomplish more than telling people to turn off the incandescent.
But you know, giving useful stuff to people for free is WeLFarE but forcing untested policies on them and making them pay for it is okay.