7 ms·

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently oppos

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most. They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    >So I bought solar panels and batteries ...Mission accomplished?
    - sulam 4y ago
      "Profit"
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.
      - landemva 4y ago
        Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.
        zbrozek 4y ago
        I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.
- landemva 4y ago
  For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.
    - khuey 4y ago
      Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??
      - vel0city 4y ago
        My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh. Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh. I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool. Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
- notatoad 4y ago
  it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful. an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
  - AceyMan 4y ago
    this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
    - mirchiseth 4y ago
      Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.
      - jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?
        fsckboy 4y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.
dehrmann 4y ago
It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...
wcoenen 4y ago
Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula. People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
Scoundreller 4y ago
Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing. Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years. But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bills-ontario-time-of-use-pricing-1.3862462 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi... > The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period. I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
- pas 4y ago
  they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution. it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care. It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale. It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming. But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
    - pas 4y ago
      it depends on the capacity premium for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out) the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that. but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too. in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online) and it varies regionally too
SoftTalker 4y ago
The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore. In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries. Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago

time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety

zbrozek 4y ago
Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  >So I bought solar panels and batteries ...Mission accomplished?
  - sulam 4y ago
    "Profit"
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.
    - landemva 4y ago
      Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.
landemva 4y ago
For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.
  - khuey 4y ago
    Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.
  - bonzini 4y ago
    What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??
    - vel0city 4y ago
      My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh. Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh. I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool. Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
notatoad 4y ago
it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful. an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
- AceyMan 4y ago
  this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
  - mirchiseth 4y ago
    Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.
    - jeffreygoesto 4y ago
      More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?
      - fsckboy 4y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.

dehrmann 4y ago

It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...

wcoenen 4y ago

Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula. People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.

Scoundreller 4y ago

Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing. Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years. But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bills-ontario-time-of-use-pricing-1.3862462 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi... > The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period. I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.

pas 4y ago
they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution. it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care. It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale. It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming. But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
  - pas 4y ago
    it depends on the capacity premium for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out) the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that. but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too. in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online) and it varies regionally too

SoftTalker 4y ago

The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore. In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries. Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.

fsckboy 4y ago
> Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).