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Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids
- High-Five 28d agoHey guys, A small site that checks, every day, whether making electricity cheaper when the grid is clean would actually cut CO₂. It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones. It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into. Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing. Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.
- addag 28d agoIs it assumed that the total consumption remains the same (i.e there is an increase in consumption in clean energy when there is a decrease in less clean ones)? Otherwise, there would be an obvious solution which is to increase the price all the time to reduce demand and thus reduce CO2 consumption, but it is impractical politically.
- High-Five 28d ago[flagged]
- rconti 28d agoI had the same question but about price (and its related impact on consumption, which is your question) -- are we assuming total spent / total consumed are held constant? It wasn't stated in the website and I didn't see anything about it from skimming the github. I didn't read the thesis, though :D
- Maxion 28d agoProportional decrease is not as useful in a climate change sense than actual decrease in co2 emissions. A grid that is highly sustainable with lots of wind and solar, but fossil peaker plants will have a lot more potential co2 savings in this model. It essentially makes dirty grids look cleaner.
- floodle 28d agoHow are you modelling how demand changes in response to price changes?
- High-Five 28d ago[flagged]
- High-Five 26d ago[dead]
- zeristor 28d agoI’ve been thinking about this the CO₂ usage could be part of the price. I had toyed with having a two dimensional price, the price alongside the CO₂ usage, but I guess that way madness lies.
- jaapz 28d agoIn my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly
- Zeebrommer 28d agoMostly yes, but it works the other direction as well: a fossil power station may not want to completely shut down because it expects more demand later in the day, and offer a few hours of low cost electricity to stay in the merit order.
- HexPhantom 28d agoThis is what makes me wonder how much additional benefit an explicit carbon signal actually buys you over normal dynamic pricing
- High-Five 28d ago[flagged]
- toomuchtodo 28d agoOn grids where pricing declines due to more low carbon generation generating, there is no extra value. On grids where pricing declines due to more fossil generation running, that is the signal you want to avoid loads during those time windows. At the moment, lower prices are not necessarily a guarantee of lower emissions. And so, if you want to orchestrate loads to move them to the lowest emission time windows (perhaps not prioritizing cost), carbon signal is the way to do so.
- maelito 28d agoOn the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.
- HexPhantom 28d agoSure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others
- jarvist 28d agoThese approaches always measure the wrong thing though - the average carbon cost of electricity. What you need to know is the marginal carbon cost, which will be much less variable as almost all dispatchable generation is fossil. So yes, you should avoiding adding load when there is a severe supply crunch and the marginal power is generated by gas peaker plants (often gas turbine based), and use power when renewable generation is otherwise being curtailed, but most of the time the grid is firmly in the middle regime with a fairly average marginal cost.
- _bent 28d agoThey are in conflict, because you can spend the same Euro only once. You could build a lot of batteries, solar panels and wind turbines for the cost of one nuclear plant
- mono442 28d agoMoney doesn't work like that.
- Archelaos 28d agoYep. Poisoning the planet with nuclear wast for a million years. 40,000 generations of our children will be happy and thankful.
- vikramkr 28d ago
- a115ltd 28d agoNice. On Octopus Agile in GB the price already tracks the mix (roughly 2.2x day-ahead wholesale), so the carbon-aware tariff exists in the wild. What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.
- HexPhantom 28d agoThe harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
- High-Five 28d ago[flagged]
- zacmps 28d agoI've long thought there should be a standard mechanism for back pressure for loads that can defer their usage. For example dishwashers, overnight battery charging, car charging, etc should be able to receive scheduling data from the grid to determine the best time to run. Users could of course be given a choice whether to use grid scheduling in exchange for lower prices or not.
- bee_rider 28d agoThis sort of thing was called “smartgrid” but it doesn’t seem to have caught on. Maybe we could lean into modern buzzwords. The electricity distribution system is a big sparse graph. If they are allowed to pass signals back and forth, don’t look too close, and maybe we can call it an AI enhanced grid. Then we can call this sort of ability to schedule appliances based on those signals “closed loop AI enhanced green appliances” or something similarly buzzwordy.
- bee_rider 28d agoThere should be a penalty for having less flexibility in consuming electricity. That’s how the market incentivizes us to figure out how to be flexible in our consumption. We should probably also subsidize the conversion, for people who look at the incentives, want to become more flexible, but don’t have the money. And we might have to handle some special cases—maybe hospitals, for example—where reliable power is an important social good. But these should be rare.
- silon42 28d ago
- calinet6 28d agoMan, I am so tired of reading slop.
- Retr0id 28d agoAt this point I can tell fairly reliably from titles alone, "measured daily on 38 grids" is not the kind of thing a human would write in this context.
- High-Five 28d agoEnglish is not my mother language. Yes, I polished. My prefered one was Carbon-aware electricity pricing but seemed so general.
- boshomi 28d agoHere is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&bzn=DE-LU&renewable_share_of_generation=1 https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht... Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation. Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
- High-Five 28d agoGood link. Germany is the case where it works cleanly — more renewables, lower price, lower carbon, all moving the same direction.
- leonidasrup 28d agoNo amount of solar panels will generate electricity without sun light. Also the amount sun light can shrink quite a lot in winter months at high latitudes and under cloud cover. No amount of wind turbines will generate electricity without wind, or to be more precise: Cut-in speed: 3–4 m/s (12–15 km/h) to begin spinning and producing power. Cut-out / Stop speed: Above 25 m/s (90 km/h) where brakes are applied to prevent mechanical damage Germany has to have backups, currently quite expensive, for all this times of missing renewables production.
- flaburgan 28d agoI think the point is, if you can decide when to consume electricity then you will do it when it's the cheapest, so let's put the cheapest when the low carbon sources are available. So the website is taking into account that renewables are not always available, that's exactly its point. And the backup source for Germany is the nuclear electricity from France. The grid is at the European scale.
- Havoc 28d agoMine is just flat pricing but I do try to align it. UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time. https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/
- High-Five 28d agoThat dashboard is great. The UK is probably the best case for this in Europe. Moving the washing machine is basically what my model assumes, except it assumes everyone does it every day. NESO publishes a carbon intensity API, so the UK is an easy one to add. On the list.
- tentacleuno 28d agoThere is also another website which offers more information on generation plants (planned and built) [0]. [0]: https://energydashboard.co.uk https://energydashboard.co.uk
- flaburgan 28d agoThe idea is interesting but unfortunately most of the people don't know the electricity price even now without this mechanism. This should be displayed on top of every washing machine everywhere to make it works
- bethekidyouwant 28d agoDryer? Are washing machines expensive to run?
- flaburgan 28d agoDryers are even worst but they are very uncommon in France where I live. Washing machines are bad because they have to warm the water.
- bethekidyouwant 28d agoI didn’t even hook the hot water up to my washing machine. Nobody died yet
- tialaramex 28d agoIn many places it is usual for the machine to have a small element so that it can heat its own water, none of the machines I've every owned had a hot water line, although one did have instructions for a variant model with such a feature. In practice having the machine heat the water is usually a good choice because the machine already wants to take a set amount of water and heat it to a specific temperature (based on your chosen programme, silk knickers obviously do not want the hot water you use to clean cotton bedsheets after your youngest didn't wake up in time) whereas your hot water boiler just makes arbitrarily hot water forever.
- bethekidyouwant 28d agoI think the only reason that you would need to heat your water up is because you have a front load washer and I’ve heard they get disgusting if you don’t use hot water once in a while this is not a problem with the top load washer, mines run for 20 years on cold water and it’s fine nothing has ever come out of the washing machine dirty. I suppose you all have front loaders because you need them to spin really fast to dry your clothes cause you don’t actually have a dryer. Europeans are weird
- Panino 28d agoMy electricity provider has a near real-time graph of energy generation by source (wind, solar, coal, etc.) and I use this during off-peak times to decide when to use or avoid certain loads. For example I love charging batteries when solar is producing more energy than is being used by customers. For a global map, check out Electricity Maps: https://app.electricitymaps.com/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/
- mono442 28d agoThe EU does that since the emissions are taxed via the EU ETS and it just results in the most expensive electricity in the world.
- snapplebobapple 26d agoThis is kind of a stupid preposition. the cheapest hour should be the cheapest with carbon externalities priced in. There are lots of times where it is both logical and good for the cheapeat hour to not be the lowest carbon (i.e minimum run times on foasil fuel plantspushing should hours very cheap because they are needed for the peak hours or forecast renewable drop off.) If the market isnt pricing the carbon externalities that is a seperate issue. further the grid price only represents variable costs, congestion, and bidding strategies of gen to try and also recoup fixed costs and make a profit. This may translate to cheaper when lower carbon because variable cost is zero for many renewables but making it explicitly happen breaks the market price finding mexhanism and is probably an even larger aubsidy to renewables, which in itself is stupid vs just pricing the carbon externalities and letting the market decide.