General > General Technical Chat
Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th
tom66:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 15, 2023, 02:51:59 pm ---Did you do any research whether people are willing to have energy contracts based on spot prices and requiring people to live along how the wind blows and the sun shines? From what I see is that very few people are willing to do that and thus prefer flattened, predictable energy prices. Hence, any consumer solution that is based on spot prices will only serve a niche market and not solve the bigger issue with intermittant energy sources like wind and solar. And the whole grid capacity costs for large peak demands comes on top of that.
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Yes, conventional electricity pricing is done on hedged markets. But you can subscribe to a service like Octopus Agile in the UK that does expose you to half hourly energy pricing. Or use a service like Octopus Intelligent or OVO Charge Anytime which gives you cheap EV charging provided you let the energy provider determine when and how that happens. These services will only become more common as the grid gets 'smarter' and intermittent energy more common. It's expected the UK will have about 45GW of wind power by 2028, and around 20% of all cars will be electric. If you can dispatch 50% of those cars at 7kW each, you've immediately got 20GW of load that you can turn on and off as needed to balance supply and demand.
I've actually just put down a deposit on a 2nd hand ID.3 which supports this technology. The next step up is V2H which allows the car to part-discharge into the home at peak times - though there does need to be some consideration for battery wear if this leads to heavy cycling.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 15, 2023, 02:51:59 pm ---Did you do any research whether people are willing to have energy contracts based on spot prices and requiring people to live along how the wind blows and the sun shines?
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Which part about the automated control you failed to understand? :palm:
It makes no sense to time your coffee making or dishwashing for cheap prices, that's real penny pitching. But you can automate the large loads which are not sensitive to exact timing. If you have those, not everyone do of course. Probably the only reason you don't grok this is because you don't, but it's blatantly obvious to those who do.
--- Quote ---Hence, any consumer solution that is based on spot prices will only serve a niche market
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This "niche" is actually pretty big as people are understanding more and more that the average price of the spot contract is less than a fixed contract (yes, we researched, and this is the one thing we expected to have to explain, but people have actually seen enough and found it out themselves already), and if you have any controllability to your patterns, it's significantly cheaper.
This is always true in the long run, due to simple laws of economics - the spot price is the true price of the energy, and no one is going to leave the money on the table and sell for less than the market value. Never happened in the human history, for any product, in the long run (communist states that tried something similar, failed). There are periods of times when fixed contracts are cheaper for a while, and people get scared and get rid of their spot price contracts, but then they regret it a few months later when the opposite, and usually larger spike happens.
Currently we are having a large group of people who panicked last year and signed into 0.40e/kWh (!!!!!) fixed contracts for freaking two years during which you cannot terminate the contract, yet the spot price average so far, this winter, which was supposed to be the crisis winter and the sole reason why people panicked and changed their contracts, is... just 0.10e/kWh.
After 2 years, their mistake has cost them something like 10000 EUR and misery having to change their living habits, reduce the room temperature and take cold showers just to save energy because it's so freaking expensive. They will happily take 0.05e/kWh average price spot energy from then on. Their panic choice cost them exactly what they were trying to avoid.
tom66:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 15, 2023, 05:33:53 pm ---It makes no sense to time your coffee making or dishwashing for cheap prices, that's real penny pitching. But you can automate the large loads which are not sensitive to exact timing. If you have those, not everyone do of course. Probably the only reason you don't grok this is because you don't, but it's blatantly obvious to those who do.
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I always set my dishwasher and dryer to run in the cheap off peak :) Dishwasher uses about 2kWh per cycle, and it runs about 200 times a year, so at current prices that is about £100 a year in electricity saving.
Maybe small change in the grand scale of things, but hardly any effort to just press 'delay start' and '2 hr' instead of 'start', to save this £100 a year.
In the future we may have appliances with a Zigbee connection to the smart meter, which allows them to be scheduled to run whenever the energy is cheap. You would just load the dishwasher, and say "run when cheap, but be ready by 9am", kind of thing.
Someone:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 15, 2023, 12:21:08 pm ---But this is under the assumption that spot prices stay constantly low. IMHO this is a very poor assumption to make. Especially when the ROI time is long (>5 years). Once there is a significant number of people having their own storage (OR the utility companies decide to implement storage as this is obviously economically worthwhile), the daytime prices will become lower and the night time prices will rise. I have been paying the same price for electricity (day / night) for a very long time already. The NL grid uses pumped storage in Norway.
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 15, 2023, 10:47:17 am ---Additionally, we need want longer-term storage, in range of weeks, or even better, annual storage. Hydrogen is a strong candidate here indeed, but you can't just go and buy your personal hydrogen storage box,
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That is a decission I have put on hold for about 10 years. Metal hydrate storage systems are available but their ROI time is like >30 years. I'll just see where it goes. It could be suitable solid state batteries are available in a decade and/or metal hydrate storage systems become available. At this moment the grid is my battery as I get the same amount of money per kWh consument / delivered to the grid but that is going to stop in the next couple of years (but long after the solar panels have paid for themselves).
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This is your circular argument:
I pay flat rates for power, this must remain in place
The grid should not have massive fluctuations in power price, so needs lots of storage
This locality has greatly mismatched seasonal use so we need impartially efficient/cheap seasonal storage to limit price fluctuations
That worked when power was backed by fossil fuel storage or massive hydro and the storage was already inherent/low cost. Gas peaking plants being the shining example of this with their LCOE being dominated by marginal costs (fuel and maintenance).
Simply removing your (imagined) need for long term storage, a more economically viable solution is to over provision the generation by a factor of 2-3 or possibly more. Cheaper power in the months (and hours) when its less demanded, more expensive when in high demand because long term storage is expensive. You might not like that, but its a cheaper system for everyone (including you) and there will be retailers offering fixed rate contracts which you can take up. On the other hand I'd prefer to be price responsive and save some money. Spot prices of wind and solar will have periods of low price/high generation long enough for storage in the 3-7 day range to be very practical and cost effective. Even plants that could hold energy for weeks-months at a time will be cycling daily as that is more profitable.
nctnico:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on April 15, 2023, 05:33:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 15, 2023, 02:51:59 pm ---Did you do any research whether people are willing to have energy contracts based on spot prices and requiring people to live along how the wind blows and the sun shines?
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Which part about the automated control you failed to understand? :palm:
It makes no sense to time your coffee making or dishwashing for cheap prices, that's real penny pitching. But you can automate the large loads which are not sensitive to exact timing. If you have those, not everyone do of course. Probably the only reason you don't grok this is because you don't, but it's blatantly obvious to those who do.
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Have you thought about loads that run continuously for hours like lights, computers, TVs, refridgerators? Those are significant electricity users that can't really be timed. In addition not all heavy loads like washing machines and dish washers can't be run at night due to the noise. And then there are simple things like cooking dinner on an electric stove / using a microwave around dinner time. If you make a carefull analysis, you'll see that a significant amount of electricity use can't be timed at all.
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