General > General Technical Chat
Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 11:04:31 am ---What I see in the NL is that most people have long term fixed price contracts or contracts with prices that change twice a year. Companies that offer spot prices are rare and have very few customers. IOW: any proposed solution that is based on spot pricing will have an extremely large uphill battle to gain acceptance & market penetration.
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Here, it's been a roller coaster journey:
2020 - early 2021: Fixed contracts at 0.05EUR/kWh for 2 years. Many swallowed the "early adopter" pill and signed into spot contracts nevertheless.
December 2021: historically high spot prices up to 1EUR/kWh, panic among those who did not understand what average cost means. Return back to fixed contracts, this time 0.10EUR/kWh for 2 years
Spring 2022: Putin happens, panic, fixed price contracts increasing steadily, reach 0.45EUR/kWh for 2 years(!!!) during the summer. Idiots sign up.
Winter 2022-2023: Nothing happened, spot prices not nearly as bad as people thought, not any worse than 2021. Average spot price around 0.10EUR/kWh.
Spring 2023: People who took fixed contracts in panic are angry as hell. There is a massive push to spot contracts because of the feeling of getting conned by power companies into paying more. People start understanding that the spot price is the true value of what they buy, and it only gets worse with fixed contracts.
But let's see how it goes. Obviously now it's again possible to get a relatively good fixed contract (at 0.08EUR/kWh). But, the difference is here: earlier people consider spot pricing as some sort of risky, ugly con. This turned around: people now understand the trap in fixed contracts, and the safety in the spot contracts.
Someone:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 11:04:31 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on April 16, 2023, 10:52:51 am ---
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 10:46:22 am ---Have you thought about loads that run continuously for long 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.
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Maybe washing machines can't run at night for some machines (though my Bosch direct-drive machine is deadly silent even fully loaded at 1400rpm, it came with the house and I thought it wasn't working right at high speed until I looked carefully at the clothes moving). But dishwashers? They are not really that loud. Maybe 45-50dB(A). If you sleep in your kitchen you might complain, but you're not going to notice them otherwise. The dryer is the loudest of all my appliances, mostly because the compressor mountings on my one need a bit of love.
Really, you are creating artificial boundaries to justify your position.
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It is not my position, it is what -I'm quite sure about- most people will want. I only outline how electricity is used in general. You still didn't answer the question to provide research about what people actually want from a utility company. What I see in the NL is that most people have long term fixed price contracts or contracts with prices that change twice a year. Companies that offer spot prices are rare and have very few customers. IOW: any proposed solution that is based on spot pricing will have an extremely large uphill battle to gain acceptance & market penetration. At least in the NL...
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And there is nothing stopping retailers from continuing fixed contracts despite variable wholesale pricing. It is your ridiculous argument that fixed price consumer contracts requires seasonal storage, and the lack of suitable storage is then a reason to not install variable renewable generation that is the problem. Fixed price just means the retailer is taking a bet on when you will actually use the energy, some consumers will profit from that choice and some will not.
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 11:09:37 am ---Actually my case can be optimised by adding storage. Either locally or at the grid level.
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This is true - what I meant, your case cannot be optimized with my proposed solution. We all know that.
You should run a calculation though how much it costs to store the energy for your TV using hydrogen, while there are other households that have loads 10 times larger than that, and which can be optimized even without hydrogen/li-ion/P2X/etc. storage.
Look, making the production and consumption match helps everyone, even if your household is not part of the solution directly.
tom66:
--- Quote from: nctnico on April 16, 2023, 11:04:31 am ---It is not my position, it is what -I'm quite sure about- most people will want. I only outline how electricity is used in general. You still didn't answer the question to provide research about what people actually want from a utility company. What I see in the NL is that most people have long term fixed price contracts or contracts with prices that change twice a year. Companies that offer spot prices are rare and have very few customers. IOW: any proposed solution that is based on spot pricing will have an extremely large uphill battle to gain acceptance & market penetration. At least in the NL...
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Well, there is already a crude way to estimate how many Octopus Go customers there are, one of many tariffs that works on off peak electricity for EV and other use. Their EVs switch on at 0030 and off at 0430 due to timed charging (this is the only provider using the half-hourly start). You can already detect this in the grid data. Here is a grid engineer talking about this phenomenon.
They were noticing around 600MW step change - so in EVs alone at 7kW that's 85,000 customers in 2021. There were about 600k EVs in 2021 in the UK, so Octopus managed to capture a good 7% of the market. But this is a lower bound, as there will be EVs not plugged in, those on other off peak tariffs, etc. And of course the situation in 2023 is even bigger, but minutely data for the grid isn't publicly available at the moment.
Early days, but there's clearly demand for those services.
Also this:
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/domestic-flexibility-could-reduce-peak-electricity-demand-23-new-study-shows
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: tom66 on April 16, 2023, 11:20:59 am ---so Octopus managed to capture a good 7% of the market
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Yeah. I don't have the slightest fear of the market being niche. It's the opposite, if anything I fear the competition being very tough, with some very large players appearing and taking the jackpot (with the combination of good enough product, and brute force marketing.)
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