241–250 of 313 posts
Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed…
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Do you have anything I can read on why marginal pricing is the only sensible way to have pricing? EDIT: Ah, apparently it aligns market forces well, by making cheap energy sources massively profitable to run, so more and more get added. Perversely, though, it seems to me that it also incentivizes an entire renewable grid to not expand to 100%, so they all enjoy a much higher price.
As long as there's a large variety of producers competing with eachother though, there's not really any good mechanism for them to collude to avoid expanding to 100%, especially when you add battery power providers and private persons with rooftop solar into the mix. I think more likely than deciding to stop building more renewables, the renewable providers are just going be incentivized to start installing large bat…
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> Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places? Scotland seems to be a perfect place for pumped storage. I see that UK has 4 pumped storage stations, 2 in Wales, 2 in Scotland. But Scotland being quite far from most of UK's population may not be ideal if we're talking about supporting the whole country with pumped storage. It would be like 600km to the south of England.
HVDC would work quite well for a 600km transmission line, I don't think it needs UHVDC lines for that kind of distance.
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I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…
Just buy a home battery. Sheesh, there were solutions to problems before LLMs
The freezer example would require like $10 of electronics assuming there isn’t already a WiFi chip in it.
The landscape has been destroyed by wind turbines, and energy prices are higher than ever. lose lose.
I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…
My friend has a car which can charge only when prices are low. I'm not totally sure how it works though, does the smart meter communicate this to the car?
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Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).
I don't want a Chinese company to own 1 billion pounds of energy infrastructure in Scotland.
I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…
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That's a great system. Like so many things, success comes down to implementation. In California, for example, PG&E will charge you the maximum peak demand prices while simultaneously paying other states to take electricity during the solar duck curve. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift? That seems counterproductive and exploitative.
Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed…
The volumetric rate for electricity is almost totally irrelevant. California's bills are dominated by the fixed cost of the grid, and we use very little grid power compared to other states, so the volumetric rate has to be really high as a consequence. Electric power bills in California are in the middle of the pack compared to the other states, almost exactly the same as Texas and less than ten other states.