121–130 of 353 posts
Is 906 GBP (~1100 USD) typical for a household? That seems outrageously high.
In a historic home in the Midwest a single month in the depths of of the winter could easily be 700-800 usd.
It is also a fairly well working market in the current system context.
I witnessed this by working for an electricity related startup and by doing all the math involved it was really hard to make the math work out right. The possibility to optimize is there but the margins are really slim, even with the large price swings in the time of use markets in EU.
Can the infrastructure be better? Absolutely, it needs ton of work, but again margins are slim and incentives for large improvements are small.
Do we have a dire need for renewable and moreover dispatchable renewable energy? Absolutely. This means more clean generation and more storage (quite hard).
Does energy feel expensive for households? Yes.
Is it actually expensive?
Could you imagine life without it?
What would it be like?
If you were in this situation, how much would you be willing to pay then?
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But why do you need smart meters at the level of individual houses? Wouldn't putting them on substations get the same benefit with much less cost?
My energy supplier (Octopus) gives me a tarrif with half-hourly pricing (smart meters in the UK only report with 30 minutes resolution). This let's me know when electricity is in less demand or high supply and schedule my day around it. Making my electricity bill cheaper and likewise putting less strain on the supplier which reduces their costs too
Paired with a home battery it can be pretty effective, but I don't have one and instead I just work around it and use my electrical heating more when it's cheaper and rely on my insulation to last throughout when it gets more expensive during the day. I've also started cooking dinner later to get past the evening hump.
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The security is broken and it broadcasts your information in the clear. I set up a RTLSDR plugged into my laptop in my kitchen and was able to read the energy utilization of my entire neighborhood after about 10min of work.
what information is it actually leaking though? If someone wanted, they could drive up to my house and see the colour of my door. The fact that someone has always been able to create a database of front door colours isn't inherently a data leak. A UUID and electricity usage for the past half hour for a house in the general vicinity isn't useful. Even if you could put a name to that UUID, I struggle to think of how th…
I find it so weird that UK citizens have often just sort of passively chosen to be poor. Like they still had food rationing for years after WW2. Is there some sort of cultural blind spot which prevents them from understanding that there are better ways to do things?
I find it weird that medical bankruptcies are a thing, or people involved in car crashes demanding they don't get an ambulance and critical emergency care, because they know they'll be billed thousands or hundreds of thousands for being out-of-network . Is there some sort of cultural blind-spot? Or maybe each country has their own ups and downs, and we can accept that even if there is objectively a "better way" to do…
Can't wait for people to moan about it on LBC.
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My energy supplier (Octopus) gives me a tarrif with half-hourly pricing (smart meters in the UK only report with 30 minutes resolution). This let's me know when electricity is in less demand or high supply and schedule my day around it. Making my electricity bill cheaper and likewise putting less strain on the supplier which reduces their costs too
The other week, it was not very windy but it was cold, so the energy price spiked pretty high (£1/kwh). Other times the energy price falls pretty low, and I regularly see it be negative for some hours of the night or rarely up until the afternoon. Paired with a home battery it can be pretty effective, but I don't have one and instead I just work around it and use my electrical heating more when it's cheaper and rely…
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But why do you need smart meters at the level of individual houses? Wouldn't putting them on substations get the same benefit with much less cost?
It eliminates the need for staff to manually read them and guarantees they are read correctly every month.
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Apparently the UK government estimated that in 2016 and 2019 the average household saved £11 on their bill due to this feedback from smart meters. This page estimates the cost at £15 so 2/3rds is recovered just from that effect.
There's no way it only cost £15 in total to install a smart meter. The cost of the meter has to be at least that much and then you have paying a guy to actually install it (which in my case took 3 attempts and caused a gas leak, which took 4 or 5 guys several hours to fix - although hopefully that's unusual).
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In a historic home in the Midwest a single month in the depths of of the winter could easily be 700-800 usd.
This is an extreme outlier. I have a 4,700 square foot home in the Midwest, electric heating (heat pump + backup direct heat) and only occasionally hit $300/mo in a cold spell.
Of course, heating an entire house with (non-heat-pump) electric heat in a cold climate is kind of crazy. Natural gas is way way cheaper. But I've seen it in old houses here in the Upper Midwest, so it's not _too_ out of the ordinary.
Some of these are "costs" which reduce costs elsewhere. Smart meters for example, though rollout has hit snags and they've become targets for weird conspiracy theories, they are basically designed to give better real time info on electricity demand which helps with managing the grid. This in theory should save money elsewhere. Similarly for CfD. Yes the government may on net be paying a subsidy to get wind power buil…
But why do you need smart meters at the level of individual houses? Wouldn't putting them on substations get the same benefit with much less cost?
Your EV can modulate its charging very quickly, and "background" loads like electric heating, water heater or even A/C can also be modulated somewhat quickly (though not as quick as an EV's inverter).
The meter needs however to make sure you indeed complied with the demand in order to pay you fairly (otherwise if people can defect on their obligation and still get paid, it defeats the purpose of the scheme of ensuring grid stability).
Doing this at the substation is not granular enough because then you can no longer determine who contributed what and whom to pay, which then removes any incentive for people actually participate.
In theory, this should lead to significant savings and efficiency benefits, as everyone opted into the scheme can now be used as an on-demand load to dump excess power (during which power is not only free, but the consumer may even be paid to consume that power) to smooth out supply/demand fluctuations.
Of course, the UK's smart meter scheme is administered by Capita, so don't expect any of this to actually happen, work reliably or actually lead to any kind of significant benefits, but in theory, it would be a great thing as long as it's done by competent people without corruption/mismatched incentives.