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0 pointsmikepurvis5y ago0 comments

TOU pricing is pretty widespread at this point; I have it in a medium-sized city in Canada, and intentionally run laundry (electric dryer) in the evening when power is half the cost of daytime use. With EVs coming online and being set up to charge at night, it would definitely be nice to have a minute by minute spot pricing scheme, though, then you'd basically have a mechanism for using the chargers and other intelligent devices on the consumption side as an intelligent buffer.

It's goofy, but another one is situations where you have a lot of stored heat energy, thinking like pools, hot tubs, hot water heaters, etc— all those things could be activated in response to spot pricing with pretty simple policies (I want a shower of at least X degrees at 7am, I want the hot tub at at least Y degrees by 9pm, etc).

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walshemj5y ago

I think when widespread overnight charging of EV's is a thing cheap evening electricity will be phased out

mikepurvisOP5y ago

Even in that world, you'd still want a way to manage the load through the night so that you don't have all the chargers clicking on at 11pm and then when the cars are full have a few hours later, demand craters until morning.

With renewables the incentives for load management become even higher (per this article). The real next step after second-by-second billing would be setting up chargers with backfeeding capabilities/policies, so that you have an arrangement with your employer to charge your car at work on cheap daytime solar power, sell it back into the grid during the evening rush, then charge up again on overnight base load. Most EV batteries are way overspecced for what people need in daily use, so as long as you have a special "charge me to full and stay there" mode you can switch into, there'd be no reason (other than a bit of wear and tear) not to cycle your battery like this.

hutzlibu5y ago

I think your household electricity prices just need to reflect real market prices. For example there were times in germany this year, with negative power prices, because the wind was blowing strong and all the wind plants generating more than anyone needed.

But for me as a customer, the price was as high as allways.

But if customers could react to that (automatically), you could have all sorts of jobs waiting for it. Bitcoin mining, dryer, charging batteries, freezer full power ... would be good for the grid, too, to balance it.

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