Mike4 wrote:Yes its softening up Octopus customers with smart meters for surge pricing. Gently get people used to the concept of considering when to use high power appliances and in particular, getting them to identify which appliances they are so when surge pricing comes in, the customers know how to manage their consumption to keep the cost down.
Do you actually think that those on dumb meters will fare better in the future?
My prediction would not be surge pricing, where there is a low standard price and a high surge price, but for non-peak discounting where there is a high standard price and lower prices during non-peak demand.
However those with dumb meters would only have the high standard price 24/7 and wouldn't be able to access the lower discounted prices.
Mike4 wrote:Most people are utterly clueless about which appliances guzzle power and which sip it meagrely. We know this from the BBC phone-in programmes where callers are obsessing about charging their laptops and phones at the office instead of home, and unplugging the telly from the wall to make the LED go out whilst ignoring the dishwasher, washing machine tumble dryer they run twice a day each.
Not only that they are utterly clueless about things like thermostats in ovens, with the dumb journalists simply taking the max energy demand of an oven and multiplying it by the number of hours it used to say it will cost £x to cook a meal.
servodude wrote:It would be interesting to see what kind of coverage these trial schemes have.
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The key thing being that if enough people do a small thing it mounts up in aggregation.
The problem I can see with the results of the trial is they are being conducted in a time of very high energy prices and when many don't have a lot of money, plus it is a 'new and shiny' thing to get involved with.
If it had been done when energy prices were far lower and people had more cash would there have been the interest - I doubt it, or rather I doubt it beyond the first one or two instances and then people got bored with the whole idea.
servodude wrote:It's really interesting to see this concept being investigated (and possibly commercialised) in the general domestic space. It's about ten years since I first worked on automated demand response systems to allow commercial energy consumers to cede control of their supply in return for reduced tariffs and captial investment (this was in California and based around large scale irrigation pumping).
It has made its way to the domestic consumer with the Octopus Inteligent tariff for EV users. Your car or charger needs to be 'smart' to be eligible for the tariff because it needs to tell Octopus how much charge your car needs and that it is plugged in, but if it is then you hand over control to Octopus to determine the exact time overnight that your car charges. You will have had a guaranteed certain number of hours charge overnight, but it might have been a bit here and a bit there depending on when there is surplus in the grid.