cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/127188
Have you ever heard of “net metering”?
It means that if your electric company gives you net metering, you can connect a generator or solar panels to your house and sell excess electricity back to the utility at the same price that they bill you for.
Sounds great right?
No, actually its a major problem for the utility.
The reason is that power plants take a significant amount of time to throttle up or down. If everyone in the area has solar power feeding back into the power grid, sudden changes in sunlight can cause major fluctuations and destabilize the power grid.
So what is the solution?
Dynamic pricing. Some areas already do this. How it works is that the price you pay (or receive) for electricity depends on the conditions on the power grid at the moment, updating as fast as possible.
When the grid has a deficit of power at the moment (maybe a power plant is struggling to throttle up to meet demand) the price goes way up.
If the grid has a surplus power at the moment, the price goes down, even going negative.(meaning you must pay to dump your power into the grid, or be paid for consuming excess power)
What this does is create an economic incentive for people to invest in equipment that actually stabilizes and supports the power grid.
For example if you have an electric car charging in your garage, it knows the price of power, and it can start charging faster when the price drops, or it can dump its battery power back into the grid when the price is high. The battery in your car is actually earning money as it sits idle!
Same with solar panels. Even if the installation doesn’t have batteries, the system can choose to stop selling power to the grid when it isn’t wanted.
Likewise, your heated pool can choose to absorb electricity when the price is low.
This is the future of the renewable energy economy in my opinion.
Why do you say that? It’s proven in areas with dynamic pricing, at least at large scale.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/27/tesla-big-battery-begins-providing-inertia-grid-services-at-scale-in-world-first-in-australia/
Tesla isn’t the only one doing this.
I worry about the potential costs as home based renewable energy becomes more popular that any savings could be wiped away for adding energy to the network, but I guess it all depends how much much the fee would be. I’d be okay with it if the power company invested in something g like this to try and minimize the time where consumers would be paying to produce electricity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_battery .
Your home equipment will be aware of the current price and automatically adjust its behavior for maximum profit, which also happens to be maximum grid stability.
If that forces all my appliances to be ‘smart’ then that’s a no for me.
You can choose not to participate. If a fixed price contract is available then great, you can go on business as usual. If not, you’ll probably change your mind the first time it costs $50 to dry 1 load of laundry during a heat wave…