The Lemon Fool

steelman99 wrote:Just been offered a new fixed deal by EDF, my present supplier which is about 22% per unit dearer than my present prices

Looking quite attractive when compared to the predictions of of 40 or 50% price rises in October. We dont use a lot of gas in a summer , and the solar & Battery's will keep the electric bills down for the rest of summer. We are only running a bill of around £40 per month at the moment , and £23 of that is standing charges , so with £18 of actual fuel, a 22% increase in unit costs will add around £4 per month until july , gamble is that I will be better off next winter if the unit rate is increased by more than 22%

Having said that Im still expecting the gas to be around £200 a month in the winter months , Might be going to Weatherspoons and making that refillable coffee last all day to keep the heating bills down

I'll have to keep an eye on EDF's website.

I was moved to EDF when Utility Point went under, and as of today, their 1 year and their 2 year fixed tariffs are 41% dearer than their default capped rate for me.

Add a £200 exit fee into the mix and it all seems a bit too dear.

But I see it has changed a little in the last few days. The standing charges are unchanged, but the unit price for electricity is a touch higher and the gas price price a little lower, which for me means the fixes are round 5% cheaper than they were. Another similar change might just tip the balance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
If thousands take this up the peak demand time will change
so it becomes a self defeating scheme

pje16 wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
If thousands take this up the peak demand time will change
so it becomes a self defeating scheme

That’s not true though. Smoothing out the demand could make generation much MUCH cheaper. There is a huge cost to providing the capacity for peak time demand.

Gryff

gryffron wrote:

pje16 wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
If thousands take this up the peak demand time will change
so it becomes a self defeating scheme

That’s not true though. Smoothing out the demand could make generation much MUCH cheaper. There is a huge cost to providing the capacity for peak time demand.

Gryff

What happens if 75% switch then?

pje16 wrote:

gryffron wrote:

pje16 wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
If thousands take this up the peak demand time will change
so it becomes a self defeating scheme

That’s not true though. Smoothing out the demand could make generation much MUCH cheaper. There is a huge cost to providing the capacity for peak time demand.

Gryff

What happens if 75% switch then?

pje16 wrote:

gryffron wrote:

pje16 wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61949246
If thousands take this up the peak demand time will change
so it becomes a self defeating scheme

That’s not true though. Smoothing out the demand could make generation much MUCH cheaper. There is a huge cost to providing the capacity for peak time demand.

Gryff

What happens if 75% switch then?

Good question...
depends on how big is the peak?
And how much competition the providers have for their energy at the time - which will drive the cost?

For the demand side
looking in: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Average-UK-household-electricity-demand-against-time-of-day-for-weekdays-and-weekends-in_fig9_324141791
- which appears to make the images available via https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
we have


(ignoring heating for now - which is really the difference between the seasons) there's quite a pronounced evening peak

yeah you're right if 75% moved their use to a different time you would have a new peak
- more accurately two peaks one a third of the size of the other

which gives you a good degree of supply headroom (as your maximum instantaneous required amount of power is around 15-20% lower, given there's a base line)

THAT is a win in itself if you are a power supplier

BUT the real magic is in what you pay for it

Power is normally sold/auctioned in 30min blocks
- data for the UK all seems to be behind paywalls so I'm going to use pull up Australian data as an example of the shape of intraday trading (and cos I know where it is)

Again this public domain and the graph is from at https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-markets
-it's for all of NSW so doesn't exhibit the overnight drop off you could see on the household use graph earlier



spiky isn't it!?

which should make it pretty clear that in addition to dropping your instantaneous peak requirement if you move them to the right place your shifted 75% could be costing you significantly less to supply

-sd

servodude wrote:Power is normally sold/auctioned in 30min blocks
- data for the UK all seems to be behind paywalls so I'm going to use pull up Australian data as an example of the shape of intraday trading (and cos I know where it is)

Again this public domain and the graph is from at https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-markets
-it's for all of NSW so doesn't exhibit the overnight drop off you could see on the household use graph earlier



spiky isn't it!?

which should make it pretty clear that in addition to dropping your instantaneous peak requirement if you move them to the right place your shifted 75% could be costing you significantly less to supply

-sd

I might be missing something here, but surely the peak in price is because of increase in demand.

Surely moving demand to a cheaper price time will simply increase the price at the new time. Price goes from $60 to 220 very quickly, but if the demand was spread then the 220 would drop, but the 60 would increase. The question is whether the TOTAL price paid throughout the day for all the energy would go down. If it doesn't then in reality no money is saved.

Paul

DrFfybes wrote:

servodude wrote:Power is normally sold/auctioned in 30min blocks
- data for the UK all seems to be behind paywalls so I'm going to use pull up Australian data as an example of the shape of intraday trading (and cos I know where it is)

Again this public domain and the graph is from at https://www.aemc.gov.au/energy-system/electricity/electricity-market/spot-and-contract-markets
-it's for all of NSW so doesn't exhibit the overnight drop off you could see on the household use graph earlier



spiky isn't it!?

which should make it pretty clear that in addition to dropping your instantaneous peak requirement if you move them to the right place your shifted 75% could be costing you significantly less to supply

-sd

I might be missing something here, but surely the peak in price is because of increase in demand.

Surely moving demand to a cheaper price time will simply increase the price at the new time. Price goes from $60 to 220 very quickly, but if the demand was spread then the 220 would drop, but the 60 would increase. The question is whether the TOTAL price paid throughout the day for all the energy would go down. If it doesn't then in reality no money is saved.

Paul

If you only look at cost that would be true but there's aspects of power supply that make the problem more interesting

One thing that's not easy to show is how the cost of every additional MW of demand goes up from the position of the suppliers - it's like buying seats on easyJet; the first ones are fine but as you approach capacity you really get squeezed, and at peak peak times the cost can go up by a couple of orders (the 6quid saving per kwH in the article would still leave change to the supplier)

Also a lot of energy use is not "discretionary": heating and AC shift the baseline load over the year/day effectively meaning your cup of tea or running the washer goes up in cost as a result (you can see the seasonal effect clearly in the UK graph I posted)

What these schemes are intended to do are shift the load that can be shifted and it looks like they've opted for carrot over stick for a change

-sd

DrFfybes wrote:Surely moving demand to a cheaper price time will simply increase the price at the new time. Price goes from $60 to 220 very quickly, but if the demand was spread then the 220 would drop, but the 60 would increase. The question is whether the TOTAL price paid throughout the day for all the energy would go down. If it doesn't then in reality no money is saved.

The problem with big demand spikes is you have to build lots of power stations which are running for only a couple of hours a day. That's a lot of capex and manning for very little output = high cost

Energy generated 24hrs/day costs $60. Regardless of quantity. Even if the demand was double, it would still cost $60. Sure you'd have twice as many power stations, but selling twice the output, so same unit cost. Energy generated <24 hours a day is MUCH more expensive, hence the price spikes when demand does. And the shorter and higher the spike the higher the cost.

Also for the greenies much easier to build renewables to supply that baseline. The spikes are almost always supplied by available-on-demand fossil fuels. Gas in the UK, probably diesel in Aus??

Gryff

gryffron wrote:Gas in the UK, probably diesel in Aus??

Gryff

Coal traditionally
Quickly being replaced by renewables/battery/pumped hydro

servodude wrote:ia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
we have


(ignoring heating for now - which is really the difference between the seasons) there's quite a pronounced evening peak


-sd

Servo, your a clever dude. Could you attempt to draw a curve on this chart to show the new winter demand if ALL energy consumption was provided by electricity, including heating. This is the elephant in the room and no one seems to want to quantify it. Even more interesting would be to produce a corresponding cost chart based on 100% electricity and zero hydrocarbons.. Scary.

scotview wrote:

servodude wrote:ia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
we have


(ignoring heating for now - which is really the difference between the seasons) there's quite a pronounced evening peak


-sd

Servo, your a clever dude. Could you attempt to draw a curve on this chart to show the new winter demand if ALL energy consumption was provided by electricity, including heating. This is the elephant in the room and no one seems to want to quantify it. Even more interesting would be to produce a corresponding cost chart based on 100% electricity and zero hydrocarbons.. Scary.

That very neatly illustrates the point of the proposal outlined in The Times the other day about trying to shift demand from that 4.30/6.30 pm slot which I commented on in the Smart meters thread.

Dod

scotview wrote:Could you attempt to draw a curve on this chart to show the new winter demand if ALL energy consumption was provided by electricity, including heating. This is the elephant in the room and no one seems to want to quantify it. Even more interesting would be to produce a corresponding cost chart based on 100% electricity and zero hydrocarbons.. Scary.

Yeah scary possibly

Do we know what proportion of UK houses presently (or traditionally only use leccy for heating?)

Grabbing a fag pack..and looking at Google

- let's say 28million households in the uk?

- 7 million don't have gas - half-ish of those only electric heating?

But I know from tracking my outgoings that my electric usage goes up by about 30% in winter just running the fans on my gas heating.

So if that graph was really simply the arithmetic average of all UK houses I'd reckon that the difference between the seasons, given the assumptions above, would probably triple
- so that would give a peak at about 1.3kW (which would be equivalent to every house in the UK having one old fashioned electric bar on full while watching a modern TV at the same time... which kind of passes the traditional sanity check pub test we should apply to fag pack calcs?!)

Certainly a lot higher than in the graph but something that could be mitigated using demand shifting given what the "discretionary" peak looks like

You can also see the effect of "coming up to temp" in the way the difference settles above the summer peak (it doesn't just recreate the same shape higher up)
- someone should really suggest good insulation!

-sd