> Also various appliances like washing machines or dish washers can be timed

In theory. Then the fire department comes and says "do not run washing machines and dish washers while you're asleep or away". And with that you're back to running them during peak hours.

We just had that discussion in the media here, due to the introduction of peak power as a part of the electricity bill.

Also insurance companies. Your home insurance might cover water damage from appliance going wrong, but if you aren't present or sleeping they might try to get out of it... And single bigger leak will waste any gains from price savings for years or forever...

Where does this happen? Also, how do they know?

Here's some semi-random news articles regarding this:

https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/advarer-mot-oppvaskmaskin-om-nat...

https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/bonn-fra-brannsjefen-i-fredri...

They know because they have to put out the fire in the middle of the night, and they do an investigation afterwards to determine the cause of the fire so they know it was e.g. the washing machine.

Presumably the fire department is merely offering advice, because they’ve been called out to dryer fires. And they’re the fire department, not the energy efficiency department.

You will be surprised how often disembarkations in the electrical space go hand in hand with a potential embarkation into the fire space.

At Octopus Energy, I think we’ve made negative prices available to retail customers (at least in the UK, not sure about the other countries we’re retailing in).

People getting paid to charge their cars because the grid has a surplus of (probably green) energy.

Everybody I know with an electric car has this tarriff.

One of them is trying to install a heat pump too to double down on this approach.

It rarely gets discussed in the media for some reason.

I just want to compliment Octopus Energy, I just tried popping over for a quote, and the website just says "No. You don't want to switch right now". Not sure if this is common with other energy suppliers, but it looks good (I'll remember for when/if I do end up switching next).

This is mandated by OFGEM in the UK now. uSwitch will also give you the current "best deal".

I have done some work with the Octopus systems and they are very new an agile, but don't handle the complexity that the big 6 have put in place over several decades. The overall metering and settlements business in the UK is quite complex especially including legacy gas and elec accounts and meters.

The most recent in the UK was 11 June, I can confirm I had a negative rate for a few hours then.