I had a similar contract when I lived in IL, and I also liked it and it made me more conscious of my energy usage patterns.

But there was always this niggling concern that the price could spike to 200x like it did in Texas, without me being able to react. Regulation to cap the peak rate would help allay consumer fears, IMO, while still offering ample profit potential to providers.

Even with a cap, it feels like it would just take one freak occurrence (power plant/transformer/blizzard) meltdown to erase any potential savings from subscribing to dynamic pricing.

Nah, just switch over to a generator for your bare essential needs and hunker down for a bit.

You can't go into a dynamic environment and only plan for upsides.

Fixed pricing is basically dynamic pricing + insurance. In the expected case, you pay more over any period of time if you take the insurance. If you can afford the risks, going without insurance tends to be cheaper.

In California TOU plans, there are caps on all three of:

1. Price per kWh - $1 last I checked

2. Hours per day at max price - ~9

3. Days per year max price charged - ~10

Even in the worst case, not too scary.

With the horror stories in Texas, I was assuming significantly worse caps. Regardless, I have very little consumption I can time shift to off-peak hours (laundry? dishwasher?), so dynamic pricing would unlikely ever work out for me.

I want to see electricity meters configurable with a "max I am happy to pay per day" setting. When that limit is near, they beep/alert you. When you hit the cap, they turn off the whole house.

You could adjust the limit as you please, with a default of perhaps $100 - but they spare you from million dollar bills, even with uncapped dynamic pricing.

If a reasonable number of these were deployed, the prices would never spike super high, because there would always be someone else willing to turn off their tumble dryer to save 50 bucks.

There’s circuit breakers with wifi connectivity that lets you turn off load through an api. Could code this up or use their apps for energy management.

Consumer demand just isn’t there for this type of product yet

It's easier to use and get cutoff later

Just hoping that everything in fridge doesn't spoil until billing resets at midnight? That doesn't sound like a gamble most people would be willing to make, especially on a regular basis. I would imagine that at least for the (shrinking) middle class and above that widespread instability in the grid will drive the sale of a lot of PV systems and battery storage.

From my experience with regular power outages in the Seattle metropolitan area, your fridge will last 24 hours after the power goes out, if you don't open the door.

Your water heater will provide water hot enough for a quick shower for a couple days.

Sure, that doesn't sound like a stretch, though most people would find that not being able to open the fridge for many hours would cramp their style...

Oh the humanity!

That's a neat idea and all but what do you do when it's -20° out? Everyone around you simultaneously needs heating but no one's trying tumble dry anything.

but you've hit your daily limit? It's one thing to charge your Tesla later, it's anything

If you live in an area that can drop to -20, you should be prepared for HVAC failure.

Just like when I lived in Iowa, the car always had blankets in the trunk. When I lived in Arizona, there was always a gallon of drinking water in the trunk (it works in the radiator, too!).

Just common sense.

While I completely agree with you (and still carry blankets in my trunk in AZ!) the freeze in Texas was an anomaly that may nor may not have been reasonable to plan for:

> Texas experienced temperatures over 50 °F [28 °C] below normal. Records more than a century old were broken

How many people have planned and can execute plans for once in a century events that happen at scale?

I’d consider myself more prepared than most, but if a large chunk of Phoenix lost power in the middle of the summer for more than 24 hours, I think the result would be even worse. There was a study from a few days ago that predicted >12k deaths during a heat wave+power outage. That makes me reconsider not getting whole house batteries ;-)

Exactly, a market based solution!

It’s possible, but in California for instance, I see large utilities constantly placing blockages in the way via regulatory capture of the PUC.

It's called a "TOU" service plan, and I've had one for several years now, through San Diego G&E.

It’s been gutted for future customers - https://solarrights.org/savecaliforniasolar/

Home solar installs (and that change) would be NEM, not TOU. California had a mandate to move everyone to TOU a while back, though some might still be on the old plans.

As a residential electricity user there is little reason for me to be on tou unless I also have an Nem for installed solar. All the tou might do is expose me to inconvenience and high costs.

That really depends on your usages. The extreme examples are if you have an electric car that you can charge overnight instead of peak hours, or work any shift that's not 9-5 so that you avoid the 6-9pm peak hours.

And of course the whole point is to incentivize changing usages to using less power during peak hours, which it does better than the old plans. That's always going to be a slight inconvenience to get people to change habits.

It's mainly going to inconvenience the poorest people who have the least amount of flexibility.

I have solar and a battery so it's really very little inconvenience for me, but those who can't afford that (and it's harder to afford now), will pay the worst costs.

By disincentivizing residential solar, the private utilities maximize their profits and decrease renewable energy installation.

The poorest people still won't be able to afford residential solar even with the greatest incentives. And the old rates that forced the electric company to buy electricity at 1:1 retail rates which was never sustainable. Those rates include grid maintenance, not just power generation. Unless you have a battery, your peak demand is likely to be when solar generation is low, so you're still reliant on the same grid during peak hours. This is the duck curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Under the old plan, if you have solar and no battery and exported enough power during the day to cover your electricity costs at night, how much are you paying for grid upkeep? Basically zero. So who is going to be paying for the grid? Those who cannot afford to get solar. That would become a huge problem when the majority of people have solar panels.

https://youtu.be/C4cNnVK412U?t=1048 talks about this subject in-depth more. Timestamp at the relevant part to our discussion.

But they don't buy at retail rates, so that's a fallacy. The CA utilities pay a fraction of retail rate for residential grid energy inputs with even the old NEM. And I am charged a separate grid connection fee with that setup, so nothing of what you're saying seems to align with my direct experience nor with the policy coverage I've read.

In my experience, any excess you generate is given to you in 1:1 credit. Any excess in the credit after a year is paid in a fraction of rates, yes. Sure I have a daily basic charge, but that's on the TOU plan, not NEM. Otherwise what did you think NEM 3.0 changed if NEM 2.0 was already a fraction of retail rates? Which power company are you on and what rates are you getting?

Even the CPUC's website says "retail rate (including generation, distribution, and transmission components)": https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NEM/

The grid has to be built to handle peak power, and if you don't have a battery, solar doesn't help with that. But it's not fair to split up grid fees evenly, say in the daily basic charge I have in my TOU plan, because poorer people will use less power and contribute less to peak. And you've brought up points on why raising prices during peak is no good either, then it'll be only affordable to the ones who have solar to offset it. And any fees only to solar customers disincentivizes solar.

So how can you incentivize residential solar without passing grid fees to those who cannot afford solar?

Utilities are actually incentivized to charge more per kwh in order to capture profits at an allowed percentage of that kwh. That really serves nobody but the shareholders of the private utilities, and it certainly does not serve the poorer customers. The poorer customers would be served by the fastest move to renewable energy, as pollution from fossil fuel generation also disproportionately affects their health due to placement of generation in their neighborhoods disproportionately.

I found this podcast interesting in terms of lower cost technical solutions as well as community control of their own microgrids, but it's really unclear how to push back private utility lobbying to get there.

https://theamphour.com/630-renewable-energy-policy-with-ari-...

Those are completely different topic than residential solar though. I don't disagree, we should be moving to renewables. But even in a community microgrid, is each person responsible for the solar panels on their own roof? Or does a community control manage it and can just intrude onto a homeowner's roof to fix the panels if something is broken. Or should the community build standalone solar power stations so there's no worry about a broken roof here and there, or trees or snow blocking the panels.

And there's still the issue of what do you when the sun is down and the duck curve hits? You wouldn't want a fossil fuel generator in your community microgrid. But batteries are still expensive, who in the community wants to pay for it? A grid is going to beat a microgrid in economy of scale.

It's not a completely different topic. If a microgrid interface is allowed, for example, then different community and investment models can be considered on a per microgrid basis. If only utility models exist, then most likely a much narrower set of models exist - and likely under serving many communities and groups in addition to higher pricing.

We have a dynamic (hourly rates) contract as well and well and we sometimes see negative electricity prices. This does not mean electricity ends up being free since there is also the transmission charge, energy tax, renewable energy surcharge and value added tax on all of these to pay. Do you actually get paid to use power, i.e. do you not have to pay any of the mentioned charges?

If they do get 100% free, this continually reraises a question of mine: outside of crypto mining, is there anything a consumer can do to capture benefit from free electricity? Low efficiency synthesis of ethanol, hydrogen, carbon capture, desalination, precious mineral enrichment from seawater? With net metering rates tanking, I would love to see some way to productively capture spare juice. The duck curve is not going anywhere.

If in a cold climate, heat the earth under your house. Then, that earth slowly gives its heat back to you over the coming months (soil is quite a poor thermal conductor, so the heat hangs around underground for a really long time)

Obscenely powerful heaters are rather cheap. Assuming prices only go negative pretty rarely, you really want 100 kilowatts or more of heaters under your house to get as much free power as possible.

Residential power here for single family homes -- the type which could reasonably do what you suggest -- is almost always single phase 120/240V. As an upper bound, let's consider 400A service. (Most homes have services smaller than 400A, and even 400A service is typically delivered to a pair of smaller panels to keep conductor and busbar sizes manageable.) Such heaters would be considered continuous loads, reducing the 400A service to 320A of current. Resistive heaters are a linear load, so we can multiply 240V * 320A to get 76.8 kW at maximum.

Hitting 76 kW is wildly impractical. Exceeding 100 kW is nonsense.

Easiest is probably using your house as a thermal battery and just temporarily dumping energy into cooling or heating down to a set temp and then when allowing your house to normalize when prices go up.

Alternatively, charge your own batteries and load balance. It's boring but effective.

You could have your computer queued to run high energy ops when free, queue training models, compiling, etc. Which would generate a lot of heat, thus cranking the AC.

I could see how this could easily 10x your power draw for a few thousand dollars and work in the background.

Often the base price is negative but you still pay some for taxes etc. Yesterday, net price was also negative because the base price was so ridiculously low...