If you present a customer with an actual silly-low price like that, you create all kinds of weird incentives for weird capital expenditure. Like a huge battery in your house – or using an electric car as the battery.
We are not a bunch or survivalists, living in a cabin in Wyoming, with a stock of baked beans and a load of ammo. We live in a proper country, with an electricity grid and centralised generation. No engineer would design a stupid system like this.
But lots of people make nice money out of it: battery makers, inverter makers, makers of most electrical things. Electricians – one of the most arrogant professions here in the UK, due to the regulatory support of their profession – must be loving it. Lots of people are laughing all the way to the bank.
But, when wealth is created like that, it is merely transferred from somebody else. So who is paying for this stupidity? For every winner is a loser. Well, like with the stock market, the people who are paying are those who are not playing. The stock market merely transfers money from the pockets of the uninformed/ignorant/on the outside to the pockets of the informed/ on the inside. Arbitrage of ignorance.
Much the time the beneficiary is China, which is a real bad idea, since they are a clear military enemy of the free world.
The world has gone crazy.
Last year, we replaced our oil boiler with an air source heat pump.
We then replaced our two diesel cars with EVs.
This year we installed solar on our roof, and we have recently had a Tesla powerwall battery fitted.
Based on electricity prices last year, I expected to recoup my costs after seven years (excluding cost of the cars). Now electricity is much higher, the payback period has reduced to around 3 years.
For comparison, we were spending £100/month on oil, £100/month on electricity, £300/month on diesel. This summer we have driven nearly 12,000 miles in the cars and since end of May have paid a total of £280 in electricity.
As we head in to winter, solar production will obviously decrease but I anticipate will be sufficient to cover the base load of the house throughout the winter. The powerwall and EVs will charge overnight during the cheap electricity period 11.30 – 5.30 at £0.075 p/kWh.
For us, it has been a no-brainer. Most of our friends are doing (or trying to – the solar installers are booked up for the next year or more, and batteries are in very short supply) the same thing.
Peter wrote:
How can € 0.002 per kWh represent anything in the real world?
I don’t understand the question. How can it not? You use 1000 kWh, you pay 2€. We have even occasionally seen negative prices – that’s because some energy sources, like nuclear power plats, can’t simply be shut off. (Well, of course they can, but that will cost the owner more than paying someone for using the energy produced.)
So who is paying for this stupidity?
The end customer. I don’t expect that this situation gets a lot of coverage in British media but it is a top priority item in the EU right now with discussions at the highest level about how to handle the situation.
The world has gone crazy.
Well, if you want market solutions without government intervention, this is what you get in an unstable situation.
I don’t expect that this situation gets a lot of coverage in British media
Sure, because we don’t have such a system here. You pay more or less the same all the time.
Based on electricity prices last year, I expected to recoup my costs after seven years (excluding cost of the cars). Now electricity is much higher, the payback period has reduced to around 3 years.
The calculations behind that would be interesting.
Your Economy 7 price of £0.075/kWh is great, at a substantially higher cost during the day. I decided to not go for E7 because it could be used only for a heat pump (storage heaters are a very 1960s thing 
) and the COP of air to water pumps falls dramatically at night, due to the lower air temp (typically). It is also fairly easy – apart from powering that heat pump – to reduce one’s electricity usage quite a long way. Eventually one ends up debating whether a desktop PC should be left on 24/7… in terms of electronics failure rate it certainly should be!
Germany supposedly has some of the highest energy prices in the world. Currently I pay 0,35€/kWh for electricity and 0,14€/kWh of natural gas for heating. Both are set to rise further in the coming months.
We pay a flat rate per month based on consumption in the previous 12 months payment period. We have no smart meter yet, so a model like described by LeSving wouldn’t work here. Germany is much too far behind in digitalisation for that.
Here is one data point for the UK.
On a per kWh basis, the energy price cap means we’ll pay 52 p/kWh for electricity and 15 p/kWh for gas. This represents an 86% rise from the April – September cap of 28p for electricity and a 114% rise from 7p for gas.
For many years it was 15p/kWh so this is a 3.5x rise!
Sure, because we don’t have such a system here
I’m sure you do, only it doesn’t trickle down to each household. Something has to set the price of electricity, and what you pay is some flat rate scheme of some sort I would guess
It’s just free market principles. What’s wrong right now is discussed in just about every channel, forum etc It’s hard to pinpoint one single thing, other than pointing out that some restrictions should be included to prevent the prices from skyrocketing. IMO we are seeing the true price of wind power, mixed in with a lack of restrictions in selling energy out of Norway.
It depends on which way the electricity generating pipeline was privatised.
I started looking up the current UK structure but went down a rabbit hole. Years ago, it was the CEGB which owned the whole thing, so they didn’t have to sell the stuff between different bits of itself. Today it is probably something similar at the very top.
Below that, you have a load of resellers e.g. British Gas resells electricity (and probably broadband too, and milk, the way things are going).
The CEGB didn’t own the whole thing. They ran the generating.stations in England and Wales plus interconnectors to France and Scotland. They were also responsible for the national grid high voltage system
They also, which was a crucial point for advising on planning for the future.
The majority of consumers were served by a number of electricity boards which were regulated by a an electricity council.
It actually was an excellent system.
A) Solar + insulation have to done by professionals
B) Stop voting for conservative clowns who have agenda against solar + wind, stop voting for lefty clowns who have an agenda against nuclear
