Crazy how it is with dynamic electricity price. Must be extremely inconvenient to monitor and react!
Here a border away in Saint Petersburg, Russia, we have electricity at a fixed rate of 4,9c/kWh in daytime and 2,7c/kWh in the night. There aren’t any variable price tariffs in here, so the bill is always about the same.
We also have central heating (part coal/gas, part nuclear) that goes for 21€/Gcal (1,8с/kWh), so there is no need to expend electricity.
You could get fixed price plans for around 5c/kwh. However take into account that yesterday was an anomaly. The average price for the last 28 days is 12.65c/kWh. During the summer time it was around 1 to 3c/kWh.
Polyurethane is better insulator, doesn’t absorb moisture and doesn’t require a vapor barrier but is also much more expensive. It’s what I insulated my shed with so that I can let it get cold if need be and will not have moisture problems later.
Finland has more than 330 hydro power plants, with total capacity of over 3,100 megawatts in 2022. Hydro accounted for 18% of Finland’s total installed power generation capacity and 22% of total power generation in 2021.
WTFINLAND
Hydro-Québec Production main power plants (2020) Total Others (49 hydro, 1 therma) - 13302 MW
This is Québec only. Other provinces that have more water and hills still have less hydro.
I don’t think the fact that Finland is north and cold and icy is a factor either. A lot of Québec’s power generating stations are in the desolate north, with some of the biggest ones on rivers flowing into the Hudson’s Bay, and they were built in the 70s.
However looking at the relief and hydro and topo maps of Finland, while there’s plenty of lakes, there’s no strong rivers. Couple this with an apparent ban on new hydro, and we got the answer.
Wouldn’t there be a price cap in events that the wholesale market has anomalies like this? That’s standard in most jurisdictions. The wholesale price is still “real” because there’s some system or market condition reflected in this spike, it’s just not normal for ratepayers at the distribution level to not have a price cap protection. It’s like the opposite scenario if the price isn’t high enough to cover the cost in actually delivering the energy and running the grid, so a Global Adjustment would come in to effect to cover the difference. There can even be surplus conditions where the price is in the negative.
We have price caps in the UK. They’re not perfect but they have stopped us from paying a lot more than we would have this past year. And the UK is definitely no (did you mean to say?) utopia. Or do you think a price cap to protect consumers is something from a distopia?
Big part of the price was that Finland was close to needing rolling blackouts, because there wasn’t enough electricity. All transmit lines were fully utilized, and all available power plants on, so only way to get the consumption down was with the price.
It worked, Finland dropped the electricity consumption almost 10% and we got through quite easily.
I guess with my knowledge of energy markets, a situation like that would result in higher prices just by the way the market functions, responding to supply and demand. The graph here appears to be a market clearing price rather than a price after adjustments, where a lot of incentives would be brought in like an intentional price hike.
We were in the opposite situation though where we were running into surplus overnight during a period of energy transition. You’d see these stupid misinformed articles being like, “the government is giving away YOUR electricity to the US!” Was like during the 2003 blackout where we needed to bring large loads online carefully alongside generation, people were freaking out how casinos and industry got power before them. The need for dispatchable loads connected to the high voltage transmission grid in that situation wasn’t as headline worthy.
Staying warm is not the issue. It’s the price for that comfort. Running a 1kW space heater for 24 hours at yesterday’s prices would have cost a little over 26 euros.
I have never heard of anyone that currently has a coal-heated house. I thought it was entirely dead in the developed world. Here these heating options are common district heating, geothermal, direct electric heating, some other kind of heat pump, biofuel (like pellets), and a tiny bit of oil and gas.
The most popular by far is district heating, after that comes electric heating (which includes electricity used for geothermal heat pumps and other kinds) and then biofuel. Gas and oil are barely visible on a graph.
I just tried to find a place in my country which sells coal for heating but alas I didn’t succeed. You can of course buy coal but its intended purpose is always grilling or smithing.
Your thinking of charcoal, which are chunks of wood converted into almost pure carbon by heating them above their combustion temperature in a low oxygen environment. He was talking about coal that was mined out of the ground. Plants from an ancient swamps that didn’t decompose, but were converted into almost pure carbon from millions of years of heat and pressure from being buried.
Do you really think, that’s what anyone pays? Because that’s not how consumer contracts work. You’re paying whatever you agreed upon when signing the contract.
Nope. More than 80% of my usage comes from heating and driving and I’ve heavily optimized car charging and heat buffering to make use of low cost times.
Heating can only be optimized for about 24h periods, that’s why I can supplement my heating with wood from my own forest.
Driving, between April and October pretty much only happens using electricity from my own roof, between May and September the entire house uses less than 100kWh from the grid.
Before I signed at Tibber, I had of course compared my recorded load profiles including simulations for automated usage optimization against EPEX 60min day-ahead prices and I would have been at less than 0.23€/kWh on average since 2020, including the high prices of 2022.
Are you actually paying the daily spot price? Not a flat amount with the utility provider taking the hit? That’s how I know it from any other country, unless you have a specific contract where the user made an informed decision to opt for market rates.
Mainly the reason is that many countries do not have hourly capable meters, so calculating the price for each hour is not possible. Flat rate is needed when you just have the cumulative read once a month.
In Finland the meters communicate automatically once a day, and send the 24h values to grid company. The next generation meters which are now installed can communicate once a hour.
Sounds more like an incentive to put up solar panels and battery storage. Even if it isn’t enough to go off grid totally, you can at least store on cheap days.
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