Should critical peak and off peak prices flow through to retail markets ?

[etienne]

At work, we have projects regarding load balancing in order to see how we could stabilize or move the load in private houses. A lot of technology is available, but there is no incentive. My feeling is that electricity producers need these peak prices in order to balance the budget, and so they don’t really provide the needed information and the incentives to make theses technologies financially interesting.

i’d be very happy if I could get for example off peak electricity 20% cheaper, and peak electricity 20% more expensive. This could be real time information and it would justify all the smart grid technologies that are now available for houses (from batteries to wash machines) but that nobody implements because electricity just has all the time the same price.

Utility Dive has an interesting article bringing up some of the issues.
http://www.utilitydive.com/news/is-renewable-energy-threatening-power-reliability/443701/

Best regards,

Etienne

[johnm33]

Some interesting thoughts on that subject, http://mtkass.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=off+peak+power

[etienne]

Yes, this is the direction in which I would go. But people have many more possibilities now than they had in 2012 (cars, batteries...) and the appliance are now available. The bottleneck is the electrical network that is not as smart as what the owners want us to believe.