I wonder if there’s consultants or perhaps even the utility itself that can crunch those numbers for you. Since your primary load is electric heating, and you don’t pay directly for air conditioning, you’re using the bulk of your energy during theoretically off-peak times. That said, since there are a lot of building in your area that use electric heating, the off-peak rate may not be as low as other places.
I found numbers here:
https://hourlypricing.comed.com/pricing-table-today/
I do not see a button to conveniently download, say, a year’s worth of data, but you could probably write a script to do it.
Thanks! I’ll see if I can get some answers from this.
I doubt that the UK will ever follow Australia to the “five minute intervals - the spot market”, but there is talk of giving the power retailers the option of either throttling supply for high-demand appliances or raising prices at peak times. Owners of EVs who can charge at night already benefit from reduced rates.
I am not sure how this would work in practice but I guess that domestic users would have their washing machine, dishwasher and any other appliance with a high demand on a separate circuit that the supplier could switch on and off somehow.
Back in the Jurassic the power generators wanted to sell excess nightime power, so end users put their hot water systems on a cheap rate - which had it own meter. You could put other things on it - various other forms of heat storage worked.
Now where I am we have the notion of a “controlled load” - often called off-peak. That still allows items to run at a reduced rate - but often the best (cheap, and when suppliers want to offload power) time has now swapped to the middle of the day. So now my HWS runs at midday. People with pools might run the pool filter motors on this rate. But you have to have these items wired to that supply. There isn’t an option to run general stuff off the circuit. For that you just choose the best time of day to get a cheaper rate. One reason why domestic devices like dishwashers and washing machines have delay timers. Your general use rate is always more than the off-peak controlled load rate for the same time.
There are a lot more potential smarts in the system, to the point suppliers might turn off loads in your house if needed. Turning off airconditioners is a possible option. (But we have peak load when it is hot, not when it is cold outside.) Moreover, they have the right to turn off my solar generation if grid stability starts to be an issue.
Here in Oz we have just about every traditional form of electricity generation apart from nuclear. And lots of wind and solar. But things are in flux. Renewables have caused significant disruption - and although we still burn a lot of coal, nobody is going to build a new coal power station, and many are being decommissioned instead of being refurbished. What this does do is bring about a much less stable market and less stable generation overall. The deregulated market means that there is significant meaningful commercial incentive to invest into the gap. And incentive for major government investment that hasn’t been seen for a while. But it isn’t a given that there is a solution. Sometimes you can’t get there from here, even when there is no choice but to start down the road.
A few companies have done well addressing the very short term energy market by buying grid scale batteries (mostly from Tesla.) Interestingly, in addition to a market for energy, there is a market for stability. This is one of the less talked about aspects of the grid. It really really needs stability of demand versus consumption. A useful metric of stability is frequency stability. The first thing you see when things are out of balance is the frequency changes - not enough that you would notice - but enough that it means something is potentially amiss. Generators are usually designed to drop off the grid if the frequency starts to move too quickly, and entire subsections of the grid will isolate as well. Behaving safely may involve a mass blackout - but it avoids major damage to infrastructure that could cost economy wrecking sums to fix.
So, if you have a battery, you can sell your capacity to step into the grid at milliseconds of notice to either adsorb or provide energy. This has a limit, but the first battery paid for itself in less than a year.
Solar and wind are traditionally useless at providing stability - because they are designed to follow the grid. Internally they have inverters that make sure that the power they generate is at exactly the frequency they see on the grid. There have been experiments at slaving these systems from a master control system to allow them to provide stability but there is a lot of installed capacity that won’t be doing that.
In a traditional grid, there isn’t a huge problem. You have huge rotating machines generating power and they just ride out any tiny fluctuations, so much so that the accepted word for stability is “inertia”. Lots of rotating iron and copper makes for a lot of inertia.
The point of the above rant is that there are potentially good reasons to think about freeing up the market. But it takes a deep breath. No matter what, the market will be left with a mix of state owned and privately owned generating capacity, and as things evolve, a wider mix of generation types. Managing the inherent conflicts takes balls of tungsten carbide, and is almost impossible to get right, or even just keep the complaints down to a low roar.
Back to the OP:
Assuming that all interior walls border on occupied conditioned space you effectively have very high levels of insulation on your interior walls and ceilings. The windows are clearly the culprit.
Assuming no leaks in the window frames the best bet might be heavy drapes that you can close at night or anytime a room with a window is not in use. Room darkening drapes are usually heavy enough to provide noticeable insulation.
Do you know any neighbors well enough to compare electric bills? This might just be the price you pay for your views.
You’d think that they could figure out how to generate electricity from all those tiny tornadoes.
It’s a devil of a problem to be sure.
Sure. But what you really need is an Interocitor.
Where’s @CalMeacham when we need him? He’ll build one out of mail-order parts and a big manual. Can we get the voltarator and astroscope add-ons?
On my bill, there is a fuel surcharge that occasionally becomes quite significant. It usually falls back into the noise after a few months, but can make prices spike. Perhaps they have one of those on your bill? It wouldn’t be part of the “base” price since it varies.
I don’t have much to add other than to comment that the OP’s electricity statement is really complicated. I live in a neighboring state (Missouri) and my bill from Ameren is so much simpler.
Same. Our electrical portion has 4 lines:
Basic Charge - this is the fixed rate everyone pays. $9/month.
First 800kWh price.
800-1500kWh price.
City tax
I guess if you use over 1500kWh in a month you’d have another line but I’ve never seen that before.