[nawitus]

Seems like a lot of complexity that can be solved by simple spot pricing for electricity. With spot pricing you can decouple solar and battery storage, as battery owners can make a profit by storing electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. Solar power owners can just sell to the grid at market rate.

[amalcon]

The problem with unrestricted spot pricing is that it's easy to end up with a surprise bill due to circumstances beyond your knowledge or control. E.g. the heating system fails in the apartment complex next door, so everyone plugs in space heaters. Your bill goes up also due to the increased demand. They can get insurance to cover this sort of eventuality -- can you?

I know two ways to fix this. First, obviously, you didn't say "unrestricted". There are various ways to restrict spot pricing to alleviate these issues, e.g. guarantee each home a particular amount at a fixed rate, and overages are at spot rates. Second, the "knowledge" angle can be attacked -- if you know that's happened, you can turn down your thermostat.

[nawitus]

In Nordpool the prices are set the day behind so there's no surprise bill. If the spot price goes up one actually should pay more, which incentives reducing electricity consumption.

I think your apartment complex example is not that realistic as it won't affect the spot price. Something more like a war will..

[ThatPlayer]

The majority of consumers at home would against spot pricing like that. California already has time-of-use pricing. Peak hours are 4-9pm when there's no solar. Peak usage is people coming home from work, turning on their lights, stoves, hot water, ovens, air conditioning, etc. Are they supposed to not do that?

Raising those rates too much would just be raising rates for everyone, just so those who are rich enough to afford solar panels and batteries make more profit.

[nawitus]

In a spot price system you can use electricity when the price is higher than average.

[spywaregorilla]

Works great until one day your energy goes up in price by a factor of 10,000.

[lotsofpulp]

Is it possible to set your power to shut off if it breaches a certain price?

[nawitus]

You can set a sensible max price, like sensible spot price system do.

[toast0]

I don't think spot pricing for electricity is all that simple.

I don't think it's really reasonable for households to pay the raw spot pricing. Someone else (utility company? government?) should be backstopping the prices for them. Time of use pricing based on typical prices seems reasonable enough.

For large industrial consumers, sure; let them pay based on actual costs, and they'll adjust their peaks to save money, which helps even out the supply/demand, which is great.

For electricity producers, spot pricing isn't really enough either, though. There needs to be some compensation for available capacity as well as generation.

I agree that it makes sense to try to decouple solar and storage though. Storage's ability to move capacity from peak generation to other times is valuable and should be compensated, and there's no reason to tie it to generation.

[nawitus]

96% of Norwegians use a spot price contract. Seems to work just fine.

[oivey]

Yeah, and then I can buy some insurance / hedges against the spot prices of electricity, day trade my air conditioner, and complete the financialization of my life.

[Ekaros]

At least on all supply side. Including residential.

On demand side, I think fixed price contracts could be allowed. It is then up to those contract providers to buy enough future contracts at lower price to generate profit. Or just ride it out and hope their math was correct.

[Animats]

Tried that in 2001. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...