This only happens if a small percentage of people have live pricing. If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes - for example by turning the heating off in unused rooms to save money.

In turn, that means that at times of crisis, prices will be high, but not 1000x high.

Gasoline is another resource with live pricing, and suggesting "I want a subscription where I pay $3 per gallon fixed for a year, no matter how much I use and no matter what happens to the price of oil" wouldn't be something a fuel station would entertain, because they know that when the price was under $3 you'd buy elsewhere, and when the price was over $3 you'd buy millions of gallons and resell at a profit.

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HWR_14 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> If most people have live pricing, most people have an incentive to act on price changes

It's not latency free to act on price changes. If they spike while people are asleep, what do you expect would happen? And would people get a notification everytime the price changed at all. The logistics are hard.

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bradfa 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Some solar inverter systems already have a data connection to get live pricing information from the grid operator. It’s not that big of a problem to implement, although it definitely isn’t pervasive yet.

Minute by minute pricing is not crazy to expect and integration with HVAC, battery systems, and inverters isn’t crazy to expect to occur.

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LikeBeans 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think pulling for live pricing by inverters and appliances is not realistic on a grand scale. Using time of day pricing is much simpler imo.

	▲	londons_explore a minute ago \| parent [-]
		[delayed]

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londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In reality most people will buy "smart" appliances which turn on and off based on price - eg. a water heater which picks the cheapest hour to reheat the tank for the day, or a fridge/freezer which cools everything more in cheap hours, an EV charger which starts selling rather than buying power at the highest priced hours, etc. It's all fairly simple software as soon as energy companies do live pricing, so pretty much every wifi gadget will do it.

People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".

It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.

Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.