I think freezers would definitely be a gimmick as they don't really use that much power.

I can see it being a nice feature for higher-load tasks though, e.g. my dishwasher uses about 1.8kWh for a cycle. On this tariff it's trivial to compute the best start-end time based on the 30 minute price windows, so if the dishwasher could do that it would be pretty sweet. Right now my dishwasher just supports a 3h delay function. I wouldn't mind if my dishwasher had a (local) API you could hit to control its schedule. Sadly this usually comes with some cloud requirement though.

Our Mitsubishi heat pump water heater has integration with some solar systems and weather services to attempt to time hot water production to solar peak.

We don't have solar panels but have a solar energy plan (cheap during the day, expensive during dawn/sundown, average overnight with fixed hourly schedule independent of actual production) so for us it's just programmed to follow a fixed schedule of prioritizing filling up during the solar hours and 100% forbidden from filling up during the expensive "duck curve" hours.

Things like freezers don't take a huge amount of power. It's definitely about things that do space heating/cooling. The traditional approach is to put your electric water heater on a timer. That way you can schedule your hot water use on a consistent schedule but only heat the water at night when you can be sure the rates are lower.

You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.

For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.

I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.

I'm following battery prices and you can now get 25kwh for 3.5k. This will be a solved problem a lot sooner for a lot of people.

A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.

Just buy a home battery. Sheesh, there were solutions to problems before LLMs

Many homes in Norway has this. Its a smart plug in your fuse box. For me it offsets EV charging untill the electricity is at its cheapest, it also cuts down on heating for the peak hours etc etc.

There are devices to store hot water.

Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift?

That seems counterproductive and exploitative.

Australia has that in an even more extreme form, although it's more an emu curve there. In fact the CA one isn't really a duck any more either is it?

Would you mind sharing the tariff name and company?

I would also like to know the company name please.

Would love to get a Forster battery + invertor system installed. Seems like the battery is £2k for 16kWh and maybe £1k for an inverter? so interested in your cost breakdown.

https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage

Chris Norbury, CEO of E.ON UK said:

"Some of the modelling we have suggests that you could get to a position by 2030 where if the wholesale price was zero, bills would still be the same as where they are today because of the increase in non-commodity costs."

Fixed costs are enormous and are increasingly driven by paying for the CFDs that back up the economics of wind. The CFD scheme allows wind producers to de-risk from market prices by locking in a fixed price with the government who then recover this from bills.

So, yes you get to enjoy low variable costs when it's windy, but you pay for the priviledge year round.

I do think that wind has a part to play in the UKs long term energy mix, but by this point I'm happy to call the current scale-up a complete false economy.

Household and industrial electricity bills are double what they were in real terms 15 years ago.

Some chargers communicate directly with the energy supplier and charge at the cheaper rates.

You can do this yourself as well with home assistant (if your charger supports it) and some API calls. It's just a matter of telling the charger when to start and stop the charge. The rest of the communication between the charger and the car is some protocol I can't remember the name of.

Could be wrong but I guess it more likely communicates with the charger. The car will always try to draw if it's plugged in, but most chargers can be switched on ("charge") and off ("don't charge") remotely. It's probably quite trivial to have something watch the price of power and on/off as appropriate

Energy providers use whatever internet API there is for either chargers or cars.

Octopus UK has a list of charger models and car brands they support for their special tariff for cheap off-peak EV charging.

The charging cable has a protocol for negotiating power, so either side can pause and restart charging.

My car hits the api for my power company and knows how much charge it needs and plans out its charging schedule, always avoids peak.

No the smart meter communicate with the charger.

Explained above, I WFH, single (no kids) and have an EV - but I don't use the car for commute etc so I can be choosy about when I charge the car and take advantage of the ultra cheap periods.

Fixed price advantage is you use power whenever you want. Your average unit rate is just the price on the tariff. Predictable and safe.

Agile price changes every 30 minutes, so you need to do a little planning. But if you take advantage of the cheap periods you'll generally come out on top. My average unit rate last year was like 16.5p p/kWh whereas the standard tariff was 23-24p, so some nice savings. There's also some risk involved - the price can go up to £1 p/kWh and a few days in winter in 2024 it did that for a short while (around the peak periods) so you have to take on that risk - and obviously being exposed to the world energy markets does mean you get exposure to stuff like wars impacting global markets.

I mean there's nothing stopping you from using lots of power between 4pm-7pm it's just you'll drag that average unit rate up to the point where it's probably not worth it. When I say "use lots of power" I don't mean like I sit in the dark between 4-7pm, it's just I avoid the big ticket power users like ovens, showers, cookers etc

Not GP but I assume the fixed prices have to be fairly high to account for people using lots of power during peak demand when most people use lots of power?

Yes - the wholesale price of electricity can sometimes be very low (or negative), particularly when there is a lot of wind. And some tariffs pass that on to consumers. But I don't see how it works at scale.

This is because the wind farms don't get paid the wholesale price. They get paid their guaranteed, index-linked CFD strike price. This means that, for every £1/MWh drop in the wholesale price, they get an exactly matching extra £1/MWh to top them back up to their strike price. They can bid a low price into the market safe in the knowledge they'll get paid their CFD price.

And that top-up has to be paid by somebody: either other bill payers, or the taxpayer.

That wouldn't be so bad if the strike prices were low. But they're not. The recent "Allocation Rounds" guaranteed offshore wind farms in excess of GBP100/MWh, index linked for at least 15 years.

To put it in context, these numbers are higher than the wholesale gas price - even with an uplift for carbon externalities - for all but the worst period of the Ukraine invasion a few years back.

But it gets worse: on top of these extremely high fixed prices for wind, we also have to pay for the installation of tens of billions of pounds (if not more) of new grid connections, because the wind farms are nowhere near the centres of demand. This cost is also added to bills.

It doesn't end there. Readers may be aware that the wind doesn't always blow. Which means we need something that's able to spin up or down on demand. In the UK, that means gas. So we have the ridiculous situation of having to pay the gas plants to sit around doing nothing, just so we can call on them at minimal notice when needed. And remember: there can be long periods with basically zero wind or solar (the famous 'dunkelflaute' phenomenon in winter).

This means we need non-wind capacity pretty much equal to peak winter demand, in order to be safe during the week or so some years when there's no wind.

So we're paying to build and maintain TWO generation systems in parallel.

This is why electricity costs in the UK are on an ever-upwards trajectory: all these 'policy costs' are added to the wholesale price, and are a large and growing component of the _retail_ price that most consumers pay.

Depressingly, 'storage' doesn't fix this. Indeed, it's a fun exercise to calculate how much electrical energy is consumed in the peak of winter in the UK over a one- or two-week period and then figure out how much the necessary battery capacity would cost... or, even more fun, how many Welsh and Scottish valleys we'd need to flood to create the pumped-storage capacity. We're talking tens of trillions of pounds.

I fear the UK has, with the best of intentions, made a mistake of generation-defining proportions with its bet on wind :(