Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids

High-Five

Hey guys, A small site that checks, every day, whether making electricity cheaper when the grid is clean would actually cut CO₂. It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones. It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into. Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing. Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.

zeristor

I’ve been thinking about this the CO₂ usage could be part of the price. I had toyed with having a two dimensional price, the price alongside the CO₂ usage, but I guess that way madness lies.

jaapz

In my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly

maelito

On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.

a115ltd

Nice. On Octopus Agile in GB the price already tracks the mix (roughly 2.2x day-ahead wholesale), so the carbon-aware tariff exists in the wild. What bounds the response is not willingness but plumbing: which import/export products the supplier lets you pair, and the export limit on a single-phase connection (about 3.7 kW). I reconstructed a 200 kWh home battery on the published half-hourly rates for June to August: the exact optimum moves 50 to 60 kWh a day, and the connection is a bigger lever than the software by a factor of two to three.

HexPhantom

The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity

calinet6

Man, I am so tired of reading slop.

boshomi

Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price. https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht... Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation. Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.

Havoc

Mine is just flat pricing but I do try to align it. UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time. https://grid.iamkate.com/

flaburgan

The idea is interesting but unfortunately most of the people don't know the electricity price even now without this mechanism. This should be displayed on top of every washing machine everywhere to make it works

Panino

My electricity provider has a near real-time graph of energy generation by source (wind, solar, coal, etc.) and I use this during off-peak times to decide when to use or avoid certain loads. For example I love charging batteries when solar is producing more energy than is being used by customers. For a global map, check out Electricity Maps: https://app.electricitymaps.com/

mono442

The EU does that since the emissions are taxed via the EU ETS and it just results in the most expensive electricity in the world.