A ‘decision paper’ supporting the introduction of Time of Use (TOU) tariffs for “domestic and small business electricity and gas customers”.
This should end well.
Damien Mulley writes:
So we’re getting smart meters next: To save us money of course. Time of use tariffs. Cheaper in the middle of the night to do washing, etc and I’m sure you won’t get screwed putting the kettle on during Coronation Street. It will “empower consumers to select the best tariff for them”
But go to Page 8 “dynamic tariffs, where the cost of consumption can vary at short notice” And there’s a tender for a PR wonk for them: I wonder who’ll win the smart metering contract?
Yikes.
Time Of Use Tarrifs (Commission for Energy Regulation)
Sponsored Link
Relax! Meter isn’t a dirty word. We already have meters for electricity and gas. The point of smart meters is to reduce use and cost at peak times and allow users to manage their usage more effectively.
This knee-jerk reaction to meters – any meters – reminds me of the time a mob attacked the home of a paediatrician in the UK because they thought he was a “paedo”phile.
That’s nearly verbatim what we were being told by iw (the bit before the paedo mob).
Seriously though unless the benefit of smart meters is that they are equipped to work with the portable energy monitoring equipment and newer smart heat control systems this gives licence to the supplier to break a day into smaller specific peak/off peak times, making it harder for consumer not to get caught out. We’re becoming slaves to monitoring the businesses monitoring our habits – supermarkets, energy, telecoms – and charging us handsomely for it. Can’t catch a break.
I could do with a laugh. Explain to me how supermarkets monitor my habits and charge me for it.
They use CCTV footage to track and monitor customer movement patterns through the store and position items accordingly, tracking the effects of the changes. The most rudimentary example is how you’ll usually find impulse purchases at the checkout. They don’t track an individual (though there’s room enough in trolley handles for RFID chips so I might be wrong) so much as the herd.
Supermarkets moving things around to get people off the “race track” is not new but the use of CCTV to help them decide where to place items isn’t what I expected as monitoring our habits. I’m impressed. Fair play to them for finding a new way of using data to increase sales, assuming it works. I thought the monitoring would be more about loyalty card schemes and how they track the purchasing habits of customers. It certainly doesn’t cover them charging me for it though.
A Canadian company have a shopping trolley with RFID chips so that’s only a matter of time away from Ireland.
Thank you supermarkets for treating us like rats in a maze!
Well, if simple low-level techniques such as loyalty card data mining and RFID tracking bother you, just wait until you find out what they’re up to with smartphone tracking and eye-tracking technologies.
Oh yes looking forward to those! Squeak squeak,
There are *volumes* of examples. Where stuff is put on shelves, the way they move stuff around every so often so you can’t build up a weekly shopping run routine and have to browse, the way they put fresh flowers out as the first thing you see so you’ll buy more perishable goods (no, seriously, that’s a thing, it’s why everyone from Aldi to M&S to Tesco have the flowers near the entrance), and just hundreds more.
And every purchase is tracked, and that data is mined, and if you use loyalty cards, it’s tagged to demographics and locations and so on.
End result – if the average person sat down at home and made a list of what they needed for the week and totted up what the bill *should* be, it’d cost far less than their shopping bill actually turns out to be every week. Not that I’m saying you’re average, of course – as everyone knows, you’re special… :P
Yeah the more I thought about it after posting that the more I realised that I knew it was happening. I guess it was just a knee jerk reaction to the “we’re becoming slaves” thing. Retailers want to sell more and use many tricks to try and get us to buy more. That doesn’t make us slaves though.
We, being special, always do a list before going shopping and we’re usually about a third of the way through the shop before we realise nothing we’ve picked up was on the list.
Yup. I think the reason most of us get annoyed at it is that it’s all about selling us cheap tat for high prices while gouging the suppliers as much as possible on the other end.
End of the day, farmers go bankrupt while we eat Findus Horse Lasagna and wind up in A&E with diet-related problems. It’s not that Tesco deliberately cause that; it’s just that they’re profiteering from it as it happens and they deliberately make it hard to avoid that and put a lot of money and effort into finding ways to stop you avoiding that.
@ ReproBertie Re Shopping Lists: Could I recommend “Out of Milk” (for Android anyways) You can also run it on your computer and it updates to your phone.
– It’s the dogs m8.
Target supermarket in America was able to figure out who was pregnant using their shopping habits on their loyalty card…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/
Ah thank you, you reminded me of the “Arse Full of Chips” tune: “I’m a paediatrician (not a paedophile)” o_O https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xLgny9yozU
this doesn’t really make sense. unlike electricity, which cannot be stored, you don’t have to link time of ‘generation’ of water to the the time of consumption.
Who said anything about water?
*winces*
His wind up laptop must be woeful
Why the wince? Can electricity be stored?? I’m asking…not accusing.
Fancy new capacitors are the way of the future, so I’m told (it was a riveting dinner conversation)….but, as is my understanding, the only practical means we have at the moment of storage involves first converting the electrical energy to other forms.
A battery doesn’t store electricity. Not quite anyway. It stores chemical energy that gets converted back into electrical energy.
Capacitors were invented a long time before chemical batteries for a start, and they store electrical charge, so yes, you can store electricity.
More practically, and not splitting physics’ hairs, we’ve been storing electical power through conversion for over a century now. The biggest example in Ireland is probably Turlough Hill. Pump water up the hill during off-peak hours, drop it back through the turbines during peak hours. Almost 300MW of power stored that way, and that’s what, forty years old?
So yeah, I get what you’re trying to say, but it’s just wrong on a few different levels.
Besides which, this isn’t about conservation or efficiency, it’s just about profit. If it wasn’t about profit, they couldn’t afford the R&D to design the new meters nor the manufacturing costs nor the installation costs nor all the PR and associated fun. There has to be enough money at the end to justify all that. Otherwise they’d go bust. It’s very, very, very basic mathematics.
I guess it’d just be nice if they skipped the PR and just admitted it.
Building additional power plants and wires to meet the 5-7pm peak in demand is really expensive. The power plants and wires aren’t needed the other 22 hours of the day. This is still cheaper than building energy storage like Turlough Hill or a massive battery. There’s a reason it’s one of a kind!
I know that capacitors have been around for a while…but I thought that up until recently were impractical for large-scale storage use. Turlough Hill is a store of potential energy, which can then be converted back into electrical….so we are splitting hairs….and I know that this is not the point of the post anyway…and I’m boring myself…
Yeah, but we’d need at least one Turlough Hill even if you didn’t want to do energy conversion – it’s the starter motor, so to speak, in the event that the whole grid were to collapse. You open the valves, the water doesn’t need pumps or other power, the whole thing can start up without outside power; and it then feeds the pumps and fires up the other plants on the grid.
Not so. Ardnacrusha is self-starting, as are most of the thermally powered generators.
But water sanitation and pumping requires power?
If DOB doesn’t get the contract I’ll eat me mickey!
Bob Dylan ref very good!
It will be like the phone tariffs, nobody will have an effing clue what they are paying
Dynamic rating is coming in too early. It should kick in when we have a smart grid in place, with proper communications infrastructure and end-user solutions that enable a real level of control of the consumption profile. I would like to see the market also becoming far more de-regulated allowing consumers to change suppliers at short or even no notice.
If the consumer is empowered through technology, an appropriate legal framework and choices based on energy profile wanted (green, lower cost, etc), and consumer side representation offering brokerage services, this could become a very interesting market for consumers, with a serious chance of Ireland going greener and consumer costs reducing.
I managed an international study five years ago specifically looking into potential consumer benefits in a dynamic rating environment in the electricity market and I wish there were business out there with the balls to jump at the opportunity of becoming the “consumer champion”.
I am writing this in a hurry, will need to re-read later…
That’s all very nice, but in practice, most people are not going to have either the time or the technological or financial ability to constantly play the markets to their best advantage. And the more complex the markets become, the more vulnerable the average customer will become.
Either they get screwed directly or they’re left dependent on the competence and/or integrity of your brokerage services.
Microsoft commissioned a study a few years back and one of its findings was that (IIRC) 80%+ of the population would not trust utility companies to provide them with advice on how to save on consumption – and rightly so. The problem then is who can we trust? It is either some sort of co-op or a trustworthy company. Other than that, we are at the mercy of whoever gets the licenses…
PS – we need micro generation (wind and solar at homes) supply into the grid to be allowed also, this is important for the overall model, and smart grid have the functionality for it.
In Scandinavia there are farmers putting parts of their pension funds on wind power generators.
I always do my washing at 2 in the morning. I can’t see how this so called innovation will benefit me at all.
Because the smart meter will allow ESB identify that you’re doing your washing when everyone is asleep and there is an abundance of supply in the grid and they’ll think – that Odis is using supply that’s just hanging around cos it’s a bit windy so let’s give it to him cheaply. In other words, you’re exactly the type of user this will benefit.
BTW I’d imagine wind power is also part of the reason for dynamic tariffs – windy day, more supply, cheaper electricity if you use it while it’s available.
Makes a lot of sense to me tbh.
Dynamic tariffs are due to the daily auctions of wholesale energy that occur 24 hours in advance. Basically these variations in prices, that have existed for year across Europe, finally reach the consumer. The renewable sector just adds an extra (big) layer of complexity to the whole thing.
As for consumption at 2 am, you might find that some operators might even be willing to pay you to use this energy in the middle of the night because of the minimum output of their plants not being consumed, causing them big problems.
The big deal about dynamic ratings are the high and low peaks. At the high end it can cost 100x more to generate an extra KW, creating a gap for NEGAwatt brokers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negawatt_power), while at the low end, it makes sense to pay someone to consume the energy to keep the machines running.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we ended up with a meaningful feed-in tariff for micro generators at the same time? But, this is Ireland. :sigh: ESB Networks finally caved in and allowed grid intertie a couple of years ago, but under such a restrictive set of conditions and a crappy tariff which effectively kills the idea stone dead. That baby was born under the watch of the Green Party, by the way.
Righto – But we all know that the reality is that they, (the men), will increase the standing charge part of my bill, to pay for the ****** smart meter. Over a time scale of an extra fiver forever.
And then send me a more expensive bill telling me how much money I’m saving by doing my washing at 2 in the morning.
Paddy, nose the story already!