@
geoffers
The suppliers can only pull those half-hourly readings after the fact..Usually around 1am the following morning. Long after any energy has been 'shifted'.
If they could physically read the meters every half hour in real time, and plan the next half hour period in advance - different story entirely.
And your case is exactly what the EV tariffs are for.. Because electricity is usually cheaper at night and there is a surplus on the grid so they encourage you to buy it at a cheap rate when the unused energy is costing them anyway, keeping the baseline generation running.
Round here, we are a small hamlet of 30 or so houses. However, there is a large dairy farm at one end of the line, and a very large food factory at the other. I worked at the factory for a bit and I've seen the electricity bills for the farm. They are scary. No point in anyone shifting anything round here as there is no such thing as off peak. The factory pulls megawatt hours, not kWh and runs a 24/7/365 operation running spray drying and powder drying processes through the night that use more energy an hour than I use in a month. I, and the rest of the village, could turn our main breakers off for a whole day and it wouldn't even make a drop in the ocean compared to the load the factory pulls!
So shifting, for any 'demand planning' or 'load balancing' purposes is just irrelevant round here. But simply not using the energy in the first place makes all the sense in the world.
I still believe that too many people are just looking at energy shifting / savings etc from their own personal viewpoint, and I can appreciate how they don't perceive any benefit of smart meters to them over and above what they currently do.
However without smart meters how can the ultimate goal of dynamic pricing over half-hourly periods be achieved?
EOn seem to have problems updating even single rates, so clearly there are issues, and these sort of tariff are very much in their infancy/still being trialled - Octopus do state that "
Agile Octopus is one of our beta smart tariffs"
I don't know how successful Octopus Agile have been in implementing this, but here are a couple of extracts from the Octopus report highlighting these points
https://octopus.energy/agile-report/
Smart meters allow customers’ electricity use to be calculated and billed in half hour periods, and so open the possibility for those half hourly prices to reflect the real price of electricity as it changes throughout the day.
Agile’s half-hourly prices reflect the real prices of the electricity that Octopus buys a day ahead
and
the lack of consumer engagement is a problem for the energy system as a whole.
As we decarbonise, the energy system is being put under greater strain - both through moving from carbon intensive forms of generation to renewables, and through huge consumer uptake of electric vehicles.
To ensure there’s enough electricity to go around when everyone wants power at peak time, we are either going to have to spend billions reinforcing the system, or get people to spread when they consume electricity
