Hourly fluctuating energy rates
With the growing share of renewable energy in the electricity grid, the market price of electricity is becoming increasingly unpredictable — a matter of demand, but especially of supply. When the wind blows hard or the sun shines brightly, a lot of electricity enters the market, pushing prices down. On dark and windless days, prices can rise again.
Until now, consumers barely noticed this because they pay a fixed kWh price. Only customers with a day-and-night rate experience different tariffs in the simplest way: slightly higher during the day, and lower at night and on weekends.
Easy Energy
But change seems to be on the horizon. A new provider has entered the market, offering end customers kWh prices that fluctuate by the hour.
Easy Energy is the first electricity supplier in the Netherlands to apply a different rate every hour. This has become possible thanks to smart meters, which have now been installed in many households and can send hourly consumption data to the grid operator. The final electricity bill is then calculated based on these hourly values.
As a consumer, you could benefit from this — if you’re able to adjust your usage throughout the day and if you know in advance what the hourly rates will be. On the Easy Energy website, the electricity price for the coming days is shown. Prices are usually lower at night and higher during the day, with peaks in the morning and early evening.
Home Manager
With smart control of devices using an automated tool like the Sunny Home Manager from SMA, you could take advantage of these fluctuating rates. The Home Manager allows you to manually input the kWh price for each hour, after which it can calculate the most cost-effective times to run appliances like your dishwasher.
You could also optimize your battery usage: charge it with solar energy or grid power when prices are low, and sell power back to the grid when prices are high.
For now, this doesn’t work quite seamlessly yet, since there’s no interface that automatically loads Easy Energy’s hourly prices into the Sunny Home Manager. And manually entering 24 values every day is a bit tedious… But that’s probably only a matter of time! Once it’s possible to automatically load hourly rates, Zonnefabriek will be the first to explain how you can benefit.
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