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That massive spike of 50c/kWh at the left looks tiny compared to today even though that's already insanely expensive
this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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Do most Finnish people pay spot prices for electricity?
About 30% do
Interesting.
At these temperatures, I can't imagine air source heat pumps being very efficient.
I would probably have a spare gas, oil or wood based heater and use that for days like this, or for if the power goes off on days like this.
Older houses definitely have them... but there was this trend at some point to renavate older houses and remove the oil heaters and fireplaces and wood heated saunas, and replace everything with electric ones. Why? No idea, trends are weird.
Electricity is usually less polluting than the various fuels, wood fires especially will fill a valley with smoke, the rest are mostly to avoid the carbon dioxide
Carbon monoxide too... and chimney fires... don't forget about indoor emissions with open stoves... Even if you don't care about the environment, electric wins the health&safety race by a landslide. Forgetting to do the maintenance on a heat pump doesn't exactly carry the same risks as with a wood stove.
Heat pumps are expensive and electricity can vary in price (who in their right mind opts in to spot pricing without on-site power generation tho, what the hell). Still, it's not hard to see why everyone who can afford it is electrifying.
Also Russian fossil fuels
Newer models are actually.
We had negative 30 C the last two days and our air-to-air kept the whole upper floor comfortable. 90 m².
Granted it's a brand new and very well insulated house, but -30 bites well on those too!
Most houses up here have other electric alternatives or a fireplace.
Gas and oil are beyond abnormal to have and I think oil is even illegal in Norway now...
Don't quote me on that though
Wow, air to air even?
But do you know what the COP is at -30?
Here is a link to it
I must make a small correction though: The last night with -30 it struggled a bit. Only managed to keep the upper floor at 19 °C so we had to turn on the cables to get over the peak.
I'm still mightily impressed by it though!
Max consumption was 32 kW/day, so roughly 4-5 € pr/day with our prices.
What about a solar + electric heating?
Well, here (in middle of finland) the sun set at 14:30, so there wasn't all that much solar energy available.
Also heat pumps are always at least as efficient as straight electric heating.
It think above -20C or so, cold weather heat pumps are still way more efficient than resistive electric heating.
Good R-factor insulation is probably the most important upgrade in OP’s case. There are people where I live in the Northeast who heat their homes almost exclusively with the waste heat from cooking, electronics or old incandescent lighting. They have like R-30+ homes and really neat ventilation designs for cooling in the summer too.
I had plans to build a tiny home with Vacuum insulated panels and a small marine stove for heat, until we had a child and plans changed.
Now I’m looking at a solar battery setup with geothermal heat pump that will probably cost nearly what the whole tiny home was gonna be.
Solar is quite poor in Northern winters. Wind + solar + heat would be a better bet, but the battery required to heat your house for more than a day with low winds would be prohibitively expensive unless you added geothermal to the mix like a geothermal heatpump which is also very expensive. Betweem the gear, battery, geothermal, all installed your probably in the 80k$ range or more. A wood stove would be the best bet
Finland has about 5.2GW of wind capacity vs 4.3 nuclear. If it's a windy day the spot price will usually be low.
Good point, for aome reason i was thinking more off-grid than load balancing economics. The battery would probably help lower power by filling when power is cheap and supplying when the rates spike throughout the day
Heat pumps only work to about -4c.
It's the first time I hear about final consumers paying spot prices. What's the reason for it? Ecological activism?
Because at its cheapest it can be even free. For a long time last summer it was only like cents, sometimes even cheaper and at best negative. And the fixed contracts have been expensive for a while now in finland. I'm paying 8cents/kwh with the conract I got last fall. I got it because I was skeptical about prices at winter and I'm so glad I took that contract
And at one point, due to an error, it was tens of cents negative. You were literally getting paid to use electricity. Though, we're paying it back now.
Some people were even running electric heaters outside. Stupid but hilarious.
Making a note to blame Finland when global warming turns Earth into a fireball.
Plans like that started gaining popularity in the recent years as in general they were cheaper than ones with fixed prices. Then because of the Russian invasion the prices skyrocketed with daily averages of even 30 and 40 cents and people were in deep trouble with their electric bills and many of them scrambled to get 20 - 30c/kWh, 1 to 2 year long plans to save their asses. However the spot prices then dropped back to 3 to 4 cents for the spring and summer and now those people were stuck with their fixed price plans and are paying 10x the spot prices. Personally I just decided to gamble with the spot priced plan as my 6c/kWh plan had just ended and the 8 to 12 cent plans are all 1 to 2 years long. Despite freak days like this, on average, I'm still probably paying less than I would have with a fixed price plan.
So not mildly infuriating, but fuckaroundandfindout?
Fixed rates on renewal went crazy after the war started. Now it's possible to choose low-load times for running dishwasher etc. On average the spot price is lower than available fixed rates, although some lucky people locked in long cheap contracts before February 2022. Most of those will expire this or next month at latest. It's certainly easier to have a fixed price contract.
Anti-ecological maybe.
Consumers have chosen the spot deals because of the lowest possible prices with disregard to the high points and consumption.
I think the opposite. Price is usually high when demand is high because of cold temperature. Because of the high price, you're motivated to consume less, and that's a good thing for the grid. It's also a good thing for the carbon footprint because usually this is when the most polluting plants are activated, gas first, then fuel and coal. This is where protecting the consumer too much from the wholesale market volatility can be a problem, a fix price doesn't motivate the end consumer to adapt consumption base on supply/demand which is important to reduce carbon footprint, instead the country pollutes more than it would if people were more aware. The problem is rather the risk for personal finance. That's why I thought mostly ecological activists would be motivated enough to take this risk. But I forgot the possibility of very low prices on average.
I'd see you as an exception to the spot consumers here. Very admirable perspective!
I’m surprised that those 30% don’t have batteries to shift load times
Those batteries would never pay themselves back.
I'm in the UK on an agile tariff and I'm not quite so sure - it depends on a number of things. Sure my batteries were bought primarily to support my solar panels. but I've been making quite a lot of money this winter.
I haven't run the figures on payback times if the batteries were just for shifting and not solar - but they might just pay themselves back.
The math has been done multiple times. The batteries don't pay themselves back, and also need to be replaced from time to time.
Sure. But the math depends on electricity tariffs. And those change and therefore, so does the maths. it sounds like tariffs are pretty extreme currently
Batteries on a plan like that, where they're part of a large virtual battery, do pay for themselves within warranty
Solar batteries never do. To rationally buy a battery one needs to put high value on backup power
Is that actually a widespread practice anywhere? I'm in Switzerland and I don't think I've seen that anywhere (other than in one farm near me which is entirely covered in solar panels)
In the UK domestic solar panels are quite common and new installations usually come with batteries. Agile 30-minute pricing tariffs are still new and fairly experimental, but people are rapidly realising that their batteries can be really useful when used to force charge/discharge based on grid demand. Octopus is probably the leader: https://octopus.energy/blog/agile-pricing-explained/
I live in the northeast US and we looked into batteries. Unless you’re rolling your own and have a very specific home/garage layout installing them is really difficult. They have to be outside the living space, away from flamingo wall coatings and windows. And they need to be relatively climate controlled (not great in direct sunlight or frigid temps).
Until we start designing battery systems that can mount outside (away from the house, like propane tanks) within their own heat pumps to manage temps built in, it’s not going to be popular in climates like ours (which are very similar to Swiss and lower scandawegian climates).
They should probably be bigger metal boxes with sodium flow batteries and heat pumps, like we have now for utility boxes in some places. They could incorporate the smart/net meters required to pump back into the grid too.
Time to install a wood stove.