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UK Electricity Tariffs for EVs

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I see a goal of smart metering to ensure the grid has visibility over demand. At the moment NatGrid rely on the frequency to determine how much to supply to meet demand, this is somewhat inefficient and can be problematic.

I don't see how that can possibly be true. Frequency is the only feasible way to manage the short-term (second-by-second) demand/supply balance, short of complete redesign of the whole system (and very limited alternatives even if you had a blank sheet). Smartmetering as currently implemented doesn't have any means to respond anywhere near that quickly. It does offer finer grain data to improve the accuracy of forecasting models, though these are quite good already and it's not clear how much benefit is there to be gained.

Control over demand is something that has to be coming soon particularly for EV charging, but it's not clear who is going to manage it. It might be driven by variable pricing and customer-owned equipment that responds to the dynamic price (probably from the smartmeter) to minimise cost; it might be driven by electricity suppliers offering cheaper tariffs if they have control of your charge time, or it might be third parties who offer the end user some money in exchange for control of your charging (the latter two possibilities based on the new remote-controlled chargepoints that the OLEV grant scheme is causing to get installed), or it might be controlled by car manufacturers via the comms links they typically already have.

It's not obvious which of those will win, nor how the tension will be managed between optimising charge times for lowest cost based on grid-level demand, vs managing supply capacity in the local networks. If everybody in the street needs only 1 hour of 7kW charging overnight, and electricity is cheapest from 2am-3am, who gets that slot and who gets moved to 4am-5am so that the fuse at the transformer doesn't blow? This is one reason for thinking that the price-signal-from-smartmeter model of demand management might not be the way forward, especially now that the ownership of the various assets has got spread out - the smartmeters are managed by the customer's supply company, which might be different for each person in the street.

This would have been much simpler if DNOs had been given responsibility for (smart-)metering, but unfortunately that ship sailed long ago.
 
This would have been much simpler if DNOs had been given responsibility for (smart-)metering, but unfortunately that ship sailed long ago.

Absolutely, and annoyingly.

Giving each car its own mpan-equivalent so that it can exist independently would be a step in the right direction. At least then each car would have a use profile and be able to buy energy accordingly.
 
You could make the exact same argument against smart meters against insurance companies.

Unless there ends up being a cartel then the free market economics will mean that there will always be a supplier out there looking to undercut the opposition and hoover up loads of customers. And it’ll be easy to switch with SMETS2-on meters.

For that reason I don’t think there will be a significant increase in price, since it would also technically be possible for insurance brokers to fix the price upwards, and it doesn’t happen. If anything the margins between the high street ones are likely to be quite small.
 
I think the issue for consumers may be trying to decide which supplier offers best value when they are all changing their tariffs every 30 minutes (which they could do, the spec allows for this).

Unless consumers happen to have an accurate pattern of usage, perhaps recorded by a smart meter over a period of at least a year, and they are then able to use that pattern to compare one supplier with another, I think it may be pretty hard to determine which supplier, out of what's probably going to be an increasingly complex set of tariffs from all of them, offers best value.
 
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Lots of things a greatly simplified down to meaningless figures to aid comparison. I don't see TOU tariffs to be any different. I also don't see there being a need to switch to smart/TOU tariff - its not a smart meter requirement.

The alternative will be just as it is now, an averaged tariff based upon each energy suppliers cost and profit model. That can be equally applied to non smart meters too. I suspect costs of non TOU tarrifs will rise if the need for demand side response increases and wholesale peak prices rise in times of need, except all electricity being used gets more expensive rather than just electricity being used at peak price times.

My biggest gripe of smart meters has always been the marketing. I always felt it rather disingenuous. What are they (smart meter marketing) trying to hide when the only thing they talk about is the usage display - why no mention of benefits and disadvantages of TOU tarrifs and DSR?
 
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My biggest gripe of smart meters has always been the marketing. I always felt it rather disingenuous. What are they (smart meter marketing) trying to hide when the only thing they talk about is the usage display - why no mention of benefits and disadvantages of TOU tarrifs and DSR?

Me too. I've had various forms of in-house energy monitoring for years now. Started off with a free energy monitor supplied by British Gas, and our current house has energy metering on all the major loads, fed to a data logger (along with lots of other stuff, like temperatures all over the place, humidity, CO2 concentration etc). We have a simple display in the kitchen that shows the level of import/export, and use that to judge when to turn on any loads that aren't controlled to come on during the off-peak period. A smart meter wouldn't provide us with any significant advantages at all, if anything I think we probably get more useful data from the system we have.
 
Most people I know who have had any kind of energy use display (smart meter based or other) are obsessed with it for somewhere between a minute and a month, but beyond that just can't be bothered.

Almost anyone who 'can be bothered' about energy use / cost / environment whatever, can have 80% or more of possible improvements just through common sense and determination.