Smart Electricity Trading

Headlines

  • Smart electricity trading involves variable pricing of electricity. Electricity could be used when it is cheap and usage deferred when it is expensive, all automatically. Batteries in cars could be discharged into the grid if the generation prices is high and recharged when the demand price is low, levelling the demand on the regional or national grid, saving CO2.
  • Companies called aggregators will offer good tariffs to facilitate this. These companies are just starting to develop schemes and are running pilot projects at the moment.
  • Small solar and wind generating systems will also benefit from these variable tariff schemes and may make more money that the simple payment options on offer now. 
  • Humshaugh is too small a community to run its own scheme as to be economic large numbers of dwellings need to be grouped together to help smooth the load on the national or regional grid.
  •  It may be that those interested who live in the Parish could participate in a trial.
  • Expect exciting developments in this service in the next few years.

Further Details

The report describes some of the schemes which have and ae being trialled and how they work. Other areas such as Cumbria have community schemes in operation.

Opportunities

This is a developing area with exciting possibilities to help level out the peaks and troughs in electricity demand at a regional and national level. The benefit locally is that prices should be lower for those who can exploit flexibility in their electricity demands and it may make generation schemes more economic and result in more deployment. It is too early to estimate the benefit it terms of saving CO2.