Dynamic Pricing Tariffs

prices will never go negative, not until duos charges change and suppliers start to cop on. if the tariff excluding d/t-uos etc comes in over 3 cent per kwh they are taking the piss completely. its basically risk free money on their side all they need to do is adequately predict demand.

Do people expect much value or benefit from dynamic pricing? Having a quick look at UK prices it appears the average unit cost is approx 26p. Dynamic pricing can bring down to 19p.

In Ireland with a somewhat similar average unit cost its still possible to but the bulk of your energy as low as 6 cent with certain setups and tariffs.

Im not going to give up on it just yet… I downloaded the Day Ahead Market (DAM) prices for the past 5 years and here is 2025 up to the end of Oct. What we have is the min price every day vs the max price. As you can see the min price every day is consistanly lower than 10cent/kWh

The average low for the year is actually 7cent and the average high is 18cent. You can see also there were and number of days where it went negative or zero (9 days) (not much -2cent was the max!)

It all depends on the mark up on these rates and obviously how they the deal with feed in rates you get..do you get the DAM price less a markup for feeding in?? who knows the decison paper does not go into feed-in rates.

The big question is do they add 1cent to the DAM price or 5 cent to the DAM price??? that will make or break it.

Can they beat Pinergy?? based on the average min price here of 7cent then, NO

The advantage I can see though is longer low periods that might suit people with smaller batteries or bigger usage. As it is trying to fit all your battery charging and EV charging, HP etc etc into a 3 hour window can be challanging. If you had 5-6 hours of low rates you could have a smaller inverter and charge over a longer period…you then have a shorter period to cover the high rates..

I need to do some analyis of the data to deep dive into it..I was thinking of doing a little project using AI to write a programe/website to game it out.

As it is it is hard to beat Pinergy but again that rate is not for amateurs…. neither will be Dynamic tarriffs

Here is tomorrow 5-6 hours of "relatively" lows rates

I ran some quick numbers myself and I think even the Energia EV rate of 9.8c (call it 10c) would be equal to if not better than most days on dynamic.

As you say eco, the main advantage I can see is the longer "low cost" slots of about 7 hrs from 11pm to roughly 6am where the price is lower. I'm assuming 23:00 → 00:00 is cheap, but they don't seem to list it.

If you have some EV's and need to get 50Kwh a night into them cause you drive a lot (e.g. taxi driver), it could be a runner, but while the supplier can of course change rates…..there's a lot to like about having a "known" fixed price. That said, I like the idea of it though - that I could be paid for taking electricity from the grid. :-)

Selectra Electricity Price Tracker: Today's Electricity Prices

for a rough idea of today/tomorrow prices.

I wasn't sure on my guesses, so I had a quick look and found Cover Quantitative Research Project Delivery - To be fair, it's from 2019, but it's probably close enough. Near the end, they reckon your average taxi does 50,000 km. Course some will do more…..and some will do less.

Using 5km per 1kwh and that average of 50,000km a year, that requires 10,000kwh (roughly). Divide that by 48 (giving them a few weeks holliers) and you get 208Kwh/week. With a 5 day working week you have an EV requirement of >40Kwh/day on those working days. To be fair, it's a bit "rough and ready", but yeah, I could see them wanting to get 50-60Kwh per night when you add in the house requirements also.

Unlikely you can squeeze that in a 3 hr slot. 4hr is more doable, but even that is on the high side, no? So could see it being useful for them if it was 6-7 hrs… though again to be balanced, most of the 4 hr energia window would sort 80-90% of their issues today.

That aside - while the suppliers will offer some dynamic pricing models, I can see it being very much a niche thing for a few years in Ireland. It's likely people, probably forum members here :-) would require smarts to roll their own solutions via automation. Could be fun, but of course you'd need the hardware to facilitate the storage/discharge. Right now anyone with more than 10kwh is very much an outlier in Ireland (myself included) and you'd need a fairly decent storage to make it worth your while…….even though no doubt the government would tax it :-)

Well the stats aren't mine, but it appears so. (Same source as linked above)

Granted this is from 2017, but I can't imagine the demographics changing significantly since then?!

Really though, the whole taxi thing is just an example edge case, and I wouldn't focus on it. As we know, it's really it's down to how much kwh that your house needs…. not if your a taxi driver or not. If you have a heat pump, and your a 2x EV household, I can perhaps see some other people falling into the same category. A 7hr window might be beneficial in some scenarios, but as far as I can tell, it'd be more expensive for 95%+ of people if those people were on Pinenergy or even Energia's EV rate (which I'm on).

I'd like to be proven wrong on that. We hear lots of stories where we see the dynamic pricing going negative, but they seem to be more "taking points" rather than actually useful windows which happen regularly that some clever minded person can make a few quid by capitalizing on them.

One thing I did notice which I hadn't thought of, was that the prices fluctuate also seasonally. As in your "average price" in winter is ~30% higher than summer. So you could be getting slammed in winter when you need it most.

Your battery size is not static. Should we get offered a dynamic plan that is very profitable with a big battery, then it makes sense to upgrade your battery. Batteries are cheap and the payback time of the upgrade could very well be very short.

You can control the inverter from home assistant, fully automate it even. All for free

It's only the 3h plan where Pinergy is the best by far in rate. Also their FIT is the best. But the day rate is very high. So Pinergy can't be beat if you can consume the overwhelming majority of your electricity in that 3 hour window. Going over a bit now and then is fine, the super low rate of 5.98c / kWh incl VAT makes up for it. But you will need a good size battery pretty much covering your electricity use for 24h

Exactly this. And it can fairly easily be automated with Home Assistant, a free operating system you can run on an old laptop or PC or Raspberry Pi. ChatGPT is your friend in doing up pretty much all of the coding for you