The initial article of this series came to an end with some observations about time-of-day metering. In brief, the message of those comments was that the benefits of such metering are mixed and contradictory since in actual application the end user may see both decreased charges at night but increased charges during daylight hours
possibly along with some additional fixed charges for adopting the special metering. It can be difficult to determine how much of an advantage or disadvantage it is to adopt time-of-day metering, especially when dealing with separate, differently structured bills for supply and for delivery, perhaps even with different start and end dates and changes in what information is provided in bills now compared to even recent history. Still, a customer who is able to both limit peak-hour use and make heavy use of off-peak hour pricing can probably come out ahead.
In principle though, it seems likely that a power company that is free to set the rate schedule will make every effort to prevent the power company from losing any money because of time-of-day metering. A typical customer is unlikely to gain from adopting time-of-day metering.
But there are considerations aside from just saving money. Time-of-day is thought to promote the adoption of electric vehicles and that will help in the fight to preserve a climate that we can live with. Well, at least that is what we are led to think.
Even a customer who does not expect to save money from time-of-day metering may still feel motivated by concern about global warming; concern about reducing consumption of fossil fuels may be topmost in the customer's mind. Is this justified?
But an alternative view is to consider who it is that most benefits when a customer adopts time-of-day metering? Surely it is any company able to profit from increases in night-time demand and those are companies who have idle capacity in the low-demand hours.
In daylight hours, electric power is likely to become more dominated by photovoltaic capture of energy from the sun because that is now the cheapest way to generate electricity. But a need will remain for providing electric power when the sun is not shining. Such power might be provided by other renewable sources such as hydroelectric or wind turbines, but there are many existing fossil fuel plants that will seek to fill that role. This is an opportunity for them to increase profits and the price of the fossil-fuel company shares. The likely consequence is a delay in when these fossil fuel burning facilities will fade away.
In the second article of this series, we note that:
"Charges for the power itself (as opposed to delivery of that power) are sensibly billed as a fixed charge for each KWH consumed".
Later, this is further explored in a comment that:
It is easy to make this case for fossil fuel power plants, but much more difficult for renewable sources. For renewable power generation, supply costs become conceptually much more like delivery costs, dominated as they are by the capital expenses for constructing and maintaining the dams, wind turbines and solar farms. The same consideration for how such power is priced applies as well to the electric power supply. The situation is a bit more complicated by the fact that there is such a mix of ways to generate electric power.
