> But it turns out people don’t care and didn’t bother with enough load shifting to cover the cost.
This doesn't surprise me a great deal. Personally, the price difference would have to be very high in order for it to affect my usage patterns. It would have to exceed the cost of having yet another complication for me to keep track of.
We’re getting the kids version of market pricing, but when you give people real market pricing without cross-subsidization, they tend to get confused/angry/bankrupt.
I still think they could do real-time pricing with some kind of cap that gets balanced out amongst all users, but the uptake still may not be there. It averages out for those that treat it as noise and still not a lot of equipment out there to take advantage of it at the personal residential level.
I checked my electric provider and although I said in an earlier comment that they don't do this sort of differential pricing, I was incorrect. They've been doing it for years now -- but it's optional and you have to opt in to it.
They say that the percentage of users who actually do this is somewhere around 10%.
Personally, I value having electric prices being stable very highly. I'd prefer pay higher rates (up to a point) to keep that stability.
if you have the choice, you'd have to run the numbers, but then you create adverse selection issues.
(Technically you can choose a tiered pay X for first kWh and then X+Y above that in my system, but if you're in a building, the building gets to decide which of the two every user is put on)
This doesn't surprise me a great deal. Personally, the price difference would have to be very high in order for it to affect my usage patterns. It would have to exceed the cost of having yet another complication for me to keep track of.