Quote:
Originally Posted by redneck
Off peak rates will cease to exist in the future when individuals and municipalities need to charge their vehicles overnight. The sun doesn’t shine at night and wind is usually reduced. Alternate power isn’t going to cut it. Base load power stations (fossil and nuke, not hydro) will have to make up the difference and they don’t run for free.
In my opinion, Electricity is going to become a lot more expensive in the future...
A lot more...
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Electricity at night is cheaper because supplying baseload is cheap. Baseload generators are utilized 90%+ of the time.
Peak generation is expensive because the generators are utilized 10% of the time. Having a very expensive thing only operate 10% of the time isn't efficient. If you purchased a car and only ever went on 1 trip, the cost of the trip was the whole price you paid for the car. The more the vehicle is utilized, the less each trip costs.
Bringing baseload demand up has the effect of reducing peak demand, or getting more utilization out of the generating capacity. This reduces cost. Flattening the power demand curve even by bringing baseload generation up, will be more cost effective.
If storage schemes can become cheap enough, we will eliminate peak generators altogether because the storage itself will become the supply for peak demand.
So you're right, we'll lose off-peak rates because it will be replaced by a low flat rate.