If you, like myself, want to contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions, improve the stability of the electricity grid, and also ensure that Putin’s war chest gets less filled, then I have a nice tip to share with this blog post. This might also help your energy supplier to keep afloat during this period of very erratic electricity costs.
Renewable energy sources have been the cheapest forms of generating energy for years. With the exponential growth in both solar energy and wind energy, these sources contribute to limiting the electricity cost increases in times of high fossil fuel prices. Solar and wind energy are often complementary; when there is little sun, the wind often blows more, and vice versa. But sometimes there is a “surplus” or a “shortage” of solar and wind energy due to variations in supply and/or demand. And by using this with the consumption of electricity, it is possible to use the positive surplus peaks … certainly if you are then able to switch on large consumers or postpone their use until that moment. Charging your electric car at the weekend is certainly a good example of / opportunity for this.
Over the recent month, we have experienced periods of “excess” electricity on virtually every weekend. On weekends, the demand for electricity is low due to companies not working, but the sun continues to shine and the wind doesn’t care whether it’s the weekend or not. Also today – April 10, 2022 – we have another such period this afternoon. And if you are able to charge your car in such a period, or run your washing machine / dishwasher, you ensure that large consumers use those periods with maximum positive effect. These are also the periods when the lowest amount of grams of CO2 per kWh is emitted for the generation of electricity.
I use the EPEX SPOT website for this. EPEX is the abbreviation for European Power EXchange; an exchange for trading electricity in Europe. And every day around 2:00 PM, the traded prices for the next day are published. By looking at the EPEX SPOT Market Data you can see per country how prices change hourly today and after 14:00 also the following day. Click on the country off your choice on the webpage, then you will see the traded prices for that country. In the print screen at the top of this blogpost I had chosen the Netherlands. You can view different datasets with the filter on the left side of the webpage; I often look at Auction (the auctioned kWh prices) also at the Continuous prices as in the screenshot above this blog post. Points to keep in mind when changing and using the filter function on this page; the correct trading / delivery date has been selected, and if you change something in the filters, it may happen that another country is selected so that you have to choose the correct country again.
A concrete example for this use of periods with electricity surplus: yesterday I arrived at home with my Model 3 with 31% SoC, and because we are not going to use the car today, I have postponed the charging until 12:00 this afternoon since negative electricity prices have been traded; see the Low (€/MWh) and Last (€/MWh) columns in the screenshot at the top of this blog post. All this takes almost no effort, but it does help in all kinds of aspects to a better world.
Tesla and Model 3 good to know & experiences 