What is Behind Energex's New Pricing?

There has been a bit of noise about the 20% increase to QLD residential power usage. I just pulled the network pricing proposal to sift through the detail and here is what I have found:

• Energex have increased the fixed charge by 42% (!) 
• Energex have decreased the peak rate by 17%. 
• Shoulder is much the same and off-peak is slightly lower

See below:
(All prices ex-GST. In $/kWh, except daily charge which is in $/day)

 2012/13 Energex Network

• Daily charge = $0.35
• Off-peak = $0.07496
• Shoulder = $0.11369
• Peak = $0.23525

2013/14 Energex Network

• Daily charge = $0.50 (diff: +$0.15) 
• Off-peak = $0.06779 (diff: -$0.00717)
• Shoulder = $0.11457 (diff: +$0.00088)
• Peak = $0.19141 (diff: -$0.04384)

Energex are quite clearly looking to increase their revenues without creating any more incentive for people to install solar/storage. This is what all the noise from the ENAA has been about. They are moving towards fixed network pricing because they know that increases in peak kWh charges are driving people to get their kWh from sources other than the network.

If the regulator had it in mind to call them on this they could point out that:

1. This electricity pricing is socio-economically regressive
2. This pricing increases the peak demand on their network (requiring new capital spend which could be avoided by using the ToU structure properly)

With this change in tariff structure Energex are:

1. Trying to stop people getting their energy from distributed renewables
2. Building a case for future network spend to meet the inevitable rise in peak demand that this creates
3. Attemping to preserve the value of their assets for Campbell's second term network sale of the network businesses

This is about Energex saving their skin at the cost of the environment and QLD electricity consumers. It is typical behaviour of an old monopoly refusing to change their business model to survive. It might be useful for the executive team at Energex to spend 15 minutes looking at what the Internet is doing to traditional retail right now despite efforts of the old guard.

The way forward for Energex is in shifting to income that does not rely upon the regulator.

Records Still Coming - 8.6%

At 4:20 AM on the 16th of October, we hit a new record in the NEM!

At that time 8.6% of all electricity being consumed came from Wind generation. That's more than 1.5 GW of power from the Wind, about equivalent to 300,000 homes using electricity on a hot afternoon (A/C on) without any carbon emissions.

Realistically, at 4:20 in the morning, it is more like 750,000 homes using power (about 2kW - off-peak storage hot water heating) with no carbon emissions. The families in those homes had some of the cleanest showers in the country on the morning of the 16th!

By Request....

Since Mistervint was made live, people have pretty consistently asked for a couple of things. Namely:

1. To make "The Trend" graph work on iPad/iPhone
2. Drilling down by state

Both of these things are now in Mistervint. The graph has been upgraded and now works on any relatively modern browser, on any device. It also looks better and is faster.

Drilling down by state is now as simple as clicking on the state you are interested in on the map at the top of the screen. Every state except WA is clickable (WA is not part of the National Electricity Market). QLD has only one wind farm (Windy Hill) but realtime data for it is not available, so Mistervint will show you all of Eastern Australia until data becomes available, or new QLD wind farms are constructed.

You can zoom back out of the drill down by clicking somewhere outside of the map of Australia, or on the Mistervint banner.

Keep those suggestions coming and we'll keep adding features.

That would be 8.3%

In the small hours of this morning the Eastern Australian electricity grid hit a new record. 8.3% of the total electricity being used in Eastern Australia came from the wind.

We're hitting a record every couple of weeks now that the winter chill is abating and we're getting the beginnings of some spring/summer breezes. I suspect that as the temperatures warm up and the load on the electricity grid from air conditioners being run all night increases, we'll see the records dry up. But I think that we've still got one or two to go before that happens.

Just for the sake of completeness, at the same time 3.9% of all electricity was being generated from Hydro and so 12.2% of all the power being used in the NEM was clean and renewable.

Encouraging stuff!

What's worth turning off?

One of the pieces of feedback we've been getting since we launched is that people might not know what they should do specifically when renewable generation is low. That is, what should you consider turning off, or leaving off.

That's fair enough, so as a quick way to improve the situation, I found this very useful little widgety thing from GE. It shows how much power (measured in Watts - the units used to measure "right now" electricity use) is used by common appliances in the home.

How much power ("right now" electricity) does each appliance use?

In the link above, the top two rows contain the appliances which you should focus on, and whilst it is U.S. focused, the appliances are all recognisable, and the numbers are all directly applicable in Australia.

The power consumption, or wattage, or "right now" electricity use is important because the data that Mistervint gives you is "right now" electricity generation. The two match up in time. What Mistervint shows you is how much of that right now electricity is renewable. Your appliances use right now electricity to do their thing. You want their thing to be done with as much renewable electricity as possible, and hence you need to know how much of the right now electricity generation is renewable.

The notion of right now electricity can be a little confusing, but just by using Mistervint, you're getting a feel for it. And that's going to be more and more important as we move to a greener and more efficient grid - more on that later though.

Anyway, we'll do some more thinking on how to use this type of visualisation directly in Mistervint. But in the meantime, if you like the widget, or have a question about what it shows, leave a comment.

Another record....

Last night it happened again.....

Although not in a huge way over Saturday's record, at 4:05 this morning, wind generation was providing the NEM with 8.1% of the electricity being used!

Again, we suspect it is because of the mild temperatures and some nicely placed wind, but it is most definitely worth acknowledging.

And just because we can (and you will soon be able to as well), we can tell you that when the record was hit 11.6% of the total electricity being delivered into the NEM was renewable. (That's pretty good). What's better is at lunch time today 13.3% of the wholesale electricity being pumped into the NEM was renewable (Hydro + Wind). And it has been above 10% since lunch time yesterday.

That's an average of 3 GW of capacity being provided by renewable generation. I'll admit I am a nerd for this stuff, but that is pretty exciting. We'll be releasing an updated Mistervint soon that will let you do this kind of analysis soon. I promise to make a noise on the blog when we do.

It looks like we're in for some strong renewable generation over the next 24 hours, so if you have some electricity heavy work that needs doing (an entire weeks worth of washing for example), now is a great time to be doing it!

New Record!!

Whilst we were distracted adding new functionality to Mistervint (customisable reporting on any generator, or collection of generators in the NEM anybody?), we hit another record!

At 4:50 AM on the 3rd of September (Saturday morning) wind generation was providing 8% of the total amount of electricity being used in the NEM.

Being very early on a Saturday morning, total demand for electricity was down, and as we have just entered Spring, demand has moderated (less electric heating). So this record wasn't driven by new generators. Instead this record was driven by a fall in total electricity demand, coupled with some nice wind (in the right places).

Regardless, any electricity used in the east of Australia from about 9 o'clock PM on September 2nd till the 2 o'clock PM was more than 6% powered by the wind. With any luck you got a lot of your electricity hungry jobs done on Saturday!