Haushalte könnten an sonnigen Wochenenden kostenlosen Strom zum Waschen erhalten

We need to offer something which makes us look charitable but doesn’t actually cost us anything.

How about free electricity at certain times of day?

Nah, that’ll cost.

We make it sunny weekends.

Genius. Order the pizzas for the pizza day to celebrate.

And what will they define as a sunny weekend?

The devil is probably in the small print

People are focusing on a poor headline and missing a lot of the point with this.

Some suppliers and tariffs already offer this – some even pay customers to incentivise load-shifting. It’s not a new concept, but in the UK we generally treat every electron as equal, even though they all have different costs depending on when they are generated and used.

The whole point here is to try and „flatten the curve“ where demand currently peaks around 4-7pm. Some of that demand is unavoidable – hospitality gets busy, people putting their ovens on, etc – but some is avoidable. There are lots of people who use intensive appliances such as washing machines, driers and dishwashers in that time period mostly out of habit, where there is often no need to. That strains the grid and increases costs.

Are people not already doing their washing on sunny days? I’ve inherited the sheer joy of waking to good weather and putting a wash on from my mother.

So this links to a lot of adverts I hear about cheap energy on weekends.

I’m on octopus agile, where my prince changes every half hour depending on demand, and lately at the weekend the price goes NEGATIVE. Apparently it’s due to load management and the cost of turning on and off power generation.

So it seems a bit of a con for these companies to offer cheap or even free energy, while providers using the actual cost are paying their customers to use it.