Variable pricing of grid electricity

[phil-sandwell]

Issue

The price of grid electricity is the fixed and static throughout the lifetime of a system. In reality the price of grid electricity could change throughout the day or year, or vary between years.

Proposal

Editing the way that the financial impact of grid electricity is considered could accommodate variable pricing. These could be implemented together, but should be able to be used independently.

At the daily scale, this could use a 1x24 input for the price of electricity ($/kWh) at different times of the day, for example:

• hourly_grid_price = [0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.10, 0.15, 0.15, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.20, 0.20, 0.20, 0.20, 0.18, 0.18, 0.18, 0.10]

This would replicate a situation where grid electricity is cheap in the morning, more expensive in the afternoon, and most expensive in the evening.

A similar process could be used to modify these grid prices in different months of the year compared to a baseline (e.g. 1.0 in January), for example:

• monthly_grid_price_factor = [1.0, 1.1, 1.1, 1.0, 1.0, 0.8, 0.8, 0.8, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0]

This would replicate a situation where grid electricity is, on the whole, more expensive in February and March and cheaper in June, July and August.

Note

The emissions intensity of grid electricity is already able to vary over time as it changes linearly over the simulation timeframe. In the future, the time-varying emissions intensity of grid electricity could also be changed to align with the time-varying price of electricity.

[BenWinchester]

@paulharfouche , I've just remembered about this - would this be at all relevant to the case of Lebanon?

[paulharfouche]

Oh no, Lebanon it's based on your consumption... will figure it out eventually. I am looking on writing it down pseudo and finding how to code it later. Will need a hand there 💯 Thank you for sending me this!

[BenWinchester]

That's what I'd figured - I was going through the old issues to check that there were no duplicates and spotted this one 😄

[BenWinchester]

Releasing these features (tiered-based pricing, and, here, time-based pricing) would be a good feature :smiley:

[hamishbeath]

Agree!