Pay consumers not to consume electricity!
Negative oil prices were one of the craziest moments ever in the energy market. At one point in April 2020, a seller paid a buyer $40 for a barrel of West Texas Intermediate. We’re going to need another crazy moment if Europe is going to make it through the winter. How about this: Pay consumers not to consume electricity.
A year on into the energy crisis, policy makers have only tried supply measures in their attempt to address the problem. Their own words highlight the approach: “supply” and “production” were got 28 mentions in last week’s communique of the Group of Seven summit; “demand” and “consumption” just five.
This is about to change: The best energy is that which we don’t consume. In Europe, officials are now working on a plan to fight the crisis, likely to be published in a couple of weeks, that’s going to focus on consumption measures. I expect to see a big emphasis on so-called “demand response.”
That involves consumers, mostly large companies, reducing or shifting their energy usage during peak periods in response to time-based rates or other financial incentives. The typical demand response measure is cheaper energy prices during low-demand periods — say, at night or weekends. But what I hear out of Brussels is an extreme form: Paying some companies to slow down their plants significantly, or even halt them, so they don’t consume electricity, and therefore help to keep the lights on for everyone else.
Saving electricity equals saving natural gas because a large chunk of power in Europe is generated by burning gas imported from Vladimir Putin led Russia.
The UK is also exploring the idea. National Grid Plc is asking companies how many megawatts of power demand they would be able to cut next winter — and how big
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
