Yep, power is more expensive right now. It happens. On balance, Flick will still be cheaper than others.

This is where timers are useful. My hot water isn't heating right now, plus dishwasher and clothes drier ran last night when power was cheap. The heat's been on since 5am, so the heat pumps are just ticking over to maintain temperature, rather than working hard to bring it up to heat.

Aredwood:

 

@nofam have you checked with Aurora (Im assuming they are your lines company), That they definitely offer a plan that has night rate or offpeak for the whole house. As my interpretation of reading the payless energy website and the Aurora pricing methodology. (goto page 38) Is that you can't get whole house night rate in Dunedin.

 

If Aurora actually do offer whole house peak / off peak pricing, Contact Flick electric and ask them to start offering it. As they promote whole house peak / offpeak plans. (They call them Smart user plans).

 

[edited to add]

 

As for that forecast price spike on Monday morning, It coincidences nicely with the "off" period that my master load control timer is set to. My average load during morning peak time only very rarely goes over 1kW for the whole house. And is normally under 500W.

 

@Aredwood - Yeah, Aurora don't offer it as such, which is why Flick don't do it down here.  Payless seem to be happy to offer it nonetheless though - I specifically asked them about running the whole house on day/night, and this is what they said:

 

 

The normal configuration would be for all appliances are on Day Night Meter.    It is our cheapest overall option as it allows customers to take the benefit of using the night rates for all appliances and the added bonus is Hot water is available throughout the day.

 

 

 

Aredwood: Very tempted to buy some 120 amp hour batteries and say goodbye to price spikes. But I know that I would be very unlikely to actually save enough money to offset the spikes.

Shame you couldn't store and forward ;)

pogo: Does anyone know what Flick's buy-back rates are for solar going back out to the grid? Do they have any plans to do this at spot? Is that even possible?

Last I heard if you have solar Flick won't accept you as a customer. That could be out of date now.

A friend with solar uses it to heat water, they have 2 or 3 cylinders plus a spa pool. It's good for that, but otherwise storage is probably needed in NZ for solar to be really useful. You'd need a huge amount of storage to run things like heat pumps.

michaelmurfy:

 

Aredwood: Very tempted to buy some 120 amp hour batteries and say goodbye to price spikes. But I know that I would be very unlikely to actually save enough money to offset the spikes.

 

Shame you couldn't store and forward ;)

 

Things would get alot more interesting if Flick started to allow solar customers to connect. As presumably you could then export power from almost any source, not just solar.

Also the Weather today was sunny, but power prices were high ish for a good part of the day. So solar exporting would have worked well with Flick.

Interestingly Transpower pays for timed load reduction via their demand response program. They used to pay a high set price of $500 per MW. But they now have an App where you agree on a price. Presumably they would have quite a high min feed in rate or load reduction rate though. But that service would be excellent for people who manage large sites that use alot of power and have backup generators. As it means you will get paid to use the generators. And if the grid is under high loading it would be a good time to run the generators anyway as there would be a higher risk of power cuts occurring. 

Aredwood:

 

Also the Weather today was sunny, but power prices were high ish for a good part of the day. So solar exporting would have worked well with Flick.

 

By my reading of the price chart on em6live, prices stayed high (> $100) between 6am and 9am only.

Would winter solar, even on a sunny day, produce much power during that period?  Anyone got their own solar output graph from today?

Let me see if my maths is any good.  Say you have a 3kw system and it was on full output between 8-9am, when the price averaged $200/MWh.  That's 20 cents/kWh * 3 = 60 cents.  Less whatever line costs Flick would pass on.  Not allot of money but if Flick started such a system, over the course of the year, it might be worth programming the spa heater to shutdown in response to a price spike, so that you can export more.