Development of Electricity Pricing Criteria at Residential Community Level

Abstract

In the UK there is no real time retail market, and hence no real time retail electricity pricing. Therefore domestic electricity consumers in the UK pay electricity prices that do not vary from hour to hour, but are rather some kind of average price. Real time pricing information was identified as a barrier to understanding the effectiveness of various incentives and interventions. The key question is whether we can evaluate energy management and renewable energy intervention in the behaviour of customers in real market terms. Currently only behaviour changes with respect to total consumption can be evaluated. Interventions cannot be defined for peak load behaviour. The effectiveness of the introduction of renewable energy is also hard to assess. Therefore, it is hard to justify introducing of renewable and demand side management at local community level, apart from when following government approved schemes, subsidies, and other initiatives. In this paper, a new criteria has been developed to help developers and planners of local residential communities to understand the cost of intervention, in order to evaluate where the load is when the prices are high.