Michał Smoleń

We have regulated tariffs and keep electricity rather cheap for families (and expensive for enterprises). Another reason is that households with possibly flexible demand profit from previous net-metering scheme for rooftop solar, which didn’t encourage self-consumption or demand flexibility. 2/2

For households - they are only available since a couple of weeks ago, so the scale is negligible. And there will be obstacles. Many families don’t have smart meters. We just started with the EVs, and most families don’t spend enough on electricity to make changing habits worthwhile. 1//2

1. We should plan our power system for overall efficiency (including environmental efficiency through carbon pricing). System with some curtailment might be better than the one that tries to rigorously limit it by limiting wind and solar capacity or over investment in flexible demand.

E.g. 🇵🇱 partially replaces old coal power plants with expensive CCGT gas turbines optimized for baseload work. But in the future, part of our fleet could consist of cheaper OCGT peakers, as they will be used as a last resort - when demand won’t be met with clean generation, storage, but also imports.

This is important because if we don’t include international electricity trade in our models, we can quite correctly gauge the need for dispatchable capacity, but overestimate their utilization. This can lead to bad investment decisions. 3/X

But while we should prepare for the worst, we have to also acknowledge that import options probably will be there - and that’s great, as imported clean power can sometimes replace domestic generation from fossil fuels. 2/X