As I mentioned previously, our electricity rates are increasing, but our power company is also rolling out some interesting programs to help people save money and reduce load on the grid. I recently enrolled in one called “PSE Flex“.
There are multiple ways to enroll:
- They send you a message before a “flex event” and ask you to reduce your power consumption. You get paid $1/kWh that you save and $15/year just for being in the program.
- If you let them remotely adjust your smart thermostat, you will get $40/year.
- If you let them control your EV charging, they will give you $0.50/kWh saved during Flex events.
- If you have a battery storage system, you get $500/year if you let them use power from it during Flex events.
I signed us up for the first item and after one month of usage, I’m very happy to report that we’ve already saved the initial $25 sign up credit plus an additional $43.21! There were nine Flex events in those 30 days. I don’t know if that’s normal or if it was ramped up because of the very cold weather we had. Either way, that’s a pretty significant savings.
As someone who spends a lot of time with “big data” I immediately had questions when they said they would credit me for power that I didn’t use. How can you measure something that doesn’t happen? They obviously had to guess and I have two ideas about how they are guessing:
- They look at how much power I used during the same timeframe in the days leading up to the event.
- They look at how much power I used in the hour before and the hour after the event.
They’re probably doing some combo of this but from my experiments, the second one seems to be the stronger signal. And with a giant electricity storage device sitting in my garage (the Tesla), I can really take advantage of this. I make sure to charge the car for the hour before and the hour after the event and whenever I’ve done that, they’ve said that I’ve saved roughly the kWh that I would have used if I had kept charging that whole time.
In most places, you power is coming from a mix of powerplants. You can see where our power is coming from by looking at the Bonneville Power Authority charts: BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total VER. Most of our power comes from hydro. That green line is wind and solar. Coal/natural gas and nuclear are at almost exactly the same level.
I had a hard time understanding why we were having Flex events when we weren’t also having peak power consumption periods. While they probably do have Flex events to reduce peak power usage, there is another reason: it can be cheaper to pay you to $1 kWh to not use power than it is for PSE to BUY the power! There’s a great explanation of this scenario in a Reddit thread but as a very quick summary, the price that PSE pays per MW can fluctuate from $40/MWh on a normal day up to $2000! Those of us on the west coast can see minute by minute pricing on this website: California ISO Price Map
I’m sure the whole story is way more complicated than what I’ve understood so far, but for now, I’ll be very happy if I can keep saving $40/month on my power bill!