Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids

On the long-term, the French option of just running a low-carbon grid remains the obvious solution.

In my country (for people with a so called "dynamic pricing" contract) the price of electricity already drops significantly when we have a load of green energy (wind, solar). I guess this is just a side effect of not having a well-balanced grid. But still that's already kind of a CO2-based pricing - although not directly

I’ve been thinking about this the CO₂ usage could be part of the price. I had toyed with having a two dimensional price, the price alongside the CO₂ usage, but I guess that way madness lies.

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Hey guys, A small site that checks, every day, whether making electricity cheaper when the grid is clean would actually cut CO₂.

It reads yesterday's generation mix from ENTSO-E and the EIA, works out the carbon intensity hour by hour, and compares a normal tariff against two carbon-aware ones.

It started for Switzerland, which turned out to be a good place to start for an odd reason. Swiss electricity is already very clean — about 34 gCO₂/kWh — and yet it's one of the best grids in the set at 2.4%, because it imports from dirtier neighbours and its carbon intensity swings through the day. Louisville, at 741 g/kWh, gets 0.01%: it burns coal at the same rate around the clock, so there's no cleaner hour to move into.

Across 38 grids, the correlation between the saving and how dirty a grid is comes out slightly negative. With how much it varies, it's 0.91. Being dirty doesn't help at all — being uneven is the whole thing.

Fair warning: the demand response is a model rather than measured behaviour, and it uses average carbon intensity, not marginal. Happy to hear your thoughts.