alt Hacker News> Some Japanese utilities have introduced tariffs designed to encourage daytime water heating as growing volumes of solar generation enter the grid. [Emphasis added.]
I was quite confused at the use of "tariff" here, as it meant to me a "tax on a good crossing a political boundary." Turns out, 'tariff' has an older meaning: a published schedule of fees or taxes issued by some authority.
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In the UK you can get agile tarrifs now where the price changes through the day according to demand and supply predictions. There's an API you can use to control chargers, heaters, bitcoin miners etc.
US utilities also have Tariffs. It’s the statement of how the utility operates and charges users for service. Anytime a utility needs to adjust costs/rates, they need to file a Rate Case with the public utility commissions, and resulting in changes to the Tariff.
My electricity contract in the Netherlands here is on a "Dynamisch tarief", with the most direct translation being "Dynamic tariff". It means I pay/get a different price for my power every 15 minutes.
"Tarief" just means price of mainly a service.
I think 'dynamic rate' is the proper translation for the US?
It's an arab loan word for ~"price list" (originally strongly suggesting an import-duty-like meaning).
The same word exists in e.g. German or Italian, but mostly just means "pricing scheme" there, like in the article ("import duty" using a different expression in those languages).
Might be a mostly/somewhat "false friend" for a German (pv magazine is german).
It’s the word I have always seen utilities use in the US.
It is used to mean a schedule of fees. Its a common usage in the UK and some other countries.
I've seen 'tariff' used a fair amount here in the UK on price lists (taxi etc)
The Japanese word used in the context of price lists would be something like 料金表 or 料金メニュー.
When I see "tariff", my mind only thinks of 関税 , and I was just as confused as you were. Turns out its just an item in a price schedule.
It’s confusingly super common in the US for that usage when talking about trucking and shipping. Where of course the other kind of tariffs are also common.
I've read that the word is borrowed from Arabic, meaning notification, and I think at first it was price notifications and then people started using it to mean that the prices were bound to some schedule or condition.
For example in Turkish, "tarife" means only that: Conditional / Schedule-based pricing, and according to Sevan Nişanyan (a language researcher), Turkish borrowed it from Italian, where it was being used similarly. Import tariffs are a completely different word.
It apparently came to English through Italian -> Spanish -> French.
So I'm not a native English speaker but as far as I understand, import tariffs are just one kind of tariff.
ps. I just f'ing love Etymology.