Carbon-aware pricing cuts CO₂ by 3% on Swiss grid
Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids
A live dashboard on carbonawarepricing.com compares three electricity pricing approaches across 38 grids, using real ENTSO-E data. For Switzerland over 32 days, carbon-aware hourly pricing would have cut emissions by 2.4%, while peak pricing achieves 3.0%—saving over 4,200 tonnes of CO₂. The site details methodology changes, block-level breakdowns, and notes that savings are carbon-based, not price-based.
The idea is to shift use away from the dirtiest hours.
- boshomi
Here is an analysis from Germany: Quarter-hourly spot prices compared to the share of renewable energy generation in total generation. A higher share of renewables puts massive downward pressure on the spot market electricity price.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/price_scatter/chart.ht...
Since price elasticity for electricity is very high, the market cap decreases by approximately €150,000 for every additional GWh of renewable energy production. A single additional offshore wind turbine with an annual output of 60 GWh reduces the combined revenue of all electricity producers by about €9 million per year that it is in operation.
Blocking wind power and solar projects only serves to secure the profits of monopolists and oligopolists in the electricity market, but causes massive harm to the economy.
- Havoc
Mine is just flat pricing but I do try to align it.
UK has big variations in carbon intensity depending on how solar & wind is doing, so easy enough to make a small effort to align discretionary things like washing machine with that
There is also a very nice dashboard for UK grid that shows clearly what's going on at any point in time.
- HexPhantom
The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity
- jaapz
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
- flaburgan
The idea is interesting but unfortunately most of the people don't know the electricity price even now without this mechanism.
This should be displayed on top of every washing machine everywhere to make it works