Yeah we got moved onto demand load, it applies weekdays during specific months for summer and winter. The peak usage is applied to the entire billing period, so I switched to monthly billing on the back of that. And another reason I want to run a battery - those hours as the sun is setting is usually when the oven, heater/aircon are all active and peak usage will kick in.
Here's a random day in early January when we still had the control load heating our hot water overnight. You can see the tall spikes from 10:30pm onwards, and before 6am in the morning when the tank was being heated.
That's not difficult to do with current sensors for main meter and CL meter.
Ahh that's odd, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be possible. But then I'm not an expert in such.
I expect TOU is going to work best with battery storage, but flat rate works best for me now sans-battery. I hope we are all able to select the option that works best for us rather than being forced to use a specific type of plan. I am finding limited options now for single tariff without demand tariff included.
And then many retailers will add a daily charge for having the Smart Meter! In my case, the retailer claims it is an imposed charge by the distributor. What a scam that is, the Smart Meter is for their benefits so they don't need to send someone around to read the meter, but then they want to charge me for the fact that they chose to install it.
Yep, that seems to be the way it works. So all the more reason to minimise the peak period consumption, and the only real way for me to do that is with a battery.
Its a commercial decision by the energy distributors, and fine-print/rules may vary by location. In SEQ, Energex sets the rules and they have a few different types of controlled load tariffs available. The cheapest is only for Hot Water and available through the night. There is also a rate for other specific "appliances", one of which is swimming pool pumps/chlorinators, that is available during daytime. But the requirement is that it can only be used by specific appliances that are hard-wired in the circuit - i.e. not to a GPO power point. We had the pool shed hard wired into that tariff before the solar installation, and cancelled it when the solar went in as it made more sense to self-consume our solar generation rather than buy at the CR tariff rate.
I am absolutely certain that is going to be the case - if not this year, certainly the following year(s) as tariffs continue to increase and the energy companies find ways to protect their revenues (such as when they introduced Demand Tariff schemes).
My original 2018 solar install has 6.6kW all north facing. That was the maximum capacity our energy distributor would allow, feeding a 5kW inverter (again, the maximum they permitted per phase).
The installer we used, who incidentally, was also the only one who actually came out to see our place, immediately recommended having east and west facing panels when he saw our roof.
With the rebate its 23c/kWh for me (FiT zero and solar panels fully amortised)
