The future of residential building electrical installations

I struggle to see the logic behind it. Customers should be charged by how many kWh they consume rather than how many amps they are allowed to consume even momentarily.

It suits the French way of generating electricity - i.e. primarily nuclear - which being very expensive to build but relatively cheap to run, best suits a relatively constant load. They'd struggle to supply the UK using their system as our peaks are about 100% higher than baseload. Their pricing system discourages large short-duration loads and encourages long duration small loads (especially off-peak) - so French homes tend to have 2kW immersions running off-peak rather than instantaneous electric showers for example. As a result their peaks are only around 50-60% higher than their (much higher) baseload - a far better use of their nuclear fleet, especially when they can use hydro/pumped-storage to help with the comparatively small peaks.


When we burned mostly gas to generate electricity, which being more 'turn on and offable' than nuclear, we worried more about total consumption than baseload and peaks, but as we move more towards renewables we find ourselves in a situation of having better to match demand & supply. So we could end up in a similar (although not identical) position to the French of wishing to encourage consumption at times of low demand (or surplus generation) or discourage it at times of high demand (or insufficient generation), even if we're coming at it from a different direction.

   - Andy.

I struggle to see the logic behind it. Customers should be charged by how many kWh they consume rather than how many amps they are allowed to consume even momentarily.

It suits the French way of generating electricity - i.e. primarily nuclear - which being very expensive to build but relatively cheap to run, best suits a relatively constant load. They'd struggle to supply the UK using their system as our peaks are about 100% higher than baseload. Their pricing system discourages large short-duration loads and encourages long duration small loads (especially off-peak) - so French homes tend to have 2kW immersions running off-peak rather than instantaneous electric showers for example. As a result their peaks are only around 50-60% higher than their (much higher) baseload - a far better use of their nuclear fleet, especially when they can use hydro/pumped-storage to help with the comparatively small peaks.


When we burned mostly gas to generate electricity, which being more 'turn on and offable' than nuclear, we worried more about total consumption than baseload and peaks, but as we move more towards renewables we find ourselves in a situation of having better to match demand & supply. So we could end up in a similar (although not identical) position to the French of wishing to encourage consumption at times of low demand (or surplus generation) or discourage it at times of high demand (or insufficient generation), even if we're coming at it from a different direction.

   - Andy.