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Comment by Sukotto | Hacker News Reader

  Change the price of electricity from moment to moment

This already happens. It is called the "Spot" price of electricity.

It's not just supply though, the demand, ability of the infrastructure to carry the power, the relative costs of the power plants, etc are also factored into the price.

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I know what the spot price is. My electric bill, however, has a fixed price 24/7. When the cost to deliver electricity varies significantly on an hourly basis, this is not an efficient way to match supply with demand.

Note how gasoline prices vary on a daily basis. This matches supply with demand.

This is a topic I find really interesting, so I caught myself writing a whole essay about it. But I have to get back to work.

So let me just say that yes, you are right that gasoline prices better match price and demand.

The large electricity consumers, though, all are on spot prices; and in many countries you also have some split for residental users (e.g. two prices, peak/offpeak, for particular hours in the day) - adoption for this is mostly slowed down by the need to replace all the electricity meters with "smart meters" that can do the variable accounting instead of simply tracking a running total consumption.

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