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The renewables argument will not lower your bill. What counts is what you do tomorrow at 1:00 PM
Debates about whether renewables help or hurt can be interesting — but after a week of trading arguments, none of the participants has a lower bill. Because these are really two different conversations.
Two conversations that get confused
The first is about what the energy system ought to look like: whether to keep mining coal, who should pay for balancing, where the transition is heading. An important conversation — but one that will be settled somewhere other than the comments section, and over a horizon of many years.
The second is about what to do with the consumption profile I have tomorrow at 13:00. And that is the energy manager's conversation.
Because nobody expects an energy manager to be right. They expect pragmatism. And this is where it gets uncomfortable, because pragmatism does not currently point in one direction.
Two contradictory signals on one invoice
The same invoice carries two signals that say opposite things. SPOT prices and dynamic tariffs say: draw at midday, when the sun is shining, because that is usually when energy is cheapest. The capacity charge says: do not draw between 7:00 and 22:00 on working days, because that is where the multiplier applies — which is to say, precisely when the sun is shining.
The capacity charge was designed in an era before 20 GW of solar and effectively penalises consumption at the moment when, from the system's point of view, that consumption is desirable. And that will not change quickly. You can be indignant about it — you can even be right. The invoice will arrive regardless.
What counts is total cost, hour by hour
What is left, then, is calculating total cost: energy and every charge, hour by hour. Not one component in isolation from the rest — because that way optimising one line item raises another.
This cannot be done with a spreadsheet or a morning stand-up. The optimum moves with the weather and the season, and every day it sits somewhere else.
A company that can keep up with it earns on the mess. A company that cannot pays extra for it. There is no third option.
Not "does the transition make sense", but "how to keep up"
During office hours the question is not whether the transition makes sense. It is how to keep up with a moving optimum — independently, every day, without morning briefings. The argument under the post will be over any day now. The contradiction in the tariff will remain.
The argument about the shape of the transition will be settled years from now, somewhere else; what concerns an energy manager is the profile for tomorrow at 13:00. And the signals on the invoice contradict each other (SPOT versus the capacity charge), so what counts is total cost hour by hour — those who keep up earn on it, those who do not pay extra.
Percee, as an EMOS-class system, calculates total cost — energy and every charge, hour by hour — and controls the site's profile on that basis: it sees prices, bands and demand, decides, acts and verifies the result, every day and without reminders. The company keeps up with a moving optimum instead of paying for the contradiction between tariffs — which at Solwena's customers has added up to more than PLN 50 million of documented savings across more than 50 deployments.
See how Percee works →