Amber Electric
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Why I am leaving Amber
Why I am leaving Amber. It’s a great concept the fact we can draw on wholesale pricing but it has its disadvantages. I’ll run through a very general scenario here: Typical day and you want to you use the aircon. The rates during non spike times are great but it’s also the times where you probably won’t need aircon on. Then it gets really hot and you decide to turn on the aircon and also the same time you get a notification that there is a price spike in rates ie $20/kW yes that’s right $20.00 not 20 cents. You decide not to use the aircon at those ridiculous rates and you wonder why you have a aircon in the first place and why you can’t use it when you actually need it the most. Secondly, they say spikes happen only 0.1% of the time but in my experience over the past month is it happens at least once a week. Any saving you make throughout the course of the week (DMO vs wholesale price ) will be negated by the massive spike hikes. So saving 4-5 cents/kW is meaningless once you use just 0.5kW during one of those crazy price spikes which can last anywhere between a few minutes or hours. So without protection from those spikes to the consumer makes this service very costly and unfortunately I assume it won’t work for most people who want to use the aircon when it’s actually hot and not when there is price spike going on. Consumers simply can’t handle $7-$20/kW price spikes. There is no point having aircon to use when it’s 49 degrees outside and you can’t use it because it will cost you $20/kW! Unless we get a more stable grid, unfortunately price spikes likely to increase and frequent more as we get hotter.