What does Efficient Energy mean?

What does Efficient Energy mean?

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Frequently Asked Questions

WHAT DOES EFFICIENT ENERGY MEAN?

Many companies and new technologies use the term 'energy efficiency'. It generally means that their device uses less energy. This can be good, and obviously if you use less energy you pay less for the energy you do use. But the 'energy efficiency' standard is mostly aimed at reducing national energy footprints, not saving you money.

Polare are turning that around. We do efficient energy. That means that we get electricity in the most efficient way for you. The biggest savings are for you, the consumer. It has some national benefits too, but we are focused on bringing down costs for our customers.

Our technology can hugely reduce the cost of electricity to you, personally. Then it also helps balance the national grid and brings down electricity costs for everyone in your community or country.

Notes
DID YOU KNOW
Most 'energy efficient' devices are around 5% cheaper in running costs
The most expensive smart thermostats claim to save up to 12-15% in your electricity costs
Polare can save up to 20-35% in your electricity costs.

HOW IS ENERGY INEFFICIENT?

One way to reduce emissions is to use less energy. Another is to use electricity when it is cheaper. Polare are making electricity greener by making electricity production more efficient for the grid, not just for you.

Too little electricity is bad…

Remember Back to the Future? Electricity has to be used at the exact moment it is generated, or in rare cases, the exact moment lightning strikes a clock tower. Sadly we don’t have a time machine and convenient future knowledge. So we need the electricity grid to have standby generators available during periods of high demand, or the lights go out. Too little electricity generation requires these standby generators, which are expensive and have high CO2 emissions.

In short, unpredictability requires flexible generation. This flexibility is expensive for the grid, and worse for emissions. It also causes prices to fluctuate throughout the day, week and year. Using electricity when it is cheap not only reduces your bill, but helps the national grid get more out of renewables and avoid standby generation.

…too much electricity isn’t much better.

In addition to standby generation, power stations such as nuclear have a certain minimum level of production which it is difficult to reduce them below, for example overnight. They overproduce electricity when there isn’t demand for it. Renewable generation such as wind and solar has to generate electricity when there is wind or sun. Some of this weather is predictable (solar on clear days) some is unpredictable (solar on cloudy days, or wind). Whenever there is too much production from wind, solar, or power stations overnight, storage is required.

Storing electricity is mostly done through batteries, which at scale are extremely expensive. Presently storage uses technology that is getting more expensive, and itself does damage to the environment through mining. With renewable generation like wind, it also requires reducing generation even when there is lots of wind. You may have seen wind turbines standing still even in high winds, this is usually why. So while electricity is often the greenest power source you can use as a consumer, how efficient that electricity production is - when you use your electricity - makes a huge difference to the cost and environmental impact.

THE COST OF INEFFICIENCY

As we have introduced more renewable generation into national grids, the total cost of these inefficiencies has risen sharply. This is all managed through wholesale electricity prices – when there is too much electricity produced, the prices go down. When there is too little, the prices go up. In the EU, these prices change every hour, or in some countries even every fifteen minutes.

But you as a consumer never see the wholesale electricity prices, and the price changes are so frequent and often unpredictable that even if you did, it is really hard to respond to them. Can you get up at 3AM to charge your car? Do you want to reprogramme your heating timer every few days? Do you know where to find the market prices and combine them with the weather forecasts?

Timers, such as are common on thermostats, no longer work to solve this problem as prices change not only over a 24-hour period, but over weeks and months. They depend on the weather, market factors, and local electricity generation mix. None of this is predictable or stable, so prices change significantly from day to day, and week to week.

WHAT POLARE DO

That is where Polare and our controllers come in. We do all of that for you automatically, so all you have to do is connect a device to a controller, set what you want that device to do, such as the temperature or when you want you car to be charged, and we will do the rest.

We use machine learning to combine all this data for every 24hr period, then our algorithms create a bespoke timing schedule optimized to the lowest prices for your property. This schedule is sent to your Polare controller, which then executes the schedule automatically over that 24hrs. That means that the default setting of your heater's on/off pattern is now matched exactly to the lowest daily prices.

One half of our algorithm works out what the lowest prices are for you. The other half takes into account what you have told it about your preferences and occupancy pattern. It then models how your room or property gains and loses heat, and works out when heat needs to be put in (the heater turned on or off) to maintain the temperature you want during the periods you want it. The algorithm does an optimization to find the cheapest time periods to power the heater to achieve the temperature you want, then sends this schedule to your controller.

This makes electricity generation more efficient. It matches demand and supply better, which reduces stress on national grids. It helps make renewable generation like wind and solar much more effective. It reduces the cost to you of electrification technologies like heat pumps and electric vehicles.

All this makes electricity and energy prices cheaper not just for you, but for everyone. We’ve tried just switching our lights off and making TV standby more energy efficient. It’s not enough. The energy transition isn’t a problem we can solve individually, we have to solve it together.


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