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Electricity companies scraping data to analyse their customers. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/2northamerican4you@sh.itjust.works
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[–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

They absolutely need to know the demand of each unit, if another home off the same feed is built later or upgrades their service they need to know if the existing capacity is sufficient or if components need to be upgraded.

No they don't.

This information is only relevant for the local provider that physically connects to your home, not for the company selling you the elecricity.

But I increasingly get the feeling that you don't have a free electricity consumer market in the US?
That would actually come as a surprise to me, but would explain some of the comprehension problems that l have seen and experienced myself in this thread.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Ah, that's the disconnect. Typically the electric company is the local provider here. Some provide service all the way from generating stations, some broker power contracts from neighboring generating stations but you typically only have one company to buy power from and they are the ones that build the infrastructure to the home. My utility lets you buy power from partnered solar farms, that solar farm would not have any idea what my home size is, but the utility that physically runs the power cables to my house sure does.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    Ok, so that's really a major difference here...

    In the EU we have heavily liberated energy markets, which let me choose between dozens of different electricity suppliers, each with its own specific value proposition.
    In many cases this means that they just compete with each other to deliver the lowest price, but there are also specialized suppliers, e.g. offering custom time or volume based rates.
    In my case it is a supplier that is a Greenpeace-originated consumer-owned cooperative (yes, I am one of the owners of the company supplying me with electricity:-) ), specializing in regenerative energy.

    These supply companies then pay a part of their revenue to the local providers, reimbursing them for the use of their physical infrastructure.

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