This is more behind it than the title says. Important information about this is that my wife does work in the energy sector and is within here company responsible, among other things, for the billing.
In Belgium it is standard to have a energy contract with a fixed rate or a variable rate. In the first situation the price is fixed for the duration of the contract, regardless what the energy price does, in the other situation, depending on the contract, the price is variable and reset mostly after 3 months (but also could be monthly). So if the price on the energy market goes up, you will pay more when it goes down, you do pay less.
But since short a small supplier is offering a dynamic price. This means that each hour of the day you do pay a different price for the enery consumed, depening on the market. Each day around 2 pm, the supplier publishes the prices for the next day.
Don't be fooled by the prices you do see, this is more or less the price they do pay, so you need to add around 0.03 euro to this. There is the requirement that the client needs to have a digital meter, so that they how much enery you did consume hour per hour.
Well at the moment we did join, they had 200 customers. No idea how much customers they do have at the moment. The reason we did join is because the wife is more or less spying how they do this and do their billing. A more friendly definitation would be mistery shopper :).
For them this is on one side the worst customer they could have, due to the fact that this customer does know everything about the legislation and the obligations a supplier has, but on the other side she also could be considered a priceless tester. I can tell you that some of the communication between my wife and their helpdesk is hilarious. So knows more or less the script these helpdesk are using, but she also knows what they should answer legaly.
If you do look at the daily prices and do some planning when putting on which machine, you could save a lot of enery and a considerable amount of money. We are now thinking about pruchasing a home battery. There are nights that the energy price is close to zero (the cheapest I do see was 0.004 euro) if you could fill a home battery with this, you could use this price almost the complete day.
It gets even better. When the wife is charging her EV we do make a profit. She does et 0.30 euro back per 1KW chared, but mostly we only pay around 0.1 euro. So it is really time that my EV does arrive.
Not only this is good for the wallet but it also does make you think about your enegy consumption.
Cheers,
Peter