What is dynamic pricing and how will it affect your bill?

For the last thirty years, the price you paid per unit of electricity didn't change during the day. You paid the same rate at 3am as you did at 6pm, even though those two units were produced in wildly different ways: one overnight with wind and idle gas plants, one in the evening with every generator in the country firing.

That's ending. Ireland is moving to dynamic pricing — half-hour electricity prices for households, exposing you to the same wholesale market your supplier already trades in. It's the biggest structural change to Irish household bills in a generation.

What "dynamic pricing" actually means

A dynamic tariff passes on the wholesale price of electricity, half-hour by half-hour. On the Irish SEM zone, that price is set a day in advance (the day-ahead market) and reflects the cost of generation, interconnector flows and system constraints. In practice:

• Overnight, when wind is high and demand is low, the price can drop below 5c/kWh.
• At peak, 17:00–19:00 in winter, it can spike over 40c/kWh.
• On a typical day there's a 3× to 6× spread between the cheapest and most expensive hour.

Who wins and who loses

Three groups, in order of outcome:

• Flexible households with smart devices — batteries, heat pumps, EVs — win the most. Their consumption is already shiftable; dynamic pricing just rewards what they were about to do anyway.
• Flexible households without devices — people who can run dishwashers overnight, charge laptops off-peak — capture a smaller slice.
• Flat-rate, peak-heavy households pay the most. If your evening load is high (electric cooking, late dishwasher, electric heating at 6pm), half-hour pricing will raise your annual bill by an estimated 8–15% at current curve shapes.

Why Irish spreads are bigger than most of Europe

The Irish grid has two features that make dynamic pricing unusually valuable: a very high share of variable wind generation (which pushes overnight prices down) and a small, relatively isolated system (which pushes peak prices up). The result is a price curve with a steeper gap than you'd see in France, Germany or Spain.

What to do about it

If you own smart devices, dynamic pricing makes them more valuable, not less. You want your battery charging between 1am and 5am and discharging between 17:00 and 19:00. You want your heat pump pre-heating the house on cheap electricity. You want your EV charging in the small hours, not at 7pm when you plug in.

The catch: managing that manually is miserable, and the pricing changes every day. That's exactly what a VPP like Driving Green automates — we read the day-ahead curve, we move your load, you never think about it. The Energy Score shows you what the shift looks like for your specific home.