Profile contracts for electricity retail customers

Decarbonization involves a large-scale expansion of low-carbon generators such as wind and solar and the electrification of heating and transport. Both space heating and battery-electric cars have significant embedded flexibility potential. Granular price signals that convey abundance or scarcity of electricity are a precondition for customers or aggregators acting on their behalf to exploit this flexibility. However, unmitigated real-time prices expose customers to electricity price risks. To tackle the dual need of providing flexibility incentives while protecting customers from cost shocks, real-time tariffs with a hedging component can be a solution. In such contracts customers pre-agree an amount of energy and a consumption profile, while hourly deviations are charged at spot prices. In this paper we analyze design options by using a dataset of anonymized smart meter data and show that profile tariffs can bring electricity bill volatility to similarly low levels as fixed tariffs while providing full flexibility incentives from spot prices.