Electricity Contract Comparisons and Cost-Saving Strategies for Private Consumers in SE3, Sweden 2022

Sammanfattning: 2022 was an unusual year in the electricity market, with volatile and high electricity prices.The question of which type of electricity contract is the best based on one's electricityconsumption pattern became more relevant for many, especially for people with a largeelectricity consumption. As a private customer in Sweden, it is possible to buy electricityfrom an electricity company of choice, which offers different contract forms. Which form ofcontract and which electricity company one as a customer should choose can be a difficultchoice, as well as what the different contracts contain. Three of the most common electricitycontracts are the hourly, variable and fixed price, which are also the contract types covered inthis report. The hourly and variable price contracts largely depend on the spot prices at NordPool, which in turn are set the day before and depend on supply and demand for electricity.Fixed price means that the customer pays the same price per consumed kilowatt hour everymonth during the specified contract period. The price is based on future estimates of theelectricity market situation and the price of electricity. There are two main purposes of thisreport. One is to document the contents of the three main contracts and to investigate howpricing is done with the help of a literature study and interviews with some actors who workwith pricing and/or electricity trading at various electricity companies. In addition to that, amodel is created in Excel that has the purpose of concretizing the impact of the differentcontracts in terms of annual costs. It is based on a Standard scenario with electricitydemandinghousehold components and at what hours they are used. The various price parts ofthe contract, which are documented in the literature study, are obtained quantitatively fromthe three different electricity companies. Hourly, monthly and annual electricity consumptionand finally electricity costs are then calculated. For the hourly price contract, severalmeasures are presented that move electricity consumption to hours with lower spot prices,namely doing laundry at night, lowering the desired indoor temperature from 20°C to 18°C,electric car charging at night and moving heating from daytime to nighttime, as well as anExtreme scenario where all measures are applied at the same time. It is then evaluated howbig of an impact these measures have on the annual electricity prices and how the pricediffers between different contract forms. The result shows that an hourly price in 2022 couldbe more profitable than a variable price if a sufficiently large load was moved to cheaperhours, for example by charging the electric car at night. It appeared that fixed price contractscan be both the most and the least favourable, depending on when they were signed.