Forget what you knew about electricity prices: Here you should start the washing machine.

Turn on the washing machine and charge the electric car at night. This advice has been popular for years among those trying to make laundry as cheap as possible.

But in reality, it's day and night that your electricity price turns up and down.

Nowadays, it's cheaper for you to turn on the appliances at 1 PM in the afternoon instead of the nightly counterpart at 1 AM.

This is shown by average figures, which DR has pulled time by time from the Energy Authority from 2015-2025.

The graph shows how the cheapest electricity price for many years was to get it at night, but now the last few years have switched over to being during daytime hours.

And the explanation can be found around rooftops and power plants, according to Professor of Energy Planning at Aalborg University Brian Vad Mathiesen.

- There is a clear trend that electricity is cheaper during the day, due to all the solar panels we have installed around the country and in Europe.

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Two heads of cabbage on offer

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One who has noticed that reality has changed is Naja Habermann on Stevns. Via her app, she has been able to plan her energy-consuming activity to run at the times when electricity has been cheapest.

- Previously, it was very much at night that the electric car should be charged. And now it's typically during the day, or when it's windy. Both parts are good. So we clap our small hands when electricity is free or almost free.

Naja Habermann on Stevns has her air-to-air heat pump standing in her backyard. It uses electricity to heat the air, which is then blown into the house and warms it up. (Photo: © Morten Mørk Jensen)

In addition to electric cars, it is the heat pump that consumes electricity in the family's old, white house. And even though electricity is now cheapest in the middle of the day, it does not cause concern for Naja Habermann and her family.

- Of course, it's obvious that it would be easy if we could just turn everything on all the time. But I don't see it as a challenge. It's a little like buying two heads of cabbage if they are on sale, so you've made something with it.

It was really a popular sport during the energy crisis in 2022 to keep track of how electricity prices fluctuated up and down.

Apps that could calculate electricity prices were among the most downloaded. Here, Danes could follow the fluctuations in electricity prices and plan when they should start their most energy-consuming activities.

And keeping up to date with an app is still the way to keep electricity costs down, according to the Consumer Council.

- If you have a larger electricity consumption that you need to start, then use an app to look a day ahead and plan accordingly, says Christian Sand, who is a consumer political senior advisor at the Consumer Council Think.

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Do we have too many solar panels?

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In Denmark, we have indeed reached a number of solar panels that, when the sun shines the most in the middle of summer, more electricity is produced than we can use.

This means, according to the good old supply and demand principle, that electricity prices in some cases become negative. But this means only in very rare cases that you will actually receive money for using electricity, as you still have to pay electricity tax and transportation costs.

And according to Professor Brian Vad Mathiesen, this does not mean that we have too many solar panels. This means that we are currently finding ourselves in a situation where electricity is lost in the high summer in order to get more out of the sun in the less sunny months and thus achieve lower electricity prices in the fall and spring.

- We have a situation where the number of solar panels, in relation to the electricity consumption we have, is met. But as we see an increase in electricity consumption, there will be a need for and space for more solar panels, he says.

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'It's okay that we don't use all the electricity'

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If you sit and think about why we don't just send electricity from the sun to our neighboring countries, the explanation is, according to Professor of Energy Planning, simple.

- The peaks in the production we have are much higher than the consumption – and that's also the case in the countries around us. We should rather find ways to use it ourselves, but it's also okay that we don't use all the electricity when we really have a lot of sun.

Another possibility could be to store electricity in batteries.

This can be a good solution for you as a private person – for example if you have solar panels on your roof and can charge a battery when electricity is cheap, and use it later.

But according to Brian Vad Mathiesen, it is not a good idea to invest in large, state-owned batteries to store solar electricity for the entire country. According to the professor, it is more appropriate to look at when and how electricity is used, as well as electrifying more of the industry and transport sector.

- Another point is that our electricity system cannot only run on solar and wind. There will be some times when we have high consumption, where we have a need for flexible power plants that can step in and deliver some electricity. For society, it is a good idea that we think of the entire energy system together and see where we can make consumption more flexible.

- We still need more wind turbines, as the heating sector also becomes electrified, and we will also see days when there are low prices at night in the half-year where we have less solar electricity.

Warning: This article was translated by a Large Language Model, in case of doubt, you can always visit the original source.