If it wasn’t miserable enough being told that I have to spend the next month at home, now I have ‘Pete’ from Octopus Energy emailing me and asking if I would mind terribly turning off a few appliances between 4.30 pm and 6.30 pm.
If fact, he says, if I can halve my energy usage during those hours he’ll give me a half-price deal on the rest.
Apparently, it’s because the National Grid has issued an ‘electricity margin notice’ for those hours – basically a plea for Britain’s remaining coal and gas power stations to turn up the power and squeeze a little more energy out of their plants.
That’s not going to be easy, admits Pete, and so electricity companies like his are going to be paying through the nose for the power – ten times as much as normal, he says. Hence the plea for me to switch off the TV, or whatever.
That is a ‘smart’ electricity grid for you: balancing supply and demand through price management. And within reason, there is nothing wrong with it. We do, after all, pay more for train tickets during the rush hour (or used to, when we traveled on trains).
Trouble is, I don’t think Pete is going to be so gentle in the future. Give it a few years and he’ll be writing to me that he’ll be jacking up my bill and charging me ten times the usual price for any energy I use when supply is short.
We are heading for periodic supply crunches in the National Grid because we are building ever more wind and solar plants without the storage capacity required to cope with the intermittent nature of these sources of energy.
At least, for the moment, we still have gas and coal plants to pick up the slack. But by 2024 the last coal power station will be gone and by 2030 the Prime Minister says he wants all our electricity to be generated by wind.
That’s going to be a pretty tall order. This afternoon’s electricity supply crunch – the National Grid’s equivalent of leaves on the line – is down to a shortage of wind.
There is a large anticyclone sitting over Britain, which has becalmed the nation’s wind farms, or certainly those south of the border. We are lucky that Scotland is drawing in winds from the Atlantic, which enabled wind farms still to generate 7 percent of our power at 3 pm.
We are also lucky that it has been sunny for much of the day. But it is November, and by 4.30 pm we will have lost 5 percent of the energy that was being generated by solar power earlier in the afternoon.
The government and electricity industry have, of course, been aware for years of the problem of intermittent renewable energy. That is why the government set up things called ‘capacity auctions’ where companies bid to build electricity storage capacity.
Initially, it was imagined that much of this would come in the form of giant batteries. Indeed, some battery installations have popped up across the country, hidden in shipping containers.
But those installed so far are only capable of providing 1 GW of power, and only then for an hour or so before the batteries are drained. To put this into context, this afternoon the country was using 40 GW of power.
Building batteries and other forms of energy storage like pumped-storage reservoirs are expensive. As a result, capacity auctions are starting to be replaced by something called Demand Side Response.
Which is exactly what Pete is trying to do: it involves electricity companies begging us to use less electricity when supply is tight, and using variable pricing to encourage us.
That is the whole point of smart meters: to allow electricity companies to vary the price in order to match supply with demand.
Managing demand might work at the moment, but it is hardly a long-term solution. Imagine a time when we no longer have any gas and electricity plants – sources of power which between them accounted for 55 percent of electricity being fed into the national grid at 3 pm this afternoon.
How will we cope then with a calm winter’s evening when electricity demand is at its peak and no wind or solar energy is being generated?
Electricity suppliers are going to have to impose huge financial penalties on consumers to turn the lights off – or face forced blackouts.
I’m all for clean energy. But without storage capacity, wind and solar cannot power the country on their own.
We shouldn’t be building ever more wind and solar farms until we have a sensible policy as to how we are going to store the energy they produce.
Read more at Spectator AU
Now that the UK has banned peaceful protest over a nonexistent virus, no one can complain about anything. Yea, that might work, but what it really means is that protests will HAVE to be forceful and not peaceful to be heard. Or simply have an uprising.
Facts dont mean a thing to Liberals and Liberal Democrats all that matters to them is how fast they can ruin America and bring in the New World Order and the Globalists plans
Spot on but not only America but all the west including Australia.
Through sheer unscientific stupidity, Europe has driven energy poverty deaths every year to those higher than weather/climate deaths in the entire world. CO2 is the basic ingredient of life on earth. CO2 levels have been declining from concentrations more than ten times that of today since the beginning of multicellular life on earth. CO2 levels today are abysmally LOW for life on earth. A little more has been a Godsend. A little more has increased earth’s biomass by as much as 30%. A little more has made plants so much stronger and more drought tolerant that deserts are shrinking. And a little more has brought a string of world record crop yields. CO2 does not now, and never has driven climate. That is a UN-IPCC and left-wing wet dream. And it is lethal. Temperatures remain well within the 1000 year Eddy cycle. Temperatures remain well within our current Holocene interglacial. And temperatures remain well within our three million year old Pleistocene/Holocene ONGOING ICE AGE. We remain well within THE COLDEST TEMPERATURES THE EARTH HAS EVER ENDURED SINCE MULTICELLULAR LIFE BEGAN. CO2 has never driven temperatures. Its concentration changes lag temperature changes by about 800 years. Not the other way around. If Europe’s politicians don’t start to learn from their scientists and goes ahead with the complete lunacy of building battery storage, they will not only have the highest price for energy in the world, they will be several times higher. And the resulting poverty and deaths will make a few beheadings look like nothing.
Couldn’t agree with you more. The plain facts as stated are true and Climate Change is political not scientific. It is the usual panic the population with fear and trepidation to make them vulnerable. Then hit them with a ridiculous solution for mega rich people to make mind numbing profits at their expense. I suspect the same people couldn’t care less about the environment or people. As the Good Book says, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Can you remember when being green meant uninformed, naive and gullible.
Now it means stupid period.