I actually thought I’d seen it all in the climate emergency fantasy world and that nothing could shock me any more, that we rational human beings had probably witnessed Peak Stupid or something close in the faux debate about ‘climate breakdown’ and what we as a society should be doing to ‘stop’ it. But no. National Grid have pushed the boundaries yet again and jumped, not the shark, but the killer whale, and now I fully expect that others will seek out even bigger ‘fish’ in the deep blue sea of seemingly fathomless stupidity which characterises the existential crisis that was once called ‘global warming’. That’s if everything in the deep blue sea doesn’t die of oxygen starvation first of course.
So, yes, here we go anyway. Let’s delve into the murky, incoherent, risible depths of National Grid’s stunning demonstration of just how intellectually, cerebrally, and rationally challenged they have become as an organisation promoting renewables and wind energy. The headline reads:
A smart energy system in action
Naturally, one interprets the word ‘smart’ to mean, well, intelligent, technologically advanced, adaptable etc. You don’t really expect National Grid to then explain that it’s ‘smart’ because consumers are being paid (yes, actually paid) to burn energy at random and unpredictable times when the sodding wind happens to be blowing! But that’s exactly what these morons claim.
Over the weekend, consumers up and down the nation found themselves being paid to use electricity generated from renewable sources. Why?
More and more renewable sources of power are coming online so it’s important we find ways of using as much of that power as possible, to ensure it’s not wasted and help keep costs down too.
The blustery conditions meant a consistently high level of wind power over the weekend, in fact 5pm on Sunday saw the record for the amount of electricity generated by wind power in Great Britain – 16162 MW. That meant a surplus of wind energy, which is where negative pricing comes in.
Even now, when the UK has not finished adding offshore wind capacity in order to go ‘net zero carbon’ energy generation by 2025 or 2050 or whenever, even now, existing installations are starting to generate ‘too much’ energy which, if not used pretty rapidly (because it can’t be stored) willdestabilise the grid and cause catastrophic blackouts as happened recently in London and the South East (though National Grid won’t admit it). So what do they do, they pay smartmeter energy customers to basically squander that energy. If someone tells you you’ll be paid for every kWh you use, you’re gonna switch every damn electrical appliance in the house on right? Make sure every single room in the house is heated to 25C, wash all the curtains, bedding, run the immersion constantly, give the dogs two baths each etc. etc. You ain’t gonna say ‘Oh great, I might just have four slices of toast this morning, instead of my usual two’.
But NG boffins think that profligate and unplanned rapid disposal of this surplus energy which cannot be stored by their ‘smart’ grid amounts to somehow ‘saving’ energy and somehow ‘reducing one’s carbon footprint’. I feel a McEnroe moment coming on at this point: “Jesus CHRIST! You CANNOT be SERIOUS!!”
Some energy suppliers (companies who buy energy in the wholesale market and sell it on to customers) offer flexible time of use tariffs. Time of use tariffs are designed to incentivise customers to use more energy at off-peak times, in order to balance demand. These tariffs charge cheaper rates at certain times of night or day, when demand is at its lowest, and higher rates at popular times. On Saturday and Sunday night consumers on these flexible tariffs were offered energy prices that saw them paid for every unit of electricity they used.
Using this excess energy in homes and batteries across the country helps us in our role balancing the grid and avoids energy being wasted.
Then we get treated to a direct quote from NG’s Director of Operations himself:
National Grid ESO’s Director of Operations Duncan Burt explains more:
“As more renewable sources of power come online we’re looking to encourage more intelligent energy use and technology. Whilst small in scale, initiatives such as this are really exciting offering consumers and business financial incentives, helping them to reduce their carbon footprint and playing in helping the UK to transition to a low carbon energy system.”
Now that is priceless – unlike National Grid’s surplus electricity generation on windy days which they’re so desperate to get rid of incase it causes blackouts that they’re actually paying customers to burn it. But of course on days when it isn’t windy, those same customers with ‘smart’ meters installed will find that their energy costs sky-rocket and they can’t afford to even use a one bar electric fire. In fact, not too far off from now, they’ll find that their ‘smart’ toaster tells them they can’t have any toast at all because there’s no surplus energy in the grid. ‘Smart’ meters will then be fulfilling their original intended purpose – energy rationing.
Of course, something this stupid, you would expect the Graun to immediately pick up on and shout it from the rooftops. They don’t disappoint. At all.
Thousands of households were paid to use extra renewable electricity over the weekend as windfarms generated unprecedented levels of clean power.
Homes using a new type of smart-energy tariff were urged to plug in their electric vehicles overnight and set their dishwasher on a timer to take advantage of the record renewables in the early hours of the morning.
The blustery weather helped windfarms generate almost 45% of the UK’s electricity on Sunday, setting a record of more than 16GW that evening. At times there was more wind power than the UK needed.
‘Unprecedented levels of clean power’. FFS! Bonkers Boris and his shiny Green Tories intend to go full speed ahead with this madness. The UK is running at breakneck speed into a catastrophe – and it ain’t no climate catastrophe.
Climate Scepticism 
Hoovering up negative priced power and storing it (in car batteries) or using it for energy intensive, time-insensitive tasks like laundry or dishwashing certainly does displace fossil fuel demand at other times. It isn’t squandering the energy if the energy was going to be used anyway. The concept has also been applied to the US gas market [where negative prices also exist for very different reasons] – rather than flare the gas they are setting up bitcoin factories powered by these momentary surpluses.
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy/why-bitcoin-mining-being-touted-solution-gas-flaring
I’d agree that asking people to suddenly wash dishes for no reason makes no sense, but I don’t think that’s what’s being proposed here. And at an industrial scale demand side flexibility (aluminium smelting springs to mind) would seem a decent ‘no-regrets’ means to stabilise power prices regardless of origin.
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Getting people to organise their lives around when it’s going to be windy and when it’s not is insane. You can’t program your dishwasher and washing machine according to the weather forecast, or decide that you’re going to create more dirty laundry or use more dishes according to the weather forecast either. What will happen is that people offered negatively priced energy will use it, no matter what, sensibly or otherwise. Also, how many people have electric cars which they charge at home? How many people can actually afford such a virtue signaling luxury? How many people will look at the forcast and think ‘Hmmm, I’ll run the batteries down on my car this week just in case the energy company offers to pay me for charging it’. You can’t organise society in such a fashion, according to the vagaries of the weather. You’re asking for chaos. Stable societies require stable energy supplies.
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I have decided to instal a bicycle-powered generator at home with a big reverse gear and linked to a newly installed smart meter. When a named storm gusts over and sends those big whirligig things athreshing, I shall do my bit for the UK National Grid and pedal BACKWARDS, so soaking up as much of that surplus electrical energy as I can. Shouldn’t let any of those free elections go to use!
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Freudian slip. Elections should be electrons
Evil spell checker.
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The idea is that smart appliances eg are set to automatically run during the cheapest hour (this technology is deployed in a variety of markets already.) The forecasting is done by the power company itself (demand modelling at an hourly resolution is a staple of wholesale energy pricing.) For recharging EVs or UPS batteries eminently sensible, even in the total absence of renewable-related supply surges (negative power pricing is nothing new as conventional thermal and nuclear plants also face ramping constraints). Not merely from the option to use but also *not* to use during ultra-peak hours when wholesale prices can go from 50 EUR/Mwh to 1000 EUR or higher.
In this case the NG is simply copying from the USA, as the largest demand response program in the world is in PJM (Pennsylvania/New Jersey/Maryland):
Click to access O.Khalid.pdf
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It takes only a little bit of thought to realize that paying people to use your product, even if you can’t use it yourself, is not a sustainable business practice. The money they give away will be recuperated by other means. Someone is going to pay for all the “free” money, most likely with a tidy premium on top to cover for errors, and that’s bad for everyone in the long run.
Tiered charges, albeit unpredictable ones, are nothing new and not the point.
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So if you have an electric car you must wait for a storm before you can charge it cheaply ? As for UPS batteries they only last 1 hour at best. Will there be a surge in storage heaters now ? They are not having my boiler !
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This sounds as mad as the Northern Ireland Renewable Heat Incentive whereby farmers were paid a fortune to burn wood to heat unused sheds etc. The powers that be have gone totally insane and a gullible and uneducated public believes all this green crap. That swamp needs a lot of draining.
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JDLV,
This is patently not about using ‘smart’ technology to even out demand via differential pricing during peak times and off-peak (low demand) times. It is power companies under the direction of National Grid directly intervening in the energy market in an attempt to protect the grid from damaging wind power surges which create dangerously low inertia in the system which leads to generators tripping (as happened in August in London when a major offshore wind installation and a small gas turbine station tripped simultaneously). No sane, rational government implements an energy policy in a highly developed economy like the UK which deliberately builds in reliance upon intermittent, expensive, environmentally damaging and unreliable wind energy merely in order to virtue-signal its ‘planet-saving’ credentials. The UK energy sector is being run by and governed by reckless lunatics and/or criminals intent on using a mythical ‘climate crisis’ as an excuse to boost their eco-egos and/or line their pockets with filthy Green lucre at the expense of the paying public.
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Basically it is a hell of a lot cheaper for the National Grid to pretend to “give” free energy to consumers rather than pay extortionate fixed constraint payments to dump any excess power.
One day the emperor will be exposed to be naked.
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And at an industrial scale demand side flexibility (aluminium smelting springs to mind) would seem a decent ‘no-regrets’ means to stabilise power prices regardless of origin.
This is a double edged weapon. While you can use aluminium smelters to dump excess power, the economics of them necessitate that the average electricity be very cheap. That is, you can use them to fix some of the fluctuations of “renewables” but only at the cost of making power more expensive for the other consumers. The smelters won’t buy the peak cost electricity (except enough to prevent the pots solidifying) so everyone else will have to pay.
Aluminium smelters are best run right beside a source of reliable, cheap electricity. They’re not going to stay in business merely so the National Grid can use them to solve its problems.
All over the West aluminium smelters are going out of business as the cost of the power becomes too much.
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Some industries are energy intensive and can only afford to operate when those costs are minimized. Glass sands in west Norfolk are very pale when extracted from huge sand-pits, but they do have a minor iron content that must be removed to produce a colourless glass . This involves using large amounts of the cheapest available electricity – usually at night. Bet they now have a bloody great smart meter.
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Did they turn the Drax wood-burning monster off when all this surplus wind energy was in the system?
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paying people to use your product, even if you can’t use it yourself, is not a sustainable business practice.>
Depends on the market & quantity – in the case of west Texas natural gas, it’s nowadays a waste product; producers make enough from the oil and liquids, and can’t ship or burn the gas, so they have had to pay shippers quite a bit to take it. Even conventional oil wells at times face negative pricing due to production ratchets since you can’t quickly shut one in without compromising well integrity.
Waste power is inevitable. Nuclear and coal plants can’t stop or start on a dime and customer load is itself highly volatile. Some negative pricing is sustainable because the hour or two they pay the market to absorb excess production is covered by all the others. And it happens *all* wholesale power markets, with or without renewables not just the UK. This is the only case I can think of where retail customers have been invited to share in what is ordinarily a rare windfall for gas peakers & pumped hydro operators.
It seems better that more flexible assets should be on hand to absorb surges in supply or demand Why shouldn’t retail or large business customers monetise their flexibility just as utilities do? The networking and load prediction technology are in place as are the idle time-shifting assets eg:
https://www.riello-ups.co.uk/news/11837-making-energy-storage-viable-for-mission-critical-sites
Fossil fuels are more reliable than renewables when they’re in stock; when there’s a major asset failure the effects are longer lasting and more costly. The LNG market on which Europe has come to depend during winter relies on fewer than 1000 specialised tankers, shuttling across the straits of Hormuz & other precarious waterways. Subsea compressor failure, shipping accidents, platform fires or blowouts to say nothing of man-made risks (sabotage, embargo, war) are inherent to conventional energy production from large inflexible assets. The day ahead UK gas price went from 50p to £2.30 2 years ago (that’s for the whole day, for the whole country, indeed for much of the continent) – that economic impact dwarfs whatever NG will ever spend on the rare hour or so of negative retail pricing.
The destabilising impact of renewables isn’t easy to spot in a long term price history. 90 day price volatility for wholesale UK power is on the low end of a 10 year time series & the largest price movements (2008, 2016) were driven by fuel volatility and nuclear outages to which a system complemented with a distributed renewables & storage would be more immune.
https://www.ice.org.uk/news-and-insight/the-civil-engineer/february-2017/what-caused-the-recent-spike-in-power-prices
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Charge of the light brigade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hX59tX9ow0Q
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Beth. My neighbour just had a visit from people in a big white van plastered with information about saving electricity by changing light bulbs, (offering to exchange them for free!) = change of the light brigade.
.
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Alan, if I was your neighbour I would demand a pound for every light bulb they swapped using the same logic as National Grid – I would be saving energy and reducing my carbon footprint, therefore I expect to be paid for it. Hopefully, it would also be a very windy day, which would strengthen the case for financial incentives to be offered.
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If anybody is in any doubt at all that smart meters will become compulsory and be employed to primarily ration energy, consider this newly released report from the government on Absolute Zero by 2050. It envisages the complete electrification of all household appliances and household heating in the next 30 years, with most power being supplied via wind and solar. This will require the current levels of domestic energy use (heating and appliances) to be reduced to 60% of the current use. This is worse than it sounds. The UK population will have increased considerably by several millions by then, meaning even less domestic energy use per capita will be required. You’re probably looking at individuals at least halving their use of energy in the home in the next 30 years. We’d better hope that winters get warmer and not colder!
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This is patently not about using ‘smart’ technology to even out demand via differential pricing during peak times and off-peak (low demand) times.
Here’s the tariff they’re talking about; t it seems to involve exactly that – the hourly pricing is automatically signalling water heaters etc to run during off peak hours:
https://octopus.energy/agile/#ifttt
But of course on days when it isn’t windy, those same customers with ‘smart’ meters installed will find that their energy costs sky-rocket
You’ll find that Octopus has anticipated this risk and built a cap into the price plan, at some kind of margin which I reckon cuts deep into any ‘free money’ from all that midnight dog washing. All in I expect Octopus makes good money off this program and gets free PR from National Grid & the Guardian.
Also, I’m not sure it’s clear here that National Grid doesn’t itself pay anyone to take the gas – a negative hourly price is paid by anyone delivering power to the system during those hours. Since wholesale power is invoiced monthly this would amount to a tiny rebate netted off with a much larger payment, as it would be for any Octopus customers. Not sure I’d wake up early and crank the heating simply to take a few quid off my power bill.
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JDLV – see also my comment above.
Two points:
1. In this particular instance, it patently was not about balancing demand and all about using a ‘smart energy tariff’ as a means to create an artificial spike in energy use in order to avoid surplus wind energy damaging the grid. Read for yourself:
In what energy experts are calling ‘the future of energy’ in action, consumers up and down the nation found themselves being paid to use electricity generated from renewable sources over the weekend. Homes with flexibly priced Octopus Energy tariffs enabled by smart meters saw negative pricing on the mornings of 8 and 9 December as Great Britain caught the tail-end of storms.
Negative pricing sees consumers paid to use energy and relieve pressures on the network when there is a large amount of cheap, green energy on the system.
The fact that Octopus Agile’s primary function is to even out energy use at non-critical times is beside the point.
2. Agile Octopus is precisely what energy companies have spent the last decade strenuously denying will happen, ie. smart meters will be integrated with smart appliances to monitor home energy use in great detail and switch appliances on and off as required. This again is part of the energy rationing regime which is being introduced, painting it as somehow being innovative and of great benefit to consumers.
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A spike in energy use driven by real price signals (which are inherent to power networks, with or without renewables) isn’t in any true sense artificial. Nor is a commercial signal compelling vendors to sell at a discount. The national grid is akin to a clearinghouse, matching sellers and buyers. Any power that winds up being sold at negative numbers is due to the auction mechanism which sets the price, not a midnight phone call to the utility saying sell the power or else. Network safety isn’t plausibly at risk here. Significant blackouts are not caused by wind surges but mechanical or software failure. The summer event you describe was blamed in part on a wind farm trip, not too much power.
I don’t see the difference between what Octopus is proposing and what merchant traders with off-peak flexibility do every day. They are motivated by price signals, which are a bona fide expression of real supply and demand fundamentals, including in a trivial sense network safety which the auction economics also safeguard, in the same way that it would be unsafe to allow too much gas to enter pipeline, so it must by law be flared, stored or shipped at a loss.
In general, a wind turbine is a more flexible asset than a nuclear or thermal plant. The latter delivers flat power 24/7 whether or not it’s needed., which is partly why it is they who should (and do) pay the trivial imbalance charge here.
I don’t know who has been strenuously denying that “smart meters will be integrated with smart appliances to monitor home energy use.” This idea has been kicked around for decades, long before climate change was ever part of the reasoning (I believe I have a couple of old Enron-era slide packs going into some depth on the topic…)
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JDLV,
“Significant blackouts are not caused by wind surges but mechanical or software failure. The summer event you describe was blamed in part on a wind farm trip, not too much power.”
That statement makes no sense whatsoever. Please reseach grid instability and intermittent wind power. As wind power penetration into the grid approaches 50% or more, instabilities arise due to the rapid decrease in inertia, which can cause power units (like windfarms and gas turbines) to trip, resulting in blackouts. This is very likely what happened in August, though they absurdly blamed it on a lightning strike. Greenwash.
“In general, a wind turbine is a more flexible asset than a nuclear or thermal plant. The latter delivers flat power 24/7 whether or not it’s needed., which is partly why it is they who should (and do) pay the trivial imbalance charge here.”
You’re kidding right? More flexible? Intermittent, unreliable, unpredictable, don’t you mean? The National Grid was designed to distribute power generated by stable units such as nuclear and thermal power stations. That’s why it has worked so well for many years. It is a real technological achievement, a marvel of modern engineering. Then along came intermittent and unreliable Medieval wind power and the Grid is now having to be redesigned (not very successfully, involving compromises just like happened on the 8th and 9th of December) to absorb wind power surges. It’s the wind operators who should be paying, not the firms generating power from tried and tested nuclear and fossil fuel installations!
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Jaime
Grid inertia is irrelevant to the issue of negative pricing which happens all the time for a variety of entirely mundane reasons. It occurs in power markets with minimal wind input, indeed in many other energy products with limited storage or asset flexibility.
A wind unit can be easily curtailed by turning the turbines sideways. Not true of a nuclear power station. True, and not terribly funny.
The National Grid was designed to distribute power generated by stable units such as nuclear and thermal power stations
Maybe, but no amount of clever engineering can predict load. Hence imbalances.
The largest blackouts in history have involved failings unrelated to grid inertia. That’s a matter of record:
http://www.rmduk.com/news-and-blog/news-press/102-7-of-the-worst-power-outages-in-the-uk
“Weather is responsible for the majority of major power outages that occur as seen by those examples.”
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JDLV,
“The largest blackouts in history have involved failings unrelated to grid inertia.”
Let’s take a look at the top 3 shall we.
1. The Miners’ Strike (Jan-Feb 1972)
It was caused by the closure of 10 coal-fired power stations – which reduced grid inertia. In fact, rather similar to today, where coal-fired power stations are being taken off line only to be replaced by low inertia wind installations. The grid is designed to run using high inertia gas and coal-fired turbines which generate lots of kinetic energy – which gives the grid its stability.
2. The Great Storm of 1987 (16th Oct 1987)
Trees taking down power lines. Same would happen today if a storm of that ferocity hit southern England.
3. The London Blackout (Aug 28th, 2003)
An estimated 500,000 people were affected. Nearly a million people were affected by the blackout on August 9th 2019, so I guess the earlier blackout is now relegated to at least 4th place – behind the far more serious blackout caused by too much wind energy!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/09/major-power-cut-across-country-london-goes-dark-national-grid/
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Jaime
There is plenty of stuff out there speculating on the effect renewables are having on grid inertia and lots of interesting answers from the engineering world (among which: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/can-synthetic-inertia-stabilize-power-grids)
The closure of coal plants in 1972 isn’t a plausible example of grid inertia (network frequency stability) causing an outage. This blackout was pretty clearly caused by the complete closure of the plant. Indeed weather disasters are much more obvious causes of system failure which underscores how irrelevant it is to life as we experience it. If you have evidence of network frequency issues causing a major blackout (including the August UK event) I would be very interested in seeing it.
It’s clear that you don’t like wind generators but at the risk of repeating myself negative pricing has very little to do with wind energy as such. It’s common enough a phenomenon in other unrelated markets that real time demand side responses such as Octopus are a natural and reasonable response – pro consumer, pro-competition – and not a symptom of mental impairment. A more syndicated network of smaller production/consumption and storage assets is in my view going to be more resilient than one dominated by a few major assets vulnerable to coal strikes /hardware failure/lightning etc but you clearly feel otherwise.
And yet a customer buyback scheme would work as well on a grid with *no wind whatsoever*where spot power prices will still go negative, as surely as death or taxes.
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JDLV, it seems quite likely that Little Barford tripped first, which sparked off a chain of evets leading to the Hornsea installation tripping also and causing the massive power outage. NG played down the possibiity that the loss of Little Barford might have caused the outage – which the loss of such a small power station would not normally do – due to system inertia being low at the time.
NG denied that to be the case.
They maintain that the two generators tripped ‘almost simultaneously’ and independently of each other and that the primary cause was a lightning strike which would not be expected to cause such events.
Two almost simultaneous unexpected power losses at Hornsea and Little Barford occurred independently of one another -but each associated with the lightning strike. As generation would not be expected to trip off or de-load in response to a lightning strike, this appears to represent an extremely rare and unexpected event.
Greenwash. NG earlier in the year released a report precisely detailing the challenges faced by greater penetration of low inertia wind energy into the grid.
Traditional, large rotating power generators provide lots of inertia (the resistance of an object to any change in motion) which acts as a natural aid in maintaining frequency stability. Renewable energy technologies introduce challenges to system stability as they do not provide inertia, meaning they cannot help maintain system frequency. The increased risk of rapid changes to frequency could lead to faults on the electricity network. As a result, we’ll require a greater volume and speed of frequency response to keep the system stable.
NGESO has found that as more renewable sources are connected to the system and larger, inertia-rich, generators such as coal-fired power stations are replaced, maintaining the frequency response at 50 Hz – a license requirement – will become more challenging.
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Oh, and here’s National Grid proudly retweeting about record wind penetration on the morning of 9th August. Complete coincidence I’m sure.
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“negative pricing has very little to do with wind energy as such”
And we sceptics are the ones who get accused of being in denial! That’s complete nonsense. All the linked articles say that it is a result of the intermittency of wind. For example the first link
Here’s another one:
Maybe Mr Vega is employed by the wind industry.
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Paul
Negative pricing *as a phenomenon in commodities* is not restricted to power, nor within power to wind intermittence. It’s relevant here but it needn’t be for the reason that demand is highly variable and supply (especially baseload thermal and nuclear supply) comparatively inflexible.
I’m not in the wind industry but I’m also not trying very hard to defend wind. To be honest you haven’t given me much to work with on that score. On the other hand I have followed power markets since the mid 90s and have seen negative prices first hand in a professional context many times. Have you?
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Agile Octopus negative pricing was a direct response to oversupply of wind energy:
Also, we need to create grid-scale storage to balance supply and demand. When there’s too much electricity in the grid, for example, wind farm operators are paid to switch off their turbines. Until we’ve got the means to store excess electricity, or we can direct consumers to shift their demand, this waste of energy and money will continue.
Octopus has already begun helping National Grid overcome these challenges. First, through our partnership with Reactive Technologies, an innovative data management solution for grid balancing, and second, through Agile Octopus, a renewable energy tariff that incentivises customers to shift demand to cheaper times.
https://octopusgroup.com/insights/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wind-energy/
In order to fulfil its 2025 zero carbon goals, National Grid ESO must embrace new technologies to keep ahead of rapid changes in the energy sector. Renewables are unable to provide system inertia to the same extent as large-scale traditional generation, with the result that transitioning to a greener energy mix inadvertently causes system stability challenges. GridMetrix® enables system operators to overcome these challenges by accurately measuring system inertia, helping to identify areas where inertia management measures are needed, thus facilitating the safe absorption of greater amounts of renewable energy into the grid.
https://www.reactive-technologies.com/news/reactive-technologies-signs-landmark-commercial-agreement-with-national-grid-eso-supporting-its-2025-zero-carbon-goals/
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@J. De La Vega 12 Dec 19 at 2:47 pm
from your link dated 07 Nov 2016 – https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/can-synthetic-inertia-stabilize-power-grids
“Montréal-based Hydro-Québec TransÉnergie, which was the first grid operator to mandate this capability from wind farms, will be sharing some of its first data on how Québec’s grid is responding to disruptive events such as powerline and power plant outages. “We have had a couple of events quite recently and have been able to see how much the inertia from the wind power plants was working,” says Noël Aubut, professional engineer for transmission system planning at Hydro-Québec.
The short answer is good, but not good enough to support massive wind power growth. Québec has about 3,300-MW of wind power today, but Canada’s wind industry is calling for 8,000-megawatts more by 2025”
from wiki – “Wind power delivers a growing percentage of the electricity of the United Kingdom and by the end of November 2019, it consisted of 10,213 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of over 22 gigawatts: 13,517 megawatts of onshore capacity and 8,483 megawatts of offshore capacity”
as usual the wiki watts for the UK are obviously wrong but still huge compared to Canada in 2016.
just wondered how much progress has been made from 2016?
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Jaime,
Once again you are confusing system instability from inertia (a phenomenon measured in seconds) with price instability on the balancing market, supposing that the latter is in some way a manifestation of the former. This is simply incorrect.
existing installations are starting to generate ‘too much’ energy which, if not used pretty rapidly (because it can’t be stored) will destabilise the grid and cause catastrophic blackouts
reveals a serious misconception of how power is priced and dispatched.
Price variability is an artifact of the economic balancing mechanism – accounting – and not in any real way a safety related mechanism, no more than the decision of the airline to only sell 250 tickets on a plane with 250 seats is a safety mechanism. Both the airline and the NG have more than sufficient lead time and resources to address demand swings on that time scale.
Asynchronous generation is conceptually distinct from short term production swing and the hourly pricing mechanisms used by NG to compensate its owners. Inertia related risks exists for an different physical reason & on a different time scale (seconds, not hours) & generally has a different physical remedy – flywheels & capacitance vs gas peakers, batteries and demand swing. The very fact that stopping a windmill can be used to balance the hourly price but is useless as a source of inertia demonstrates this.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VjXJ0w_HB74J:https://www.epexspot.com/en/company-info/basics_of_the_power_market/negative_prices+&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk
I am going to anticipate your cut and paste of the phrase “ to avoid overloading the grid” to say that overloading the grid is the common sense explanation why generation would need to be shut off, explained to someone who doesn’t know that it can’t be stored or used in real-time, not as proof that grid overloading is a realistic outcome. The tolerances NG embeds in its liquidity programs guarantee this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Grid_Reserve_Service
Before renewables, no one ever pointed to negative prices as a symptom of grid instability; they are simply a manifestation of system inflexibility of an ordinary non-critical character.
The fact that Octopus is promoting its business partner (Reactive) with a common interest in wind energy doesn’t reveal that price instability = system instability. It simply shows that some solutions (battery technology) applies to both problems like any other engineering challenge specific to wind.
The simplest expression of this point is that negative pricing has simply never coincided with any physical threat to the power grid *nor itself caused or presaged a blackout*. The wind data from August 9 does not reveal a stronger than usual wind speed nor was it foretold by especially volatile prices in the hourly Nordpool market. See for yourself:
https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/GB/Auction-prices/UK/Hourly/?view=table
The proximate cause of the blackout was lightning followed by hardware failure of some kind. You suspect this to be related in some murky way to inertia but I haven’t seen much to validate this, and this would still seem to bear very little on the question of variable supply as applies to pricing. There was no grid-crippling surge in wind power on the day in question (per the OFGEM report/Met) nor negative prices. But any surge could have been fixed by turning down gas plants or *even wind towers themselves* as the timescale easily permits this the same way that BA’s workaday processes prevent your flight from containing 2000 passengers well in advance of a stampede at Heathrow.
I’m not sure if your description of this event as catastrophic is tongue in cheek but a 45 minute failure in parts of the country isn’t catastrophic. That would be more like the NYC blackout of 2003 which lasted over a week and affected 50 million people, myself included. This wasn’t caused by renewables/inertia /goblins but an ordinary software glitch. so far as I am aware there was not a single blackout related casualty in all of the UK.
Catastrophic failures in the gas system are much more frequent and often involve actual fatalities. Negative pricing are also routine and a far less important problem but the other rigidities, supply chain length, engineering constraints etc are more thorny than system inertia with demonstrably more serious outcomes. This is by no means a reason to hate and fear gas as a power feedstock, but it should highlight the absurdity of inertia (much less negative prices!) as a show stopper vis a vis wind power.
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JDLV,
I’ve been blogging and commenting for a few years now and find that when people sense they are losing an argument, they do one of two things:
1. Stop commenting
2. Construct ever more lengthy comments consisting of largely irrelevant and digressing material which require ever increasing effort to dissect.
I’m not suggesting you are losing the argument. I’m suggesting you lost it very early on in this conversation. You chose to refute my arguments about grid instability based on the principles of electrical engineering by switching to an alternative economic argument based on simple supply and demand and pricing variability.
I gave you the facts, not merely my opinions, facts as given by expert electrical engineers and as stated by energy providers themselves. Excessive wind penetration into the grid at times of low demand destabilises the grid and, if not remedied fairly quickly, can lead to generators tripping followed by large scale blackouts. When supply exceeds demand, wholesale electricity prices can go negative if there is not enough flexibility in the system. That is economics. Power stations cannot be just turned off, so wind farm operators are paid to stop their blades rotating, which is costly and wasteful.
A solution is to increase energy use at the supply end via flexible smart tariffs which pass on the benefits of negative wholesale prices directly to customers, thereby potentially increasing demand so that the excess energy can be safely absorbed. Safely absorbed, such that it does not destabilise the grid.
So, in contrast to what you say, I am not “confusing system instability from inertia (a phenomenon measured in seconds) with price instability on the balancing market” because they are implicitly connected. That being the case your assertion that “price variability is an artifact of the economic balancing mechanism – accounting – and not in any real way a safety related mechanism” is also demonstrably false.
I am going to anticipate your cut and paste of the phrase “ to avoid overloading the grid” to say that overloading the grid is the common sense explanation why generation would need to be shut off, explained to someone who doesn’t know that it can’t be stored or used in real-time, not as proof that grid overloading is a realistic outcome. The tolerances NG embeds in its liquidity programs guarantee this.
Grid overloading IS a realistic outcome. Grid-scale storage does NOT exist. This is WHY wind turbine operators are PAID to stop their blades rotating. This is WHY operators are looking at artificially enhancing demand by offering to PAY customers to use energy. Or are you saying that Octopus Energy are also ignorant, as well as myself?
Also, we need to create grid-scale storage to balance supply and demand. When there’s too much electricity in the grid, for example, wind farm operators are paid to switch off their turbines. Until we’ve got the means to store excess electricity, or we can direct consumers to shift their demand, this waste of energy and money will continue.
Please don’t bother with any more long-winded and meandering responses because this is my final comment on the issue and I won’t reply.
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Also, we need to create grid-scale storage to balance supply and demand.
We also need to stop hunger in the poor and bring about world peace.
Some things that are a good idea are simply not possible in the time span we would like them to be possible in.
Batteries aren’t going to cut it other than very short term fluctuation control. They’re expensive and dangerous if too many are stored close together. There is no other suitable technology remotely close to being scaled up.
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largely irrelevant and digressing material
Yes in a post about hourly pricing, grid inertia is completely irrelevant.
Your original post attempted to tie negative prices to the concept of grid instability. But negative pricing has nothing to do with grid instability or we should have seen instances of blackouts preceded by or coincident with negative prices. Also, no blackout in history has been caused by it, and they exist in stable grids where wind isn’t present. Your engineer friends, insulated from the pricing mechanism of the power market, may not have these facts to hand. I’m not going on what my friends have told me, just what I know from trading in energy markets for 25 years, including the wholesale power market.
It’s really simple: if you’re in a position to offer an hourly discount because the grid is paying you, the grid is operating within normal tolerances.
A car has brakes, and it has airbags. Using the brakes from time to time doesn’t mean the car is unsafe, or that the airbags are about to go off. The inertia conversation is about the airbags. They both involve speed changes (instability) but at time scales many orders of magnitude apart.
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The wind energy sector and its many advocates in the main stream and online social media are in denial about (and perhaps deliberately underplaying) the risks associated with increasing reliance upon wind power. It is also certain that some people are making rather a lot of money from taxpayer funded constraint payments made to wind farm operators precisely to avoid their installations destabilising the grid.
https://www.ref.org.uk/ref-blog/352-constraint-payments-to-hornsea-offshore-wind
At the same time that it was paying Hornsea to reduce output, National Grid was instructing conventional CCGT plant in the region both to increase output and to start generating. These generators included those at Staythorpe, Keadby, South Humber Bank, which all started generating, and Salt End, and Cottam which were instructed to increase output. Thus, instructing Hornsea to reduce output does not appear to be an action intended to address a simple excess of generation in the area but suggests that National Grid may have been concerned at low inertia, and was seeking to increase inertia relative to load by reducing asynchronous generation (Hornsea offshore wind) and simultaneously increasing synchronous generation (CCGT).
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Dfhunter,
I have a comment from you in my inbox which doesn’t appear to be anywhere on site. If you didn’t delete it and would like it to appear let me know and I will copy and paste.
J
I see it is there now.
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‘Unprecedented levels of clean power’.
If constraint payments are being made now, then ‘unprecedented’ future levels of wind power inevitably mean more of the same i.e. unprecedented levels of said payments.
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Grid inertia is a complex subject that even involves what is mathematically defined as complex math — math that includes the square root of negative one, and is apparently used a lot by electrical engineers. I thought I was getting a pretty good handle on it from a post at WUWT by Rud Istvan:
Then I got into a discussion thread with engineering type, Chris Morris, and things aren’t so clear:
https://judithcurry.com/2019/11/09/week-in-review-science-edition-112/#comment-902633
There is one thing I’m pretty sure of. If wind turbines are starting to cause negative pricing, adding more of them is going to make electricity more expensive.
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one way.we handle negative pricing is by having a variable demand facility …otherwise known as a bitcoin farm. grid operators and wind farm folks are lovin it
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The bitcoin farm is indeed an intriguing and important ‘variable demand facility’. I wonder what the central bankers like Mark Carney make of that.
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Isn’t bitcoin mining supposed to be using huge amounts of energy (currently enough to power a small nation), which keeps on increasing as the maths problems get ever more difficult? The currency will need its very own source of renewable power soon!
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Presumably if bitcoin farms are being paid to generate bitcoins, then the value of said currency will only head in one direction. Presumably also it would still be possible to make a profit while generating bitcoins that had zero or negative values.
If a resource has negative value, it seems to be less than worthless. Too, if a resource with variable value has major excursions into the negative, that means – or feels like it means – that it will also have major excursions into rather extreme positive realms too.
This is all rather confusing, but one thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want a “smart” meter.
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I wonder what the carbon footprint of CMIP6 model runs is?
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From my regular checking of ‘Gridwatch’ it seems that, from August 9th, an of coal-fired generation – between about 1GW and 3GW – has been permanently on-line, where before that date there were long periods of absence. Maybe to provide system inertia?
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I see Steve Mosher is proudly shilling for big bitcoin.
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maybe instead of bitcoin farms we could have free street lighting for all night long !!!
so, when the lights go out in our house’s we all gather at the nearest lamp post.
ps. the birds & nightlife will be pissed, but we must save the planet by any means.
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@Canman
Grid inertia is certainly complex. Just like climate science it lends itself to distortions and ill-informed scaremongering. But I don’t see how negative prices will mandatorily raise prices for the customer. They haven’t had that effect on eg the US gas market. The same dynamics causing negative prices, flaring etc have also kept consumer prices there very low for years.
There is in the end a market price for frequency stability but it isn’t relevant to the negative pricing as defined here. National Grid eg has just tendered for inertia providers via the recent ‘stability pathfinder’ program (following similar programs in Ireland and South Australia.)
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/156406/download
“We require incremental stability capability beyond that which can be currently accessed through the market or the balancing mechanism”
Which reveals pretty clearly that inertia is beyond what can be accessed through the market or the balancing mechanism, including through any variable demand program such as described by the OP. It may be expensive, it may be cheap, but it isn’t going to be solved by Octopus-style variable demand.
Likewise bitcoin/smart metering etc may help with the “good problem” of too much cheap energy but not with the other problem of inertia, which is why inertia specific services are being sought, notably via zero-MW, regional capacities, denominated in GW/seconds rather than GW/hours. Not because of the trip risks posed by too much wind (those haven’t happened), but to contain trips originating elsewhere (lightning eg) by maintaining system frequency.
From my regular checking of ‘Gridwatch’ it seems that, from August 9th, an of coal-fired generation – between about 1GW and 3GW – has been permanently on-line, where before that date there were long periods of absence
@Glyn Palmer
The Elexon portal is the source for Gridwatch, and offers hourly historical generation data & it doesn’t show continuous coal use from August 9th – far from it. Coal generation only briefly exceeded 1GW in August on the 15th, 27th and 28th and not continuously.
https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=generation/fueltype/current
The more recent climb in coal output is explained by a climb in the UK clean dark spread (CO2 adjusted spread of baseload power to coal prices. UK day ahead baseload power has climbed from the mid 30 GBP/Mwh in August to 47 GBP with a slight decline in EUA prices and ARA coal prices across that interval.
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J De La Vega:
I know I don’t understand this area but this is to express my gratitude to you, as someone I think does.
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Thanks very much Richard, and also to Jaime for initiating and hosting the exchange. The subsidy and transparency issues discussed in her REF link merit attention and bear meaningfully on the topic of social cost if not on grid safety.
Gas not power is more my bailiwick. Its physical constraints also inspire behaviour and prices that defy common sense. But these same challenges can inspire & even subsidise mind boggling feats of engineering (shale, LNG & GTL spring to mind). Grid scale storage may not be far behind, and with it cheaper more reliable energy of entirely local origin.
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If it’s getting more challenging to safely and economically sensibly integrate existing wind power into the grid now, imagine what it will be like in 10 years time when Boris has doubled offshore wind capacity to 40GW. That’s what the Conservatives promised in the Queen’s Speech – in order to save the planet, you understand. At least the Germans are able to export surplus generation to the European grid, even if othr nations are unhappy about having German energy dumped onto their energy markets. I wonder if Boris actually realises that the UK is an island?
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Boris has interconnectors for his…er…surplus wind
https://www.eniday.com/en/sparks_en/interconnectors-gas-electricity-uk-ue/
Latest project: ‘UK to Denmark interconnector gets £850M sign off’
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/uk-to-denmark-interconnector-gets-850m-sign-off-12-11-2018/
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The final reports into the Aug 9th blackout have been released by OfGem and BEIS. A former director of National Grid and former national grid engineer have also written an analysis. I quote:
The significant loss of frequency was down to a fall in system “inertia” – the energy provided by conventional generators that effectively acts as a shock absorber to prevent sudden frequency changes, the analysis states. Renewable plants, such as wind and solar farms, which generate power intermittently, do not provide inertia, and wind generation alone now accounts for 17 per cent of the UK’s electricity.
“To avoid an immediate repeat of this incident, which could be much worse (the event on Friday the 9th was close to nationwide black system), it will be necessary to manage system inertia,” Mr Gibson and Dr Aris state.
They call for limits on specific types of generation, such as wind and solar, for any given day, based on predictions of system inertia on each day.
“For the longer term there are various actions which should be considered that will recover lost system inertia … It is necessary with immediate effect to limit the amount of new, zero inertia generation plant, such as wind and solar and even new interconnectors, that is connected to the grid. This consideration should include roof-top solar.”
They add: “Disconnection of some low or nil system inertia plant may be required in the short term to render the system adequately secure.”
Boris plans to double the capacity of offshore wind farms.
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Looks as if the UK is determined to learn the hard way.
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Wind farms paid up to £3m a day to switch off. An interconnector from Scotland to Wales ‘tripped’ because it got too windy in Scotland. More madness, the cost of which will be passed to consumers. It will get worse.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/01/19/wind-farms-paid-3-million-per-day-switch-turbines/
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Told you.
“Ofgem reviewing plans to give energy networks the ability to shut down domestic electricity supplies
A new sort of smart meter would need to be installed in every home in the UK
Would have the ability to switch off high usage devices such as electric vehicle chargers and central heating systems
Sources close to discussions told us that government is ‘open’ to proposing legislation to support these powers
These include giving networks the right to decide when they consider the grid to be in a state of ’emergency’ and the power to switch off high usage electrical devices such as electric vehicle chargers and central heating systems in British homes.
Under the plans all homes would need to have a third generation smart meter installed, to include a function that allows meters in the home to receive and carry out orders made by the energy networks.
This would dramatically alter the role of smart meters, which are currently capable only of sending data on energy use to energy networks.”
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-8706033/amp/Smart-meters-used-switch-electricity-without-warning-compensation.html?__twitter_impression=true
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Relevant to my discussion with JDLV about grid inertia above, Judith Curry has a post on the Australian Renewables ‘Transition’, which is not going too well:
“The frequency is the timing between wave cycles in an AC system 60Hz (a Hertz is one cycle per second) and 50Hz in most of the rest of the world. The frequency has to be the same across the whole grid – it is one of the things that defines it. A stable grid frequency is critical for effective operation. Thermal plants usually provide this by using governor control, whereby the frequency drives the plant output through a negative feedback device. The grid system operators may also run real time or short period dispatch, whereby the plant operators increase or decrease load over short time periods on grid operator’s instructions.
The inertia, provided by the rotating machinery of the generator, serves to slows the rate of change of frequency (RoCoF) . The slower the frequency changes occur, the less stress for the plant on governors. And as there is linkage, a small RoCoF in “normal” grid fluctuations will also stabilise the voltage and reactive power requirements.
However in recent times, there have been significant and rapid swings in the Australian grid frequency between the control limits, shown in the graph below . . . . .
Grid operation is more than just keeping the load and generating balanced and providing a stable frequency. Grid capabilities must be able to cover its fundamental operating parameters like frequency, voltage and reactive power when things go wrong. Examples would be when a lightning strike occurs, or a transmission line failure or a generation plant trip. The grid needs both inertia and fast acting reserves as backup. Protection systems take time to sense and then react to changes in frequency. Circuit breakers typically take 3-10 cycles to fully disconnect once they receive the trip signal, but these are only the last steps in the chain. The protective electronic sensors have to sense that the frequency or line impedence is outside its allowable range, and then activate the switching relays and the switches take time to break the circuit. The gap between allowable and load shedding is a fraction of a Hertz. To give time for the protection and reserves to function, the frequency (and voltage) have to decay as slowly as possible, which is where the (RoCoF) becomes important. There is a relationship between RoCoF, inertia and load lost as a fraction of total load, but even a change of 1 Hertz decline a second is considered risky.
That is why when major events happen, inertia to slow the RoCoF is so critical. South Australia went black in 2016 because a lot of wind generators tripped off, the major interconnector got overloaded and tripped, then there was not enough inertia, and the frequency collapsed so fast that system load shedding schemes couldn’t operate and everything protectively shut down.”
The whole post is well worth reading. From my point of view, it appears to confirm the theory that the Aug 9th blackout was triggered by a lightning strike, which normally would not be a problem, but because of the lack of inertia due to renewables penetration, when the Little Barford generator went down as a result, it caused a cascade of major renewables generators to trip also. the National Grid has STILL not resolved these problems, despite their reassurances. As the authors of the post at Climate Etc. say:
“The above is a simplified explanation of what is needed for reliable grid operation. Proponents of renewable energy do not want to discuss concerns of this sort, particularly the costs involved. When forced to address these issues, they rely on magical thinking, advocating for technologies that either do not yet exist or have not yet been proven to work reliably on a grid. The known solutions are expensive, but the renewable sector doesn’t want to pay for them – their mantra remains that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels so the others should pay for them – hiding the expense. Add in the costs from the needed system support requirements described above, then renewables are significantly more expensive (and less reliable) than conventional generation. The extra costs of renewables support are being paid for a deteriorating quality of electricity supply. That is why there is a new industry adage –
Cheap renewables are very expensive.”
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LOL. Synchronous converters are supposedly the ‘new technology’ which will open up grids to renewables penetration by providing reactive power and inertia – very expensively.
“Synchronous condenser technology has been around almost as long as the electric grid itself to support transmission system reliability, says GE. As the grid became more mature and reliable over the decades, synchronous condensers eventually became regarded as obsolete, with many utilities discontinuing use of the technology. Today, however, as the grid has experienced increasing instability, the technology is undergoing a major comeback with all major synchronous condenser manufacturers reporting higher sales.”
https://www.modernpowersystems.com/features/featurege-synchronous-condensers-100-years-on-7769875/
So, it’s back to the early 20th century then!
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Jaime J; I’ve just read your Feb 6 post quoting Ofgem’s ideas for the next generation of smart meters.
There are some points which don’t track.
To be able to shut down the heavy consumers in a household, the meter would have to be integrated with the switchboard in some way. The alternative would be a facility to limit the maximum draw so the unit trips if a heavy load is connected and the householder has to sort it out. Neither seems very practical: the first would be hugely expensive to implement and the second would be unacceptable to the general public.
Aiui, the present generation of smart meters – SMETS 2 – already have the facility for remote disconnection. (Wasn’t there a bit of a scandal recently over power companies moving non-paying customers over to smart meters and then disconnecting them without going through the usual processes?)
Lastly, all EV chargers now have to be “smart” with the facility for remote disconnection or load limiting.
However, I have read that a new generation of meters may well be required anyway because the present ones use the old 2/3G bands which are to be re-purposed shortly.
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Not sure which post you’re referring to Mike. I think the idea for switching off particular appliances is that the appliances themselves are ‘smart grid enabled’ so they can be remotely powered down. This could be done by the energy company via a smart meter.
Click to access GUIDELINE_INTRODUCING_SMART_APPLIANCES.pdf
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JJ; I was referring to your post above on this thread of Feb 6th:
“Told you.
“Ofgem reviewing plans to give energy networks the ability to shut down domestic electricity supplies..etc”
Whatever the mechanics, it shows that “demand reduction” measures aka rationing are very much on the way.
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Ah, yes, now I see. As you say, new EV chargers are already being required to be ‘smart’ enabled so they can be powered down remotely. I’m guessing they’ll do the same with new installations of heat pumps. It wouldn’t surprise me if legislation comes out requiring that all new washing machines, fridges, cookers etc. be smart grid enabled.
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O/T – Nice to see you back Jaime, hope you are well.
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Well thanks dfhunter. To coin a currently very popular phrase, my presence here is a “limited hangout”!
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Not such a limited hangout after all. Good to be back among friends. I do mean that, despite our past serious disagreements.
Damn, just had an unbelievable online chat with a British Gas representative who was giving me the hard sell on smart meters. My meter is faulty and I’ve booked a repair or replacement. Despite my repeating numerous times that I will NOT accept a smart meter replacement, he just kept on and on telling about the smart meter replacement I was going to receive! Unreal. I’ve got an email transcript of the online chat. When this engineer turns up tomorrow and he says the meter can’t be fixed and he pulls out a smart meter to replace it, there are going to be sparks flying! Good job he’ll have turned off the gas beforehand. I’m in no mood to be jerked around by these people.
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Jaime,
So far as I am concerned, welcome back.
Good luck with the meter man. After years of resistance I was saddled with a smart meter (which now languishes, unconnected, in a drawer). Their ability to foist one on me was buried deep in the small print relating to my chose tariff. And now they have withdrawn all tariffs save for a single variable rate. If I had hung on, I might have avoided the meter. Inf, my understanding (which might be wrong) is that where a meter has ceased working and needs to be replaced, they can insist on installing a smart one. “Smart” – there’s a misnomer, if ever there was one.
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Thanks Mark.
Pleasant young man called round. The meter is definitely faulty. He says that British Gas are claiming they can’t get hold of replacement conventional meters which he indicated is BS in order to push Smart meters on customers, and I agreed of course! Anyway, they can’t force me to accept a Smart meter and so he’s going to try to arrange a special order for a conventional replacement. Then they might say we’re putting you on a new more expensive rate which I will object to because I didn’t sign any contract; I just took over the existing prepayment meter when I moved in – which ironically doesn’t cost any more than if I was to pay by direct debit.
But this just exemplifies the hard sell of Smart meters in the UK. They’re making it very difficult for customers to refuse to have them installed, but shying away from making them compulsory.
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Well done Jaime – result!
Politicians are sly. They don’t mandate unpopular policies, they implement them by the back door. Car makers have to sell increasing proportions of EVs or face fines. Energy retailers have to install a certain number of smart meters every year or face fines. Basically they introduce daft policies with no thought for their practicability, then dump the problem of implementation on business, which passes the costs on to consumers.
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Jaime; please keep us posted on your meter replacement. I am resisting smart meters and was wondering what would happen if my old ones started to misbehave.
Mark; I guess you mean the display unit that’s languishing in a drawer – probably the best place for it! They are useless, imho, for helping folk to control their energy usage as they can only report total consumption which is easily checked by looking at the consumption figures on the web account. They are not practical for checking the consumption of individual (electric) units. I have a £10 plug-in widget from Amazon that I can use to monitor individual items, especially the electric heating in one part of the house.
The whole smart meter programme is a disaster. Early ones stopped working if the customer switched supplier so are having to be replaced. later ones still use the 2/3G network which is going to be closed and re-allocated in a few years. Apparently it’s not practical to upgrade the meters so they will have to be changed….again! No wonder the bill is up to about £16 bn last time I checked.
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BG had a target of installing 677k smart gas meters last year. They only managed 354k. This year they’re hoping to install 800k! No wonder they’re going in for the hard sell. People just don’t want them.
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/smart-home/smart-meters.html
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Jaime,
>”Good to be back among friends”
I’m glad you feel that way and long may the feeling last. I always felt we were on the same page even when I complained about the font you were using.
Anyway, those nice people over at ATTP speak very highly of you 😉
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John,
LOL, I might be tempted to go take a look but I’m way too busy watching paint dry at the moment.
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The update on my meter replacement is that BG intend to charge me £179 to replace it – if I do not accept a ‘free’ smart meter.
https://jaimejessop.substack.com/p/british-gas-smart-meter-blackmail
I made a complaint. I maintained that the charging policy for non smart meter replacements is not made publicly available and thus did not form part of the contract of supply. BG have responded. They say:
“Our policy is : Our Smart Energy Expert will upgrade your meter(s) to smart meter(s). If your preference is for a non-smart meter, we’ll try to fix your current meter. If this isn’t possible, we’ll replace it. An additional fee will be applied to your account/PAYGE meter Gas PP £179.
These information is on a website, please click on the like it will give you the document.
Should you not be happy with our policy please refer this matter to Ombudsman.
https://www.britishgas.co.uk/aem6/content/dam/britishgas/documents/tariffs/terms/Gas-and-Electricity-supply-terms.pdf.”
I wonder if it was written by an illiterate 20 year old or someone whose first language is not English. But apart from the appalling grammar I checked the document and it says nothing about a penalty charge of £179 being levied in the event a faulty meter needs to be replaced. What it does say is:
“14.
Our other reasonable charges (where applicable include VAT at the appropriate rate), which we’ll inform you of at the time include:
•
Visiting your property to repair, move, install or exchange a meter or display unit, or to disconnect or reconnect your supply. If we’re legally required to move a meter to a convenient position, we won’t charge you. Charges may also apply if:
•
we carry out work or move a meter that isn’t faulty
•
we didn’t provide you with the meter
•
the meter or display unit has been damaged or interfered with, in an attempt to steal gas or electricity
•
we can’t gain safe access due to an obstruction which isn’t then removed
•
you ask us to change to a different meter or to install a meter which is different to the type of meter we usually fit.”
So, they can impose a ‘reasonable charge’ for exchanging a meter. That’s clear. But what they are attempting to do IMO is impose a very UNREASONABLE charge for replacing THEIR faulty meter with a like for like conventional meter when they would impose no charge for replacing it with a smart meter, even though the latter replacement would involve the same amount of work and time. Non- smart meters are clearly available to BG and there is no indication that they cost more to purchase and fit. Clearly, the customer is simply being penalised for making a choice as regards the type of meter they wish to have fitted and this is not made clear in their supply contract. Whether it’s worth pursuing them on this I don’t know. Other companies are apparently NOT imposing this charge, so this is not blanket policy throughout the industry.
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Update:
I intend to respond to their response to my complaint, but the two email addresses they have provided are both defunct and don’t accept incoming mail, so I’ll have to do it directly via the website chat platform.
But two fingers up to British Gas; I’ve worked out a way to get the meter to work by topping up one day, putting the card in the meter, then when it doesn’t read the card, trying again the next day and it works every time so far. Using this method I’ve topped up with enough credit to last me well into winter, so I can banter with them at my leisure.
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Jaime – best off luck, keep us informed on progress.
I expect to go thru’ this myself in the near future on the Isle of Man.
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“Intrusive ‘smart meters’ threaten to turn UK homes into Net Zero panopticon”
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On 16th March I wrote:
“It wouldn’t surprise me if legislation comes out requiring that all new washing machines, fridges, cookers etc. be smart grid enabled.”
Today, David Turver tells us that the Energy Bill passed its third reading in the house of commons and it includes this:
“Centralised Control of “Smart” Appliances
Part 9, Chapter 2 deals with Energy Smart Appliances and Load Control. Paragraph 235 defines energy smart appliances to include fridges, dishwashers, washers, heaters (presumably heat pumps and immersion heaters), air conditioners and electric vehicle charge points. Effectively this is most of the high consumption devices in any home, other than a cooker.
The same paragraph stipulates that the smart function is “capable of operating in response to load control signals from any person carrying out load control.” In other words, the control of domestic appliances will be handed to anyone the Government sees fit to carry out load control, see Figure 2.”
Truth be told, I was warning people years ago on Facebook that ‘smart’ meters were spy-in-the-home energy rationing devices and would be used to limit use of domestic appliances via a ‘smart energy network’. Here we are. If you don’t comply, you won’t be able to sell your house and they can send you to prison for 12 months.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/criminalising-net-zero-disobedience
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“Energy Bill Authorises “Reasonable Force” to Install Smart Meters that Allow Authorities to Turn Customers’ Energy On and Off”
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/07/energy-bill-authorises-reasonable-force-to-install-smart-meters-that-allow-authorities-to-turn-customers-energy-on-and-off/
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Mark – now I see where all the “Green jobs” will come from, wonder if they will daub your door if you don’t comply
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Mark, the energy bill is being introduced by a Tory government which knows it will be implemented to the fullest extent by an incoming Labour government. The British people are about to be hammered by the eco-fascists. As far as I’m aware, there is no mandatory requirement to have a ‘smart’ meter fitted if a conventional meter goes wrong or reaches its supposed ‘expiry date’. In my personal experience, the energy company will just make it very difficult in practice to get a non smart meter replacement. I believe a homeowner is also within their rights to fit an approved meter themselves at their own expense. This may be the only lawful way forward at the moment. Going off grid entirely, using a diesel or petrol generator and/or solar panels not connected to the national grid are looking like permanent solutions to this dangerous power grab.
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It’s time to seriously start thinking off grid:
https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/best-off-grid-solar-system
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It sounds like good news:
“Blackouts less likely this winter says National Grid”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66936976
But it’s still not great:
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The 2023/24 winter outlook is milder than average with significantly above average precipitation. Let’s hope they are right, though many of the elements which contributed to the very cold winter 2009/10 will be in place.
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“Smart energy meter seemed to send our bills through the roof
We got charged for the electricity our solar panels were generating rather than being paid for it”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/oct/17/soon-as-smart-meter-fitted-bills-through-the-roof-solar-bill
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Bit O/T
but just watched this TV Ad – https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=smart+meter+advert&mid=9E132B95FB83D69785169E132B95FB83D6978516&FORM=VIRE
& also found this – https://www.thedrum.com/news/2022/10/05/smart-energy-s-einstein-ad-encourages-brits-embrace-smart-meters
not sure if above links will work!!!
seen the ad many times without paying much attention, but with winter coming & gas boiler heating set at 17 top limit, it was fun to note the ad suggested turn your thermostat from 22 to 21.
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ps – from that Drum link – Production company: Stink Films
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dfhunter,
Smart meters will not only help you save energy and cut carbon emissions, they will also resurrect you from the dead, Lazarus style, if you agree to sign up to a contract with Stink films to star in a series of ads extolling their benefits.
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Actually, I’m not sure which of those is the most absurd claim.
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Jaime – I would plump for Lazarus 🙂
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https://twitter.com/7Kiwi/status/1772364310246805815
https://twitter.com/OctopusEnergy/status/1772274151123824812
There you go. On the day that the Telegraph reports that Ofgem is considering using Smart meters to charge customers variable tariffs according to the weather, Octopus Energy boasts about one customer using as much electricity in a day as would normally be used in a week – for next to nothing in cost. Exactly as I predicted.
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Jaime J; aiui, Octopus already offer a tariff called “Agile” which basically tracks market prices. It seems to be a good option for customers who have solar and batteries, allowing them to avoid drawing from the grid when prices are high. Not a viable option for the average customer.
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Ross Clark has an article in the Speccie today headed:
You’re not being paranoid: smart meters are out to get you
His opening and closing paragraphs:
He’s right.
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BBC news covered it, but were a bit coy on what impact on average households.
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Robin; the “cunning plan” to control demand via smart meters will first have to deal with the 4 million or so which are “dumb” – not working. In addition many more millions will stop working following the imminent shutdown of the old 2G/3G networks on which they depend. Given the poor rate of installation of new meters, it’s going to take a while!
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“The smart meters scandal is about to explode in our faces
It would not be much of a surprise if Ed Miliband, as energy minister, introduces some form of energy rationing”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/27/the-smart-meters-scandal-is-about-to-explode-in-our-faces/
“The technology doesn’t work as planned. The numbers don’t add up. And ordinary people may have their lives ruined by a system that barely even recognises they exist. If ITV is looking for a follow-up to it’s hit drama about the Post Office scandal its producers and script writers do not have to look very far. It is playing out in real-time right now. In reality, the smart meter fiasco risks turning into the next Horizon scandal.
Like so many government-backed technologies, it was sold as a way of making the system more efficient, with the added benefit of helping us hit our net zero targets. Smart meters installed in our homes would give us more accurate readings of how much electricity we were using, while the little monitors in the corner might gently nudge us towards consuming a little less (which would be helpful, given that the Government has woefully failed to make sure we have enough power to keep the lights switched on).
What’s not to like about that?
Well, quite a lot as it turns out. According to the latest figures from the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero, of the 30 million meters installed in British homes, almost four million are not working properly. The estimate was 2.7 million in June last year, but has now been revised dramatically upwards.
The results of that can often be painful. Households may well have been overcharged for the energy use, and at a time when many are already struggling to pay their energy bills. Some households might now have to go back to manual readings if they want to question their bill, but the technology can make that difficult, too.
There is a depressingly familiar pattern starting to emerge. The computer system doesn’t work as it should. There is plenty of buck passing, with people initially denying there is anything to worry about, then blaming someone else for the problems, and finally denying that anything can ever be done to fix the problem. It seems that no one has learned anything from the Post Office scandal. Instead, ministers will grimly press ahead with a technology that clearly doesn’t work, and if people are forced to pay an inflated sum, then it will simply be brushed under the carpet.
Even more terrifyingly, the meters may eventually be used for “time-of-day” charging. It would not be much of a surprise if Ed Miliband, as energy minister in a government led by Sir Keir Starmer, introduces some form of energy rationing. After all, there seems to be little hope of ever hitting our net zero targets without it. Your smart meter might then decide when you can and can’t boil the kettle, regardless of whether it works properly – and if it doesn’t work well enough, that’s tough…”
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Mark’s Telegraph excerpt – an opinion piece by Matthew Lynn – was accompanied yesterday by another opinion piece, by Jeremy Warner.
“Britain is being frogmarched into smart meter oblivion”
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Smart meter surge pricing is itself but a sticking plaster applied to a potentially catastrophic problem – several days of zero renewables output during a stationary high pressure centred over western Europe and the British Isles in mid winter, resulting in huge demand which cannot possibly be met by the existing renewables dominated energy infrastructure. When you’re shivering uncontrollably in your own home during winter, given the choice between freezing to death or putting the heating on and making a hot cup of tea, you’re likely to choose the latter, even though it’s going to cost you a second mortgage. Anticipating such a scenario, the government has introduced legislation which will FORCE consumers to install ‘smart’ appliances which will AUTOMATICALLY turn off high demand appliances during such a weather event. Equivalent to a managed blackout.
As David Turver points out on Twitter:
[Edited by RD to make tweet visible.]
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No, WP doesn’t refuse Jaime. It’s getting better in some ways.
Hit / as the first character of a new paragraph, choose TWITTER and viola
Quite a random couple of tweets there but h/t Steve Mc for retweeting the second.
Measure the tree rings in that, Mr Mann.
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I’m using Brave Richard and whereas pasting a tweet address used to result in the tweet embedding, it now just results in WP going around in an endless loop which I have to interrupt by refreshing the page. Most irritating.
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I’d be very surprised if there’s a problem with Brave here, Jaime, it being based on the open source Chromium that powers Google Chrome and a lot of other stuff.
I’ve just taken the liberty of making David Turver’s tweet you wanted visible.
How you get to see tweets appear has changed – and is slightly more long-winded. But taken as a whole the new editing facilities look a positive to me by now.
More in Tech Notes before long. Yesterday I was experimenting with how much I could achieve from my iPhone using Safari. And that too all seemed to work fine.
WordPress has tested our patience, more than once. But this feels to me permanently better.
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Am still unable to embed tweets on this site. I have tried with Firefox too – same result.
https://twitter.com/7Kiwi/status/1776394150167933076
Link to David Turver’s tweet this morning re. Agile Octopus customers on half hourly smart tariffs being PAID to consume electricity.
It’s being sold as some sort of ‘benefit’ but in reality, it is just a desperate attempt to try to offload excess wind power in order to protect the grid from being overloaded, resulting in blackouts. Also, how many people sit at home throughout the day, obsessively watching their smart meters, waiting for the moment when the tariff goes negative so they can turn on as many household appliances as possible in order to make a quick buck? It’s just ridiculous!
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Jaime J: aiui, that negative pricing conundrum is a side-effect of the way renewables are funded. For example, onshore wind is almost all covered by Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) where by they are granted 1 ROC for each MWh supplied. A ROC is presently worth about £60. A wind farm’s incremental operating costs are trivial so they can “sell” power to the grid at, say, -£40 per MWh and still make £20 on the deal.
So it’s all about maximising revenue. A large part of offshore wind gets 2 ROCs per MWh so they have even more incentive, as do most of those on Contracts for Difference (CfDs), most of which are relatively generous (the weighted average is about £140 per MWh, iirc).
Apologies if I’m preaching to the choir here!
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Energy fascism coming to your home:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/16/new-smart-meters-surge-pricing-function-government-plans/
You vill have ze smart devices installed!
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Can anyone remember where any old discussions about smart meters were held? I’ve been looking for sceptical statements from the old days that now qualify for “we told you so.”
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Jit; there are quite a few threads on NALOPKT if you click on “smart meter” in the word cloud.
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Jit; there are quite a few threads on NALOPKT if you click “smart meters” in the word cloud.
(This is my third attempt at this post so apologies if it appears in triplicate!)
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Jit, I remember getting into a conversation with Smart Energy GB on Facebook years ago, expressing my view that smart meters were spies in the home and would eventually be used to ration energy and control energy usage via ‘smart’ domestic appliances. They of course scoffed at the idea and insisted that they were merely energy saving and monitoring devices which would help customers reduce their bills by encouraging more efficient use of electricity. And here we are today.
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Ross Clark has an article headed ‘Smart meters could soon cost you a whole lot more – Surge pricing is a desperate policy’ in the Spectator this morning (https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/smart-meters-could-soon-cost-you-a-whole-lot-more/). He points out that, as it will require expensive software to keep the costs down, the proposed ‘surge’ pricing where the price of power will vary on a half-hourly basis – ‘a desperate solution’ to the intermittency problem – will in effect be another burden on poorer people. From his opening and closing comments:
Well, let’s hope so – but it’s amazing just how much of this nonsense the public seems prepared to take.
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Robin, I think Ross Clark may be missing the wider implication:
You only need a smart meter to impose surge pricing. The idea of linking the smart meter to smart appliances is that the smart appliances respond to the pricing signals from the smart meter and, when supply is so low that it threatens to not meet demand, i.e. when the price starts spiking to unaffordable levels, the appliance will simply refuse to operate. So when you go to charge your EV, or turn up your heat pump because it’s cold, or manually switch your washing machine on, you will get the message: ‘This action is not allowed. Please try again later, or switch your appliance to automatic mode.’ Fancy toast for breakfast? Your smart toaster will refuse to cooperate with the desires of your palette: ‘No toast today, the wind has gone away’ it will mockingly sing to you as you contemplate hurling it through the kitchen window.
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Paul Homewood has got the message:
Only something I was saying five years ago here on this very thread, arguing with JDLV.
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With “smart” appliances, aiui, they can be controlled directly without needing to go via a smart meter. This has been the case for EV chargers for a few years now.
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Mike, I just figure it’s more convenient and logical to have the smart meter controlled by the energy companies, which the controls the smart energy appliances in the house.
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Relevant to this post is the current bragging by renewables enthusiasts re. the record low fossil fuel GENERATION contribution of 2.4% for an hour on 15th April. Penetration of renewables into the grid was something like 70% at one point, meaning that inertia would have to be provided to avoid blackouts (as happened on August 9th). Following a review by NG ESO of that low inertia caused blackout (denied as being the problem by certain commenters further up this thread), it was decided by NG ESO that they would repurpose gas-fired generating stations to provide reactive energy and inertia only, without generating electricity. More than likely, this is what stopped the lights going out on 15th April. But you can see the problem here can’t you. These repurposed ‘synchronous condensers’ providing inertia to the grid are both expensive AND dependent on gas. They don’t use as much gas as when they were previously generating electricity but they still use gas, so this inertia allowing brief episodes of ‘record low’ fossil fuel use comes at a heavy price and is NOT carbon free!
https://www.current-news.co.uk/national-grid-eso-claims-world-first-approach-to-inertia-awarding-328m-in-contracts/
https://www.current-news.co.uk/national-grid-eso-hails-world-first-transition-of-gas-power-plant-to-provide-inertia/
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Jaime – I notice those links above refer to articles dated 2020 & 21.
Partial quote from Julian Leslie, ESO head of networks from the 2020 article –
“These contracts are finding new ways to help balance the grid which are cheaper and greener, reducing emissions and saving consumers over £100m.”
Partial quote from the 2021 article –
“The ESO has procured the equivalent of around five coal-fired power stations worth of inertia through its stability tender, saving consumers £128 million over six years, it said.”
Well, £128m is definitely “over £100m”, but quite a big jump in expected “saving for consumers”
wonder what the actual “saving for consumers” has been 2021-to today?
further quote from the 2021 article –
“Julian Leslie, head of Networks at National Grid ESO, said the transformation of Deeside Power station was “incredibly exciting” and that innovations like it were “cheaper and greener than the alternative, reducing emissions and saving money for electricity consumers.
“Our stability pathfinder – creating a market for inertia and other stability services – is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and is a huge step forward in our ambition to be able to operate the GB electricity system carbon free by 2025.”
As you say above “is NOT carbon free”, yet in 2021 she felt/believed the ambition was achievable by next year!!!
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dfhunter,
I may be wrong in saying that these purpose built and re-purposed synchronous condensers burn gas. Reading further, it appears that they are connected to the grid and draw power from the grid in order to spin the flywheel and create inertia. Still, whether that equates to ‘carbon free’ inertia generation is debatable when a third of electricity generated in 2023 still came from gas.
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Jaime – don’t think you were wrong, but it’s sometimes difficult to parse these types of articles.
from the 2021 article –
“The power station originally consisted of two Alstom 13E2 gas turbines, two CMI Heat Recovery Steam Generators HRSG and an Alstom steam turbine, but these were shut down in March 2018 and have been sat in preservation since then.
On Friday 18 June, the two gas turbines began providing inertia and reactive power, helping to keep the electricity system running at the right frequency. It follows Triton Power being awarded the six-year stability contract by National Grid ESO in January 2020, along with four other companies awarded contracts.
Inertia was traditionally a by-product of the kinetic energy in the spinning aspects of traditional fossil fuel power stations. As the country increasingly moves away from power sources like coal towards renewables, there is an increasing need to separately procure inertia to ensure the stability of the grid.”
It’s a Gas reading your finds/digging/drilling down into the facts 🙂
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ps – in above quote we get this –
“Inertia was traditionally a by-product of the kinetic energy in the spinning aspects of traditional fossil fuel power stations. As the country increasingly moves away from power sources like coal towards renewables, there is an increasing need to separately procure inertia to ensure the stability of the grid.”
So what was a “by-product” now has to be replaced by “there is an increasing need to separately procure inertia to ensure the stability of the grid“
And Julian Leslie, head of Networks at National Grid ESO, can say with a smile to camera/MSM “cheaper and greener than the alternative, reducing emissions and saving money for electricity consumers.”
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dfhunter,
It is difficult to parse these articles. Most of them do not describe clearly how the gas turbines are powered to create inertia for some reason, but then I read this about Deeside and it does seem fairly definitive:
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/deeside-power-station-begins-world-first-power-system-stability-contract-national-grid-eso
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Jaime – the term “the two gas turbines” seems to seal the deal, obviously the plant will need some lecy from the grid just to to stay on standby & make cups of tea.
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Gosh, two gas turbines to make cups of tea!! Amazing when there are multitudes of spinning bird shredders across the country. And I thought ‘inertia’ was to be avoided and causes all sorts of problems.
I know I don’t understand; my brain is full up and I have become the proverbial three legged creature. So I’ll leave this to your good selves but it makes me smile that the much lauded green electricity uses natural gas for stability. I now have another weapon to battle the fossil fuel avoiders with. Oh for the opportunity.
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Letters I never thought I would see in the Guardian:
“The shocking stupidity of the smart meter system”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/14/the-shocking-stupidity-of-the-smart-meter-system
There are three, but the first is possibly the best:
Re your article (British Gas boss says all UK households should be forced to fit smart meters, 8 May), after being harassed by email, text, telephone, letters and finally doorstepping, and being told that we had to get smart meters for safety reasons, we relented and spent a fun day at home with the fitter. The smart meters don’t work; they never worked. Apparently they don’t work in our type of house.
The European Space Agency might be able to wake up the satellite Rosetta 673m kilometres away, but our power supplier cannot wake up our smart meters. Sorry, I have to rush, they want another meter reading. You see, they are experiencing a high level of calls so no one can answer the phone.
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More letters in the Guardian (good to see that not all Guardian readers fall for the unrelenting propaganda):
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/when-smart-meters-save-money-and-the-overheating-planet
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I spent much of last week helping my elderly mother move to an apartment in a brand new building. As a new building it is entirely powered by electricity. I kept her on supply with the old company which supplied her previous property with gas and electricity, for the sake of simplicity.
Needless to say the new apartment also has a smart meter. Today I received an email from the energy company asking me to read the meter and send the reading to them, because their smart meter had failed to do so.
Good luck with your smart grid net zero revolution Mr Miliband.
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My advice is take photos of the readings Mark. When a dumb smart meter fails to send readings to dumb employees at an electric company, anything can happen, but anything which usually involves the customer being overcharged.
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Ever heard of a Virtual Power Plant? It’s even got an acronym: VPP
https://liftoff.energy.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/20230911-Pathways-to-Commercial-Liftoff-Virtual-Power-Plants_update.pdf
“On a June afternoon when an early heat wave baked parts of Eastern Canada, Paul Richardson was surprised to notice the smart thermostat in his Ottawa home, usually set to 23 C, was reading 25 C.
Then he remembered he’d given his hydro company permission to remotely adjust it in exchange for a $75 gift card.
During heat waves like the one currently blasting southern Manitoba, power-hungry air conditioners strain the electrical grid. Now, instead of pushing power plants to generate extra power by burning fossil fuels, some utilities are paying customers like Richardson to become part of what’s known as a virtual power plant.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/virtual-power-plant-explainer-1.7274196
“Virtual power plants are also less expensive to operate and easier to set up than real ones, which have to be constructed. ” No kidding!
“Ontario’s Peak Perks launched in May 2023, and by February 2024 it had enrolled more than 100,000 people. Participants get a $75 gift card for signing up, and a $20 gift card for every year they stay in the program.
Robby Sohi, IESO’s chief operating officer says that most of the time, electricity use is far below the grid’s maximum generation capacity. What poses a challenge is when demand peaks during weather events like heat waves and cold snaps. Virtual power plants can help flatten those peaks because Sohi says they offer “absolutely … the cheapest megawatt that you can get.”
Basically a Virtual Power Plant operates by you choosing to give up using electricity so someone else can use it. It’s a creative way to justify not supplying power when people need it. Maybe the logic could be applied to other areas where there is a shortage. Rather than being homeless you could live in a virtual house. Or eating virtual bread by not buying it.
Perhaps we could call it Virtual Signalling.
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potentilla, sorry you languished in spam for three hours before I found you.
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“UK’s smart meter targets leaving energy users short-changed, says Martin Lewis
Consumer campaigner writes to Ed Miliband warning that installations are being prioritised over repairs”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/sep/17/uk-smart-meter-targets-energy-users-martin-lewis
Energy customers are being short-changed by “perverse” government targets to install electronic smart meters in homes across the UK, according to the consumer campaigner Martin Lewis.
Lewis, the founder and chair of MoneySavingExpert.com (MSE), has written to Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy security and net zero, warning that installations are being prioritised over repairs, leaving thousands of households facing shock bills because their meters have malfunctioned.
Last December, the artist Grayson Perry reported that his monthly electricity charge had soared from £300 to £39,000 because of a faulty smart meter. Lewis wants suppliers to be incentivised to fix faulty meters as well as installing new ones.
“I am writing to you […] to warn of the brand damage that risks making the government’s targets framework perverse,” Lewis said in his letter. “A rethink is needed – specifically I’d suggest shifting firms’ targets from smart meter installations to the overall number of ‘working’ smart meters, which would incentivise firms to do both installations and repairs.”…
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Mark,
Reading the above, one might get the impression that the Smart meters are providing wildly faulty readings. I am completely mystified at how a monthly bill can go from £300 to £39,000 and still be charged to a customer by the supplier! That’s absurd.
What appears to be the main problem with ‘smart’ meters is that a significant number of them stop providing up to date readings to the supplier because they lose their wireless connection to the web. In that case, they are no more useful than a conventional meter and the customer must provide manual readings. It’s fairly easy to check whether a ‘smart’ meter has gone dumb but it would seem that both suppliers and customers are not bothering to react to the issue before bills become grossly inflated (which happens a lot more often than undercharging – strange that).
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Following from Martin lewis’ comments, it would be interesting to track the number of meters which are functioning properly. Acording to reports, a lot of the original units went dumb when the users changed supplier. Also there are stories of meters never working correctly due to lack of – or poor – signals, as Jaime J says.
It’s about to get a whole lot worse because the old 2G/3G networks that the meters use are going to be switched off soon to free up bandwidth for other uses. Apparently it’s not practical and/or too expensive to upgrade the millions of current “SMETS2” meters so they will all have to be replaced. (I’m not sure I have this right so happy to be corrected).
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Here’s the Martin Lewis letter in full:
https://blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2024/09/martin-lewis–letter-to-the-energy-secretary-on-smart-meters/
Their own survey shows that 19% of meters are non-functional for a variety of reasons.
Given his reputation for getting to the truth on cost issues, this part of his concluding paras is disappointing: “Smart meters, done right, offer an exciting future that should benefit energy security and enable innovative tariffs that can diminish peak usage, by incentivising people to shift usage to times when renewables are dominant – all of which should cut consumer costs.” Clearly he is out of touch with the factors driving power costs.
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Mike, that paragraph almost feels as if it was written by someone else. And for a consumer expert to fail to join the dots – that more people will suffer from surge pricing than will benefit from discounts at times of low use – is concerning. It’s baked into the pie that the majority will want to use the resource at the most costly times – that’s why the resource is costly then.
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Jit; it does read that way – a bit of kowtowing to the political culture. My guess/hope is that he will take a more pro-active stance once TOU tariffs start to bite the most vulnerable, as he has done with pre-payments, for example.
I doubt he will go as far as tackling the “renewables are cheap” myths as that would take him into a major political confrontation.
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Yay! Free energy on Sundays! As long as you get a ‘smart’ meter installed. And as long as the wind is blowing. Ed wasn’t lying after all; labour is going to cut on your energy bills – on the windy Sabbath.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/09/23/free-energy-sundays-miliband-green-revolution-edf/
Your ‘smart’ meter won’t let you charge up your car when demand is high and wind speeds are low; in fact, it will cut off your supply to the main grid and demand that you plug your car in to power your home electrics! What a joke. Smart meter customers and now EDF and Octopus ‘free energy’ fans fell for it though.
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Also, what’s the betting on the price going up 15% generally to cover the cost of the “free”day?
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The Tory government were bad, very bad. This Labour government and the crony capitalist ‘investors’ it’s attracting are beyond insane and deeply disturbing. As Pete North has put it, very succinctly:
David Lammy: Moron
Angela Rayner: Moron
Rachel Reeves: Moron
Yvette Cooper: Moron
Ed Miliband: Dangerous Moron
Keir Starmer: Psychopath
Check out Reeves’ gushing speech at the party conference as she pauses to wait for the round of fake applause. It’s just weird, disturbing, horrible. The facial expressions. She obviously thinks she is the returned UK economic Messiah – and Mililbean thinks he is The Batman returned as the Dark Knight (Night), hanging upside down in his Batmobile, drooling and gibbering, as he delivers insane, condescending, cringing platitudes to the masses re. ‘clean energy’ revolutions, cheaper bills, shiny new Green jobs for redundant oil industry workers and now ‘free’ energy.
I think I’m going mad.
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Chickens are coming home to roost. Let’s hope they are registered with Defra.
The August 2019 blackout was caused by too much wind creating instability in the grid, but they’re still bizarrely trying to deny it at the same time as tacitly admitting it. This paragraph has to be read to be believed:
What, you mean the risk of lightning strikes will grow with the amount of ‘renewables’?
No, obviously not. The risk of grid instability will grow with the increasing penetration of zero inertia renewables into the National Grid. So now NG ESO (or NESO as it’s now called) are going to install inertia flywheels all over the shop in order to stabilise the grid on windy days. How much is that going to cost I wonder?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/02/giant-flywheels-to-be-installed-in-britains-grid-blackouts/
It’s not appreciated by many that the risk of blackouts is equal, if not greater, from too much wind supplying too much power vs. too little wind not supplying enough power. What an absolute farce this all is as we continue to shut down cheap, reliable, easily integrated fossil fuel powered base-load generation.
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Giant flywheels….why not run a few of the existing gas plants unloaded as synchronous generators? With little or no load the gas consumption would be very low and they would have the advantage of being able to ramp up quickly, if required.
This is armchair expertise in power generation: corrections welcome!
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Apologies Mike , you were in spam again.
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Mike, National Grid do use some decommissioned power generating turbines to provide inertia when modified to run as synchronous condensers, but I don’t think it’s possible to just switch off electricity generation of existing gas stations and have them run in synchronous condenser mode. I may be wrong. It’s also probably more economical in many cases to utilise purpose-built synchronous generators rather than repurpose old gas and coal turbines.
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Jaime; I don’t know enough to argue the point! Even if gas plants cannot be run completely unloaded, they can be run at low loads. The turbine-generator sets always spin at 3000 rpm so a few plants running at, say, 10% load would provide a lot of inertia.
Hopefully someone will come along who can shed more light on this!
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Apologies again , Mike. WordPress really seems to dislike you!
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Mark; no worries. It gets there in the end! I may be on its blacklist because I am not signed up.
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Notice The Telegraph article mentions –
“It follows warnings that the removal of coal, gas and nuclear power stations from the system will leave the grid without the secure steady baseload needed to maintain stability.”
“NESO said the schemes would save consumers money by cutting the need for maintaining backup power stations and importing power from overseas via interconnectors.
A spokesman said: “The pathfinders alone are expected to provide consumers with savings of £14.9bn between 2025 and 2035.”
Also notice “Flywheels are energy storage systems that use surplus electricity to accelerate a massive metal “wheel”” – wonder what metal they plan to use?
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dfhunter,
So much for the interconnectors saving us money!
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A sign of things to come:
https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/10/03/uk-energy-industry-unites-to-replace-800k-rts-meters-before-shutdown/
If the responsible bodies (hah!) can fumble this – relatively – small problem so badly, it doesn’t hold out much hope for upgrading or replacing all of the older smart meters which rely on the 2G/3G networks that are due to be switched off soon. Of course, there is also the small matter of 4 million non-functional meters awaiting repair or replacement…..
I believe the technical expression for this is “clusterf@*K”.
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MikeH – thanks for that link. Partial quote –
“Charlotte Friel, Director of Consumer Protection and Retail Markets for Ofgem, said: “The importance of protecting RTS customers from losing control of their heating and hot water is equally matched by the scale of the challenge ahead.”
What a scary & weird statement. Are RTS customers not able to control their own heating/hot water?
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dfhunter: I’ve only looked at a couple of sites and haven’t tried to delve into the detail workings of the system. It’s my impression that these radio signals control split tariffs so, if they don’t work, customers will end up paying full whack for all the power they use. It may be that, absent the signal, some systems will not turn on at all. It’s not clear whether users have some sort of manual over-ride.
It looks as if the options are to move to smart meters (but it’s not clear whether the tariffs will be the same) or be stuck with a dumb meter and lose access to cheap, off-peak tariffs. My guess is that many users will be those most vulnerable to higher costs and/or less able to sort out a reasonable deal.
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Oh dear, we can’t provide a simple long wave radio signal signal anymore which tells Economy 7 meters what time it is because “it’s no longer viable,” so 800,000 people will have to switch to ‘smart’ meters if they don’t want to pay sky-high electricity rates, all day, every day, rather than just at times when the wind isn’t blowing. Sorry about that, can’t be helped.
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JaimeJ: yes, it’s pitiful. If we were to dig I expect we would find that the decision to turn off the RTS signal was made ages ago so they’ve known about this problem for years.
So I dug a little. Wiki says:
“The Radio Teleswitch Service is broadcast alongside the longwave output of BBC Radio 4 from the Droitwich Transmitting Station.
In October 2011, the BBC stated that the Droitwich transmitter, including Radio 4’s longwave service and Radio Teleswitch, will cease to operate when one of the last two valves breaks, and no effort would be made to manufacture more nor to install a replacement longwave transmitter.
The BBC stated that their plan is simply to cease broadcasting on longwave forever once the Droitwich transmitter fails. It has been reported that the BBC estimated that fewer than ten spare compatible valves existed in the world, and that each valve had a working life of between one and ten years.[4]
A 50 kW longwave transmitter transmitting a 1000 Hz wide signal could take over the teleswitch role with adequate nationwide coverage—but some legal provision would probably have to be made to make this possible.[original research?]
In 2016, the Energy Networks Association consulted on the future of the service, highlighting that no agreement for its operation past the end of 2017 existed. While most suppliers acknowledged the system could ultimately be replaced by smart meter functionality, there was general agreement that the system would need to continue until at least 2020 to avoid significant inconvenience to customers and agreement was secured for the service to continue until the end of March 2020.[5]
Several further extensions have been negotiated between the Energy Networks Association and the BBC from 2019 onwards, due to the lack of progress in developing suitable smart meter alternatives. In late 2020 SSE, one of the major users of the service, began informing its customers that teleswitched meters would be withdrawn and replaced with alternative solutions.[6]
The availability of radio teleswitching has been progressively extended and as of early 2021 the service was due to remain in operation until at least March 2024.[7][2][8] By that date, however, the radio frequency (in England) was expected to be switched off in Summer 2025.[9]“
So they’ve been futzing around with little to nothing actually happening for 13 years…..
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Just spotted that there’s a prog on Ch 5 at 8 pm (in 20 mins!) on smart meters.
They claim they will explore where the govt and energy suppliers have not looked….
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Don’t bother with the Ch 5 prog – very mediocre.
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https://www.ft.com/content/989d43b8-64f4-47be-9548-fe163dc3d840
The only way this can happen is for smart meters to be forced upon a lot more people and for those smart meters to be set up to involuntarily ration the use of electricity when demand exceeds supply, but also to encourage much greater use of electricity, via flexible half-hourly tariffs, at times when supply exceeds demand, in order to balance the grid and prevent blackouts. Smart meters were never ‘a convenient tool to monitor your electricity use and save you money.’
Compulsory smart meters incoming.
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Ooh! This has got to hurt. Agile Octopus smart tariff expected to peak at around 80p per kWh tomorrow, during the evening peak. Poor loves. The era of being paid to use energy is almost over, but that didn’t stop Agile Octopus customers and the company boasting about ‘free’ electricity when the wind was blowing. Now that it’s not, prices are rocketing of course and it can’t help when you get malicious people on fixed price tariffs deliberately using electricity during peak periods, pushing demand up even higher and spiking smart meter tariffs even further. Who would do such a thing? Not me!
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The BBC today:
Energy smart meter issues creating north-south divide
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Jaime J; thanks for that heads-up about Octopus Agile. Looking at their dashboard, their prices are usually up around 40p during the evening peak – and sometimes higher, as you said. I guess most of their customers can work around that and organise their lives according to the power costs but it is certainly not for the average family!
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Jit,
But the 3G signal has now been phased out by most mobile networks and will be gone altogether by 2025. My old Nokia phone works on the 2G signal, which is not being switched off thankfully. So even if energy companies ignore government regulations in the north and connect to 3G, those meters still won’t work, unless they connect to 2G or 4G, but the article doesn’t mention that. What a dog’s dinner.
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The BBC possibly made a mistake by opening that article up for comments. It isn’t going well. 😄
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Passing comment on a non-climate forum:
“I’m north of Manchester and having moved into a newish property Octopus couldn’t connect to the existing EON Smart meter. They sent out an engineer who installed one of theirs but they still can’t connect to it. Turns out all smart meters in Scotland and the north of England run on a very weak radio signal and millions of them can’t connect. From Manchester and further south they run through the mobile phone network and the conections are much more robust. There was an article on BBC news last week.
My landlord then informed me this is the 4th smart meter that different power companies have fitted and none of them can connect. It’s a similar story when I speak to folk that I know all over the town. Seems like money for old rope for the meter installation companies.”
SNAFU comes to mind…or clusterf*’k.
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You can run from reality but you can’t hide. Kathryn Porter tells it like it is. Grid frequency excursions are becoming more frequent . . . . . because grid inertia is declining . . . . because zero inertia renewables are replacing traditional thermal generating stations.
It’s just a matter of time. NESO will sooner or later face its King Canute moment.
https://watt-logic.com/2024/12/23/gb-grid-frequency/
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This is in answer to JDLV’s insistence in 2020 that I was confusing short term (secs) grid instability with ‘marketing signals’ (i.e. offloading excess wind generation by offering negative prices).
There has also been a consistent trend of lower limit breaches increasing in frequency, which is consistent with falling grid inertia (see chart).
This fits with the expected picture that the grid is becoming less reliable. It is also interesting that when individual occurrences are inspected, it is more often the case that frequency has drifted outside the operational range rather than suddenly falling out as would be expected from an outage. This is more worrying as it points to a general difficulty in maintaining stable frequency – things will always break and trip, and the grid is designed to deal with that, but these drifts outside the range speak more to a wider reduction in stability versus what is expected.
Catastrophic blackouts are the the symptom and will eventually be the end point of a gradual decline in grid reliability due to declining grid inertia caused by increasing renewables penetration. Demand side management is part of the wholly inadequate establishment response to the problem of increasing wind penetration and the decline of grid inertia.
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Things fall apart,
The centre cannot hold. (
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“A mess’: energy suppliers face scramble to install smart meters in UK homes
The government is facing criticism over the rollout of the scheme, as spiralling costs and faulty meters slow progress”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/feb/09/a-mess-energy-suppliers-face-scramble-to-install-smart-meters-in-uk-homes
A small device in every home was supposed to be the key to solving Britain’s energy headaches: encouraging consumers not to waste power, preventing shockingly high bills and making the system greener. Instead, smart meters have become an emblem for the energy industry’s poor reputation as the costs of rolling them out approaches £20bn and the government project lags years behind its original schedule.
Consumers who have the devices still face surprise bills, too, as some faulty meters go into “dumb” mode, where they stop automatically sending regular meter readings to energy suppliers, leaving households to send readings.
“Honestly, it has been a mess from the beginning,” an executive at one major energy supplier says. “So many of the problems that we have encountered were predictable and preventable. But we were told to keep pushing ahead towards these deadlines.”
The mission to fit smart meters was set in 2011, when the government first mandated that all UK homes should have one by 2019. As the rollout progressed, the government watered down its own target, suggesting that all homes should be offered a smart meter by 2020 and around 75% of homes should have one installed.
The weakened target was later pushed back to the end of 2025, but may still be out of reach. About 60% of households now have a smart meter, meaning the rate of installations would need to step up over the next 11 months. There are 24m gas meters and 29m electricity meters installed and the government’s latest data shows that 680,000 smart meters were installed in homes in the third quarter of last year….
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Well, well, well, it’s all coming out in the wash now isn’t it, if this is indeed confirmed:
https://substack.com/@starknakedbrief/note/c-103870847
I’ve warned for years that smart meters are not just energy rationing and control devices, they are actual spy-in-the-home devices, which collect an extraordinary amount of valuable information about your living conditions and behaviour. Government and corporations would love to get their hands on this data.
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Jaime,
You’re right to add the qualification “if this is indeed confirmed”.
Nothing would surprise me, but I need stronger evidence than that cited before I believe it. We are supposed to be sceptics!
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Jaime, are they not simply control-a-prole devices under development? Regards, John C.
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John, like there is more than one way to skin a proverbial cat, there are several ways to control-a-prole.
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It seems that the information is genuine. The government were forced to back down but then it seems they sneakily reintroduced the collection of granular smart meter energy use data.
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/the-govt-want-to-read-your-meter-readings-and-your-mail-could-be-next/
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Massive widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal today. On April 22nd, they were boasting about achieving a landmark 100% renewables on April 16th and then 5 days after that, bragging about setting a new solar record. I’m sure these events are entirely unconnected . . . . .
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Now this from Sky News:
LOL. I think what they mean is it was very sunny and solar destabilised the grid. Kathryn Porter suspects that’s the case:
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Jaime: but this misses Kathryn P’s additional comment that I quoted on the Case Against NZ thread:
‘However, if the blackouts are the cause of cyber attacks on multiple parts of the grid, more inertia would not have helped‘
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Robin,
IF they were. I’m sure they’d like to blame Putin, but it’s far more likely that excess solar destabilised the grid.
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Jaime, do you know what this means, “REN says that, due to extreme temperature variations in Spain, there were “anomalous oscillations” in very high-voltage lines.”? Or is it just bull-baffles-brains used to say that there was too much solar generation and too little inertia, perhaps when some clouds briefly (but repeatedly?) dimmed the solar output. Regards, John C.
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But see THIS.
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John, it means BS.
Here’s the generation mix just before the power went down:
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Jaime,
As I understand it, induced atmospheric variation is a rare phenomenon that requires there to be excessive temperature variations across the grid. The weather record for Spain shows there to have been no such conditions leading up to the blackout. I think it is far too early to accept the IAV hypothesis.
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The Spain/Portugal blackout is the Aug 2019 Eastern England and London blackout writ large. As I said above:
Something (a line fault, whatever) triggered the initial frequency excursion, which could not be contained and managed because inertia across the entire grid was historically low, lower even than in England in August 2019. So the result was a cascade of generators tripping, even more spectacularly than as happened here in August 2019. But a significant difference between UK Aug 2019 and Spain April 2025, is the fact that a large percentage of generation in Spain was from solar (which feeds DC into the grid which has to be converted to AC by inverters). These inverters went off-line due to the wild fluctuations in frequency which could not be controlled because of the very low inertia (resistance to change) on the Iberian grid.
Whatever the proximate cause of the blackout was, it is not that relevant. What is relevant is that, because of Spain’s obsession with ‘renewables’, their grid has been made much less resilient, therefore faults and other incidents affecting transmission lines or equipment which would have been contained locally in the past are now a critical threat to the entire grid.
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Seems everyone has an opinion Michael Shellenberger – Over-Reliance On Renewables Behind Catastrophic Blackouts in Spain
As John & others note, too early & not enough info to draw conclusions.
Only other snippet I heard was an interconnector between S/France went down.
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“Warning meters in 300,000 homes could stop working”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdjlkrwmpveo
Hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of losing hot water or heating when their old type of electricity meter goes out of action.
Energy companies have said it will be “very, very difficult” to replace all Radio Teleswitching System (RTS) meters with smart meters before the old technology is switched off on 30 June.
Campaigners estimate more than 300,000 homes could lose heating – or have it stuck on constantly – in what energy regulator Ofgem has called “an urgent consumer welfare issue”.
The government said the industry had to “work urgently to continue to increase the pace of replacements”....
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“300,000 homes have the old RTS meters and could lose heating – or have it stuck on constantly.”
Wonder if your heating is “stuck on constantly” you can say, “Well use those windfarms that I pay for that need to be curtailed/shut down, because the leccy can be used to heat my house all year round & maybe get a heated swimming pool in the garden for free. Thanks in Advance”
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“Fears 300,000 British electricity meters will not work after tech switch-off
Campaigners say homes with RTS meters could be left with heating that is permanently off, or on, from 30 June”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/may/26/british-electricity-meters-rts-switch-off-heating
The adverts featuring Lorraine Kelly paint a worrying picture of people left without heating or hot water or, perhaps worse in mid-summer, their radiators on full blast.
Either outcome could be possible when the Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS), which controls an old type of electricity meter found in almost 400,000 homes across Great Britain, is switched off from 30 June.
In the ads, the Scottish TV presenter urges people to contact their supplier, with the tagline adding: “Don’t delay. The RTS switch-off is on the way”.
Although 1,000 of these old meters are being ripped out every day, the daily rate would need to top 5,000 to stand a chance of reaching everyone in time. Campaigners fear that more than 300,000 homes could be left with a meter that does not work.
One reader, Sarah*, who contacted the Guardian, has been trying for several months to get a new meter but was told by her supplier, ScottishPower, it did “not have a solution” for her home set-up….
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“Ed Miliband wants kill switches in your house
‘Demand management was always the unwritten drive behind smart meters’”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/06/03/miliband-smart-meter-rationing-green-energy-net-zero/
That nice, goofy Ed Miliband. Why would he possibly want to cut off your heating?
As the UK staggers towards an energy cliff edge, and days on which supply can’t meet demand, this is becoming a genuine fear. A “kill switch” is a mechanism that stops a device operating to fulfil its primary purpose – and now two thirds of UK households have one. It’s called a smart meter, and 35 million can be used to remotely cut off supplies as of the end of March. Labour’s aspiration is to have three in every property: one for water, too.
So can a power company cut you off, just like that? The suppliers certainly have a statutory right to do so. With conventional meters, bailiffs require a warrant to enter the premises and disable the connection. With a smart meter, which is talking to a network all the time, it can be done with a flick of a switch back in a remote control room….
.….So far the threat of disconnection has arisen from our possible failure to pay for energy. But going forward, the threat is of “demand management” – that is rationing of energy. For decades we have neglected supply, in the hope that demand would come down. It leaves us in a near state of emergency.
The lifespan of a combined cycle gas plant rarely exceeds 25 to 30 years, explains Kathryn Porter of independent energy analyst Watt Logic. She reckons that with over 10GW of our gas generation fleet built in the 1990s and 9.3GW more built in the 2000s, around a third of the gas generation “is very vulnerable to closure in the next five years”.
“Most of these older units won’t be economic if anything breaks”, she says. The problem is that there are often periods, sometimes quite long, when wind and solar produce little if any power. Our increasingly rickety gas infrastructure may soon be unable to back it up.
Suppliers may have no choice but flick the switch. Load shedding, the euphemism for forced disconnections, takes place when demand exceeds supply. One mechanism for this is rolling blackouts. Another would be the use of smart meters to cut off supplies in a more targeted way…..
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‘Smart’ meter = Surveillance, monitoring and rationing technology.
Who knew?
Tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists knew.
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On the 12th December 2019, I wrote:
Imagine halving your current annual domestic electricity usage in the next 5-10 years, at the same time as being forced to switch to an electric heat pump and an EV by the ‘electrify everything’ mob. What will that mean in practice? It will mean you are cold and unable to travel when the wind isn’t blowing nicely in winter. It will mean there are times during the day when you are forbidden to use any electricity at all, but if you have to override the ‘kill switch’ because of a domestic emergency, it will cost you a small fortune.
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Mark – thought I posted this link already, but related to your comment –
Labour plots rollout of three smart meters per household
Partial quote –
“Britain’s smart meter rollout promised to help households save money – and energy. In reality, the hi-tech gadgets have been a disaster, leaving thousands of households with inaccurate energy bills at a huge cost to the taxpayer.
And yet, plans being considered by Labour mean homeowners could soon need three smart meters – one for electricity, one for gas and one for water.”
@Jaime – I may be wrong, but seems to be a few gas related house explosions over the last few years. Never hear what the cause was, but my best guess would be tampering with gas supply to cut bills.
If leccy ‘kill switch’ happens, wonder at what point in the house leccy supply line?
Maybe someone can answer that question, but regardless, bet someone will “tamper” with tragic consequences.
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“Old meter switch-off is pushed back”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g2qp8wed0o
Hundreds of thousands of households who may have been left without hot water and heating at the end of June will not immediately have their old meters switched off, the government has said.
There will instead be a “cautious and targeted phase out” of Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) meters, it said.
The switch-off will begin on a smaller scale, and affected homes and businesses will be contacted by suppliers “well ahead of time”, the energy department said.
Fuel poverty campaigners said the switch-off process had been “doomed to failure” after it became clear that the 30 June deadline was “simply unachievable”.
As of last month, about 314,000 households were using the RTS meters, and having them switched off could have meant they lost heating – or had it stuck on constantly.
About a third of those households are in Scotland.
The meters use a longwave radio frequency to switch between peak and off peak rates, and can also be used to turn heating and hot water systems on and off.
They have been in use since the 1980s, but are now becoming obsolete.
Suppliers have been replacing the meters, but not quickly enough to meet the deadline….
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