It wasn't only Magnox power stations which had to stay on all night and never let the furnace walls go cold in case they crack. A lot of the late 20th century power stations were designed as always-on half-to-full power. Most of the huge coal burning power stations could never go cold. The biggest coal power station in South Wales where I lived had the same limitation. Those were so big that if the conveyor belt loading in coal were to stop, it would take half a day to burn off the coal already in there, and you shouldn't want to because a complete refurbishment of cracked furnace walls would cost days of specialist work.
Intermittent renewables in the age of "everyone can read and everyone has teletext or an internet connection" need a different scheduler to economy7 for on-all-night baseload. Economy 7 could be implemented with two plain old meters for the different pricing and a clockwork timer. Using the cheapest peaks from a myriad of intermittent renewables and avoiding the least available times, the best schedule can vary somewhat with the weather and with everyone else's use. On another forum an idiot was complaining that it was more expensive than average to recharge his large electric car between 4pm and 7. And so it should be on most days, because for everyone to do that would need massive new pylons everywhere and twice as many windmills as would sensibly scheduled usage, and most people don't want that.
It is to better encourage my household usage to best renewables availability that I changed to a different (name no names) supplier whose floating price by half hour intervals will sometimes drop and will sometimes go over 30p/kWh when I shouldn't use electricity any more than I really have to. I can use plenty right now though, as the sun is shining.
Last edited by wizzo227; 08-04-24 at 14:26.
