[Mailman]

Originally Posted by retrotecchie

@StillWaiting
There is more money to be saved by reducing energy consumption all year round than there ever will be for shifting consumption around.

Just to prove your point, 3 years ago in February my annual consumption of gas/electric was 10200kWh/3600kWh. The stick of forced economy has now got me using 6400kWh/2400kWh. Although I have moved home, I should be using more (or at the very least not using less) having gone from semi-detached house to semi-detached bungalow with more roof space. The DFS scheme has proved that the process can work (via the test events) although I suspect the days of these test events may be limited in the future. It has become largely irrelevant for my houshold being an academic excercise if nothing else. I'm more concerned with the overall direction of price movement past Q3 of 2024 rather than any gains from future DFS events.

[retrotecchie]

@Mailman

I'm thinking another good 'stick' would be a change from the Economy 7 mentality to something like Penalty 9. You get cheaper (or normal) rate electricity outside 'business hours' but pay a 'penalty' or a higher rate for energy consumed during peak hours between 8am and 5pm when business and commercial usage is higher. That in itself would encourage folk to shift their demand to cheaper periods. Economy 7 was all well and good when we had a contant surplus capacity of off-peak electricity generation thanks to the now retired Magnox nuclear fleet. You can turn off gas, but you can't turn off nuclear.

[wizzo227]

I really don't like your Penal 9 tariff proposal. How about having two sorts of circuit breakers to ring mains, with special "interruptible" ones to the immersion heater, car recharge, marked sockets which might have fan heaters televisions and comparable interruptible appliances selected by the household, and sub-metering what goes through the interruptible group. The fridge oven and washing machine keep their always-on power. A smart-oven could bump the thermostat up a degree during a minute of unusually cheap electricity. A smart-washing-machine could pause and wait for cheaper electricity.

Similarly, shops could leave the cash registers freezers and lighting on expensive electricity, but set at least 3/4 of the heating and the door blower to go on an interruptible circuit with a sub-meter so that those get interrupted and get billed less expensively than at present. There is a structural obstacle to getting this done in that shop leases and contracts sometimes keep the energy bills where shop keepers cannot see them.

With a wifi internet signal it is possible to interrupt all of those loads for minutes (not hours) of more scarcity than the next minute (not next week); !clunk! do something else, the telly is off for a while. "normal" ring mains is expensive in 2024, paying a lot extra for imported-gas-fired and other fossil fuel backup generation, particularly between 4pm and 10pm. Any kWh submetered though the !clunk! interrupter could be billed at a less expensive price, subtracted from the total metered into the house, and during the evening peak may be off for a couple of hours unless there happens to be a renewable surplus that evening. At the technology level of 1980, economy-7 style fixed hours off could be done with a clockwork timer and meter. In 2024, there must be better ways, to keep the interruptibles waiting until there is spare power from the renewables.

[retrotecchie]

@wizzo227

My suggestion would have zero cost. Yours would mean rewiring every premises in the country!

[wizzo227]

Originally Posted by retrotecchie

@wizzo227
My suggestion would have zero cost. Yours would mean rewiring every premises in the country!

Your suggestion needs a SMETS2 meter or better, and needs EoN to sort out their codes to update peoples' meters with pricing by time of day. Whilst the cost of a SMETS2 meter at about 300 pounds per household has largely been shifted onto standing charge and some people already have them, who'd get a smart meter only to have it lob penalty pricing at them?

My suggestion does not care whether or not the meter outside is SMETS2 smart or the old sort, because many household loads can time-shift by a few minutes almost imperceptably but don't like to forgo a hot dinner for a whole evening. Some homes may choose to invest in a new sub-meter and switchboard with interrupt wifi switch and by-the-second meter-logging capabilities, and only those who choose to save money this way get the electrician in to fit second household distribution unit and check that the immersion heater is wired through the interruptible one and not the other. A convenient time to do such work is when the house needs to put in an electric vehicle charge point outside. Make enough of those interruptible and cheaper at off-peak, and we'd need less pylons and less fossil-gas-fired generation for the evening peaks.

Key to this is distribution of a mainstream internet and wifi status number meaning that "in your area" "renewables are plentiful" and a forecast comparable to "and the renewable forecast for this evening is moderate to good, and increasing". For that to happen, we need more renewables, so yes we do rewire the whole country. Did you notice, they've just part-nationalised national grid, effective later this summer. So please ask everyone for the money to get spent more on renewables and less on fossil gas.

[retrotecchie]

@wizzo227

You are a factor of 5 out on your pricing. A full SMETS2 setup is around £32 compared to around £16 for a 'traditional' or conventional meter. As over half of smart meters currently installed are either SMETS2 or have at least been adopted from SMETS1, then your notional figure of £300 per household is miles out.

The reason we need MORE pylons and a £59 billion investment in the grid is precisely to get the 'cheap renewable energy' from where it is generated mostly on the east coast off shore to where the power is actually needed. It's far more to do with people slowly adopting EVs and heat pumps than anything to do with gas.

There is enough current capacity and planned capacity to be self sufficient in renewable energy in the next ten years. You just cannot connect the producers to the users with the current grid infrastructure!

[meldrewreborn]

@retrotecchie

I think most (but certainly not all) of the new farms proposed are around Scotland, whereas most of the UK population lives very much further south. Undersea cables will help to bring the energy to coasts further south but we don't all live on the coast, unlike some I could mention!😁 Not many connectors to West Wales are needed though.

As to Gas I currently use 6 times my electricity usage in gas. I suspect many other use similar multiples. If we are gradually forced onto electric heat pumps (not me - I'll probably be dead!) in the coming years, that will require enormous onshore network improvement.

[retrotecchie]

@meldrewreborn

The National grid have the largest interconnector planned for West Wales. Connecting Wylfa to Port Talbot. Proposed new nuclear on the old Wylfa site plus connecting thirty seven west coast wind farms. Ostensibly to power Tata Steels new electric arc furnaces. There isn't enough capacity in the south for the scheme.