Demand response

The Energy and Climate Change Committee are currently considering demand response, which is an interesting subject for those who quite like the idea of having energy when required rather than when permitted by the political classes. The hearing started a few moments ago and features:

• Duncan Burt, Head of Commercial Operations, System Operation, National Grid
• Phil Jones, Chief Executive, Northern Powergrid
• Sara Bell, Executive Director, UK Demand Response Association
• Yoav Zingher, Co-founder, KiWi Power (who make kit for demand management)
• Zoe Leader, Climate and Energy Specialist, WWF

(because you can't have any hearing at the ECC without a green on board). This is followed by a separate panel.

• Matthew Hancock MP, Minister of State for Energy, Department of Energy and Climate Change

I'll write some notes as I listen.

1. We're hearing that big manufacturing operations will have to change the times at which they operate. (so prepare to move to nightshifts people!)
2. Witnesses seem to think that domestic users are at least as important via smart metering.
3. WWF are worried that people will switch to diesel generators instead of switching off.
4. Discussion of trials of smart meters, in which consumers were switched off "with their consent, obviously".
5. Discussion of car plants switching off at 2 hours' notice and then everyone works overtime later on. Did I really hear that!!!
6. Discussion of making up grid shortfalls by buying in diesel generation from manufacturing businesses etc. WTF!!!
7. They seem to be envisaging a world in which your hotel airconditioning will switch off without notice for half an hour.
8. Pure diesel farms can bid into the new system. Gotta love greenery.
9. Tim Yeo is pretending he gives a monkey's about consumers.
10. The lady from WWF is being asked if she is happy with the proposed arrangements. Surprised MPs aren't down on bended knee before her.
11. Discussions of "deciding when to run the washing machine".

Comments

[It doesn't add up...]

Meanwhile Richard North seems to have disappeared up the spout of his own vacuum cleaner in support of the EU's initiative:

http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=85174

[Alan Davidson]

Rarely have I read such insane discussion anywhere let alone in the UK Government. In the early 1970s I worked for a while at CEGB HQ in London. I was always quite impressed at how the electricity supply system amd grid operation was very reliable and competently run. I emigrated to Canada in the mid 1980s, which turns out to have been a good decision. How the UK has allowed it's electricity system to descend to such a nonsensical level of planning and operation from how it was in the 1970s, is beyond my comprehension. How has the public permitted this to occur? Why have UK governments allowed it to happen?

[lapogus]

Alan - I blame short-term thinking, at the political and corporate levels, and then a complete failure by the so called experts in DECC and on our Scientific Advisory Committees. Privatisation meant that the electricity companies which had been largely run by engineers who knew the meaning of phrases like load factor, grid balancing and dispatchable load were slowly replaced by supermarket managers and their like, who only cared for sales and keeping city analysts happy. The days of the CEGB's long term planning and rolling replacement of old stations were long gone. The new management focused on the companies 'market performance' (for potential takeovers which many CEOs profited handsomely from). Many senior grid engineers saw all this coming, but their warnings fell on deaf ears, and they chose early retirement before the pension deals became less generous. Meanwhile Milliband and his fellow WWF idiots like Worthington infiltrated DECC, such that market skewing ROCs and FITs incentivised the inefficient windmills and the Climate Change Act has killed off coal without CCS.

[John Shade]

Like Alan Davidson (Sep 3, 2014 at 2:50 AM) I also worked for the CEGB in the early 1970s. I joined it as a physicist about the same time as Baroness Worthington was born. I too was impressed by the competence of the grid control operations. Since then, a handwaving English literature graduate, imbued with all that being immersed in Friends of the Earth can bestow, drafted the Climate Change Act, thereby making competent grid control almost impossible. She was grappling with what she saw as a 'massive tidal-wave of a problem in global climate change', and so grid control was not likely to be on her radar. This 'massive tidal-wave' has so far been beneficial overall, although it would be a rash optimist who would propose we increase our emissions of CO2 to keep it all going. After all, as the recent NIPCC report has illustrated, our CO2 seems to be of negligible importance as far as driving the climate is concerned, and our monster GCMs according it a key role have been a bit of a disaster when it comes to practical guidance about the future. Scafetta's model, which I suppose might fit on a decent programmable calculator has done much better, and Armstrong's model, which would fit on a postage stamp, has also done pretty well.

[sherlock1]

My point about the 'changeover switch' which I was making in my previous post, was this: of course it will be possible for those premises fortunate/far-sighted enough to have a standby generator to use it to power themselves in the inevitable likelihood of power failure. However, the government would not be able to call on the use of these standby generators to support the mains, because they (the generators) are ISOLATED from the mains, and they (the government/National Grid) have no control over the cycling, etc output from these machines.

[john]

They're only grid connected to collect subsidy. Not much point in injecting a few KW into a dead short.

[Electrical Engineering Services Los Angeles]

It is anything but difficult to "parallel" generators in the event that they have reasonable AVR/representative and synchronizing gear.