Electricity shake-up could save consumers 'up to £40bn'

[Triassic]

New rules will make it easier for people to generate their own power with solar panels, store it in batteries and sell it to the National Grid.

They will reduce costs for someone who allows their washing machine to be turned on by the internet to maximise use of cheap solar power on a sunny afternoon. 
And they will even support people who agree to have their freezers switched off for a few minutes to smooth demand at peak times.

Among the first to gain from the rule changes will be people with solar panels and battery storage. At the moment they are charged tariffs when they import electricity into their home or export it back to the grid.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40699986

 

thougt this may be of interest to some here!

[jamiehamy]

Surely the elephant in the room is the lack of a smart grid system - we can't even get Smart meters to work properly never mind be sustainable in the face of technological advancement, so how on earth are they planning putting in infrastructure that allows external control of your/my domestic electrical useage? Talk about running before you can walk!

[vivienz]

When I first heard the headline this morning, it was a 'hooray' but then closely followed by a twitch when I heard about internet enabled washing machines and freezers.  No thanks to that.

 

Besides, what about all those rural areas that can't get broadband or only receive a poor bandwidth?  I love the idea of all the micro generation, but I'm a super-cynic when it comes to smart home tech. 

 

@jamiehamy - I think that the biggest elephant in the room is the problem of poor battery technology that just isn't moving on enough.

[Nickfromwales]

I'm still wondering why the government hasn't better anticipated this next jump, and subsequently started a compulsory solar Pv fitting drive to every uk home. 2 panels or 4 panels on the roof of every home, controlled by the same system as E7 to stop over volting at peak generation times, used to offset wholesale energy costs and thus create a budget to beef up the local distribution networks / make them smarter.

Every home has the sun shining on it, why the hell aren't we using it more intelligently ?

 

What happens if the signal to ping your freezer back on gets interrupted? 

 

[Jeremy Harris]

Reading what has been reported suggests a level of misunderstanding by government, presumably at the hands of their puppet masters, the energy companies, as to how things work that is a bit more than staggering.  It's been years since you could buy a washing machine that could be turned on by a time switch controlling power to the machine, something I've long been annoyed about (we used to have our very old washing machine connected via a time switch so that it ran overnight on E7).  Modern machines just reset whatever the set programme is, ours even resets the integral time delay setting, when the power goes off, so they cannot be controlled by just turning the supply on and off.  We are some way away from "internet of things" washing machines, and given all the many security vulnerabilities in the first generation IoT devices I think there may well be a lot of resistance to the idea.

 

Reading between the lines, I think this is a way to tear up FIT "contracts" (it can be done, I believe) to reduce the payments that are currently given to microgenerators.  I think what we will see is some minor (in the overall scheme of things) investment in battery technology, that will have near-zero impact (are the government REALLY going to invest as much as people like Elon Musk in battery technology?).  There may well be an incentive tariff for those who are prepared to invest in home storage solutions, and who are willing to use them to support the grid, rather than reduce their own electricity bills.

 

The big problem the grid has is imbalance, and that's got worse as old nuclear and coal plants have been closed, and as renewable generation capacity has increased.  We now get very big swings in renewable generation, with it providing a large percentage of the power we need from time to time, and producing very little power at other times.  This means that fast-acting generation capacity has to be available to take up the dips, but is then shut off (and so making no profits) during the peaks.  The industry wants to find a way to try and shave the peaks and reduce the depth of the dips so that it is more profitable to run power stations.  Part of the problem is the generation funding model, which is a free market, with the spot price for generated electricity changing through the day, and from one day to the next.  It's questionable as to whether such a totally free market is a good model for reliable long term electricity generation infrastructure.  There needs to be an incentive to build new generation capacity, and that depends on the investors being able to predict the likely long term return, and I suspect that at the moment that isn't easy (hence the massive government subsidy/guarantee for Hinkley Point C).

Edited July 24, 2017 by JSHarris

[SteamyTea]

28 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I think what we will see is some minor (in the overall scheme of things) investment in battery technology

It has started, the government choosing 'winners' again.

http://www.cityam.com/268984/government-power-up-investment-into-battery-technology

[vivienz]

It won't be easy to apply any changes like this to small-scale industrrial use, either.  For example, we work from an industrial unit in Dorset and use a fair amount of 3-phase power.  A few years ago we looked at having solar panels installed on the roof, thinking that as we are south-facing, it would make a lot of sense.  However, because of the angle of our roof and lots of adjacent trees, the panels just wouldn't have been able to capture enough energy to justify the cost.

 

Our unit isn't all that old, but if you wanted to apply and expand the idea just to this one industrial estate, you'd have to demolish and rebuild a large proportion of the units and take down the adjacent trees on surrounding farm land. 

[Jeremy Harris]

8 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

It has started, the government choosing 'winners' again.

http://www.cityam.com/268984/government-power-up-investment-into-battery-technology

 

So the UK government is looking to spend (not necessarily invest) £264M and expects to become a " world leader in the design, development and manufacture of electric batteries"? 

 

Remind me again how much investment has gone into building the Tesla Gigafactory, plus all the Panasonic/Tesla R&D spending?  I'm pretty sure Panasonic alone have invested over £1bn in it, and I think that there has been another £2bn or so from Tesla and their backers. 

 

Just how deluded is our government to think that investing less than 10% of just one of the many companies investing in battery technology is going to somehow make them "world leaders"?

 

[Nickfromwales]

I was kind of shocked to see an M not a Bn after the £246 . 

That'll just about cover expenses most likely...........

 

[jamiehamy]

4 minutes ago, Nickfromwales said:

I was kind of shocked to see an M not a Bn after the £246 . 

That'll just about cover expenses most likely...........

 

Same here! It's a paltry amount and rally unlikely to do anything. 

[MikeSharp01]

UK HMG - madder than a mad things mad thing..... BUT the answer must be out there its just the one who finds it will clean up.

[Jeremy Harris]

My money is on Elon Musk, or someone very like him.  Governments are bloody awful at driving innovation; history shows that it is often a single, highly motivated, individual that is prepared to take the risk and put in the effort to bring about a major innovation, or, in some cases, just a simple accident.  I can't recall a single UK government sponsored innovation programme that has delivered anything really worthwhile.

[Ferdinand]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

There may well be an incentive tariff for those who are prepared to invest in home storage solutions, and who are willing to use them to support the grid, rather than reduce their own electricity bills.

 

^ This. But it needs the government to encourage widespread adoption.

 

Personally I think that solar pv was handled OK eventually ... once they got into reducing the subsidy to spread the same money across more people, however it was at the second or third bite. When I look at Spain or Germany it seems to have paid to wait.

 

Perhaps here it will have something to do with genuine export metering.

 

Ferdinand

 

Edited July 24, 2017 by Ferdinand

[MikeSharp01]

16 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

I can't recall a single UK government sponsored innovation programme that has delivered anything really worthwhile.

In general you are, I think, correct because they don't think things through, which is not hard as you guys have, as above, and the industry I know is very wary of this programme. Nonetheless some HMG projects have shown returns - BBC micro was a government funded programme that built quite some innovation which led to ARM holdings.

[Ferdinand]

Also things such as the switch from town to natural gas would have been tricky without government intervention, perhaps.

[Jeremy Harris]

Government can be effective as an enabler, to mandate infrastructure changes, for example, but investing in battery technology makes very little sense, as the chance that this tiny investment will produce any significant improvement is miniscule.

 

If government chooses to incentivise home energy storage as a way of better managing the grid load patterns, then that makes a great deal of sense.  Industry can't easily do this, given the current energy supply model we have, so if there is to be wide-scale change then it needs government intervention.  The problem is that the government doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to schemes like this.  The FIT scheme sort of worked out reasonably, albeit with a great deal of market uncertainty and profiteering from a few dubious businesses who set out to game the system, but some of the other schemes, like the RHI and the Green Deal, are just mad.

 

I'd be happy to consider investing in home battery storage IF the scheme makes sense in terms of the balance between the benefit to the grid and the benefit to me.  Right now, home battery storage makes no sense at all; anyone who invests in it will end up paying more per unit of energy than they would if they just relied on a grid connection.  Bring in a scheme that makes it slightly better than whole life cost neutral and I'd invest, really to get the benefit of energy supply reliability as much as anything else.

Edited July 24, 2017 by JSHarris
typo - meant to type "incentivise"

[richi]

1 hour ago, MikeSharp01 said:

BBC micro was a government funded programme that built quite some innovation which led to ARM holdings.

OTOH,  Sinclair Radionics Ltd. was given NEB public money, but Clive got so fed up with the interference, he trousered the grant, set up a new company—Sinclair Research Ltd., née Science of Cambridge, née Sinclair Instrument, née Ablesdeal—allowing Radionics to whither on the vine, and the government to see no direct return on the investment.

[Jeremy Harris]

Arguably the BBC Micro helped massively in the educational sector, but it was a dead end in terms of the original technology incentive, in terms of helping to create a UK personal computer industry.  The "wrong" choice of processor was one reason, but frankly it was a lottery trying to guess which architecture would "win", a bit like the VHS versus Betamax thing. 

 

ARM was way after the major government indirectly invested in the BBC Micro, and although it could be argued that this indirect investment in Acorn helped them to develop the later RISC architecture, I'm not at all convinced that it wouldn't have happened anyway.  Acorn ended up going broke and being taken over, IIRC, and probably the only worthwhile remaining asset was the IP in the RISC architecture, I suspect.  Even that had a pretty rocky road to eventual success, and that success is largely due to the drive and investment from Apple when ARM was first formed.

[richi]

Acorn's biggest problem was the ridiculously huge bet it made on the Electron—a crippled BBC Micro that was also badly delayed, leaving the company with piles of unsold stock too late for Christmas.

 

The ARMv1 architecture first saw the light of day in the Archimedes line, which was the follow-on BBC product. It also had an ARM second CPU board for the BBC around that time, IIRC. Archimedes saw some success worldwide as a real-time on-screen graphics generator for TV (it was used for the National Lottery, for instance).

[Jeremy Harris]

I owned an Acorn Electron, just before I splashed out and bought a BBC Master.  It ended up in the skip when we moved to Scotland in 1992, I think, as by then I'd bought a 286 PC with a (at the time) wonderful EGA monitor...............

[richi]

I had an original Mk.1 Acorn Atom, full-loaded with a heady 12 KB of static RAM and the optional floating-point ROM. Phear me.

 

All the chips were in sockets, mounted to the underside of the PCB. Unfortunately, the keyboard was mounted on the top, so typing gradually made the chips fall out. Every week, it would need preventative maintenance (i.e., open the case and push all the chips back in).

[Temp]

2 hours ago, MikeSharp01 said:

In general you are, I think, correct because they don't think things through, which is not hard as you guys have, as above, and the industry I know is very wary of this programme. Nonetheless some HMG projects have shown returns - BBC micro was a government funded programme that built quite some innovation which led to ARM holdings.

I worked for Acorn. Arm actually got a chunk of funding from the EU.

[MikeSharp01]

28 minutes ago, JSHarris said:

ARM was way after the major government indirectly invested in the BBC Micro, and although it could be argued that this indirect investment in Acorn helped them to develop the later RISC architecture, I'm not at all convinced that it wouldn't have happened anyway.  Acorn ended up going broke and being taken over, IIRC, and probably the only worthwhile remaining asset was the IP in the RISC architecture, I suspect.  Even that had a pretty rocky road to eventual success, and that success is largely due to the drive and investment from Apple when ARM was first formed.

Yes life and business is as much about serendipity as it is about engineering and such things are littered with un-traveled  roads. I think it is hard to see the ARM architecture, the enterprising people behind it and the experience they got in the context of ACORN not being somewhat primed by the BBC Micro work but I do agree that trying to plan such an outcome at the start would be, if not quite impossible, almost impossible because the technology developed along the way, that was not there at the outset plays a part.

[richi]

13 minutes ago, MikeSharp01 said:

Yes life and business is as much about serendipity as it is about engineering.

This is certainly true with ARM. To hear Steve Furber tell the story, ARM wasn't designed to be very low power, nor mobile. But it was its extreme power efficiency is what put it in so many mobile devices.

 

edit to clarify: the original design objective was less than 1 Watt, but the first test device drew about 10% of that.

Edited July 24, 2017 by richi
clarify

[MikeSharp01]

2 minutes ago, Temp said:

I worked for Acorn. Arm actually got a chunk of funding from the EU.

See my comment above, they would not have needed funding unless they had the idea and the key people and the basic ideas arose in ACORN but it was not going to be the vehicle to carry what became ARM forward. The essential point you allude to is that funding for bright ideas is what is needed - in the UK we have always been good with bright ideas but in the last 50 or so years our business finance systems have been shot to bits by short termism and our engineering capacity debilitated by having all the brightest engineering graduates working in the finance sector rather than engineering because people in the money business earn better than they do in creating something useful we could, if we made them, sell to others.