Bad data in Gridwatch

That is probably correct. ewas in hospital and in convalescence for a long time exactly when BM reports decided to change their data format and that data is gone forebver I think

When I was flat out in bed

I cant argue with that. In fact all 'renewable' energy is a waste of time. If the amount spent on subusidies had ben spent on nuclear instead we would be in clover now

Precisely, and if its nuclear it costs as much to shut it down as to run it. So nuclear is the best option for base load and a bit more to allow for servicing and unscheduled maintenance.

Hydro and gas are best for peak demand following. Intermittent renewables have no place whatsoever.

Governments cannot change reality. Only peoples minds.

Net Zero is finished. Milliband will nail the final coffin shut on it any week now by trying to make it work and failing even mire dismally than he has failed at everything else.

I think for that one, TNP went into hospital at the time Elexon changed the data source ...

My electricty consumption is pretty even throughout the year (gas CH).

Link the solar to a storage battery maybe?

Mine was even too, which surprised me as I used an electric fan heater to heat my study, rather than turn on the gas central heating for the whole house.

It was only after buying smart plugs that I discovered my old Freezer and Fridge both consumed huge amounts of energy in Summer (I let my kitchen get cold in winter).

If we use more power in winter than summer, wouldn't it make solar even less attractive when the standing charge goes and the cost per kWh increases to compensate? Solar would make even less of a contribution to energy costs at that time of year. It would make a higher contribution in summer, but unless a lot of air-conditioning was used, it wouldn't compensate for the higher winter usage.

ah - but if you have big (gynormous) batteries there's no problem ;-(

Yes, I've started doing that - just 700W keeps things reasonably warm, even in this weather. So I'd expect it to go up by a couple of units a day.

Indeed - freezer's in the cellar. Annual running costs about 2/3 of manufacturer's estimate.

Right now storage is one of the data reported. The maximum output from all the storage in the entire country over a day is about an hour's consumption.

If you look at a bad week in the depths of winter solar does **** all even in the limited hours of daylight, which means we'd need enough storage to maybe last a month (guessing here).

If we had that much storage it would be better linked to wind farms. They're even uglier than solar farms, but at lease they produce more power in winter when we need it.

If we install 2.6 times more wind farms than we currently have we can get ourselves down to the 5% gas that "net zero" requires.

For solar it's 40 times, and when the sun does shine we'd have to turn most of them off.

Andy

Mine (maybe 2500W max) hasn't done much through December - 1.5kw/h a day on average. I gather this has been a bad winter, though.

It all depends on how the tariffs stack up come the time. As things stand, with a small battery and 16p/unit export over the summer, I get electricity pretty much free over the year. That may well change . . .

It won't help much over the winter, unless there's a tariff that allows you to top up to your daily capacity at a cheap(er) rate.

It's all a lottery. I did look at the figures and pondered the future, but made my decision in the main on environmental factors, the fact that I was having the roof retiled anyway, plus achieving some isolation from the energy market. 'Energy security' I suppose that's called.

I'm lucky enough not to have to worry about an economic return. Well, at the moment anyway.

OOI - where is that reported? I think the figure relating to domestic with solar and storage installed would be interesting.

Yes of course. I don't think anyone's ever suggested that solar will be a significant source of energy in the UK for maybe 6 months of the year.

That is actually the point - have a decent and thought through spread of renewables. Plus of course other sources of power when renewables just don't do it.

Hopefully, somebody somewhere would come up with a storage solution if we ever got to that state. I was speaking to somebody the other day (an academic environmental scientist) who was getting excited about domestic thermal stores for suitable properties (with cellars, in the main). Over my head but there could be something in it.

But since we don't, it is.

I ran the calcs on this,. A well insulated swimming pool sized heat bank under the house would definitely enable you to use off peak electricity for all heating, but it got infeasibly large to be useful to store summer sunlight for winter heating. And of course that means using electricity to heat: Currently most homes offices and the like are gas or oil heated. Th overall increase in electricity would negate the use of such a system on economic grounds

It all looks good till you run the numbers

grid.iamkate.com says that storage stats are available, but only for discharge and not charge (so she doesn't include it). I can't see anything about that in her code, so it doesn't offer any clues where it's coming from.

Most solar is not attached to the grid but to the DNOs, so the solar stats are estimated numbers from them. I'd imagine they're not going to see domestic batteries since they're not actively reporting (ie they can't tell when you're charging vs consuming, and your export is consumed by your neighbours so just reduces local demand rather than is separately meterable at the DNO level). Smart meters would improve the resolution but I don't know if the DNOs get export stats from the DCC.

I think that's phase-change? SunAmp is a purveyor of thermal stores using phase change material. They aren't exactly cheap but I don't think there is anything intrinsically complicated in them, just pick the right material and make it in bulk - paraffin wax will do in a pinch:

exactly

You'll have to excuse their units choice, but they claim something will be built. I like to see both gigawatts and gigawatts-hours in the reporting. Multiple reports of this type, have been careless like this.

Paul

They are. They are designed to replace the inertia of spinning turbines only. Of course that's not how the green press releases are phrased.

Teh amount of pure Horseshit spouted by the GreenCrap™ lobby is enough to power the country for a week. The public narrative is for great strides forward towards 100% renewable energy - at least for electricity. The reality is that we are emitted moire CO2 than if we had simplyt built more baseload CCGT stations

I saw the article used the term "LDES", Long duration energy store.

So naturally I looked for a definition of what "long duration" is:

Quote: "Long duration energy storage is defined as a technology storing energy in various forms including chemical, thermal, mechanical, or electrochemical. These resources dispatch energy or heat for extended periods of time ranging from 8 hours, to days, weeks, or seasons."

Cite:

I was looking for a media piece about what Ed Milliband's big green plan was up to. Instead I found a piece from The Telegraph that unintentionally made Ed sound 100% sane.

I think it illustrates that the problems understanding energy are not necessarily Marxist, more that journalists and politicians have zero appreciation of technology.

Read the actual document, rather than filtered through the media. It's much better at presenting the numbers:

To be honest it looks like a wall of text, techno-babel, with ambiguous and political propaganda, as opposed to a serious plan.

Take LDES, mentioned 32 times without a clear definition of what it is. They use the term as a seasonal replacement for Natural Gas, as opposed to 8 hours. There is an ambiguous shell game. LDES is reasonable for 8 hours, LDES can be used to solve seasonal changes in demand, spot where they shift meaning.

Deep in the document they cite LDES, H2P (hydrogen 2 power) and CCUS (Carbon Capture), these really are yesterday's technological future. These aren't realistic for 2030. There was talk of a hydrogen economy a few years ago, but it came to nothing.

You also see highly misleading political comments like "Putin turned off the gas". Our politicians sanctioned Russian energy, rather than the other way around. That is why gas prices went up. The latest story is about Ukraine switching off their gas pipeline, Putin was willing to continue supply.