The idea that turning all domestic electricity off for 10 minutes at 10 pm (22:00) will bring the National Grid to its knees seems far fetched at first glance.
I assume that there will be a noticeable dip and spike but how noticeable? More than the surge at advert time on Coronation Street when allegedly everyone jumps up to put the kettle on?
This looks more like a "me, me, me" campaign.
I also can't find anything on line so far which reports on this alleged action nor on its impact in Spain.
Personally I'm all for applying pressure on the government to stop the loading of debts from failed power companies onto the standing charge. This loads the debt unavoidably on to those least able to pay. However on the face of it this seems to be complete bollocks.
Turning all domestic electricity off for 10 minutes at 10 pm (22:00) will have absolutely no impact on the National Grid and definitely won't bring it to its knees, for one thing all the Commercial and Industrial consumption is much greater than the Domestic!
I did consider suggesting that everyone maxed out by turning on all ovens, kettles etc. for 10 minutes. Peak evening would seem like a good time. However selling this to people in acute fuel poverty might not be as easy.
But the aim would be to take down the grid so those in fuel poverty would be only spending pence before the grid goes down. If it made no difference people quickly would give up. Would the system recover within a short time or could it take many hours or days
No electricity, no central heating, no TV , no phones, no internet access etc.etc. People would only do this once if it results that they are without these facilities.
Magic money tree territory. The UK fiasco was the result of the government's "consumer friendly" price cap policy.
If the Spanish PM freezes prices to boost his ratings someone still has to pick up the cost. Not the government, because they don't actually have any money.
Realistically, either the taxpayer or the electricity consumer.
Just about everyone agrees that the electricity "retailers" should not be loaded up either with the "failed companies" or any of the other "social policy costs" such as electricity meters or bankrupt consumers.
I use the term "electricity retailer" because, to my mind, "electricity company" should mean the people who are actually making the stuff. (Obviously, most if not all generators have a retail "arm").
There was a famous incident I think on Look North in the 70's (but it could have been another region) where they were live in a National Grid control centre. The presenter asked the fat controller if that meter on the wall showed live consumption and he said yes.
The interviewer then said so if everyone put their kettles on it would go up? The audience duly obeyed and the meter shot up alarmingly taking the grid off frequency. There was an edict issued to the effect that no live broadcasts would ever be allowed again from grid control centres.
I stumbled on this anachronism whilst looking for the old report:
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I do worry that Russian hackers will use the totally insecure SMETS I smart meters to synchronously pulse load on and off the grid. That could do a lot of damage if you choose the right waveform and timescales. I hope that most have by now become dumb due to change of supplier.
Something similar in Stuxnet was used to destroy Iranian centrifuges.
True, but that was by taking control of the PLCs, and in a clever way so that the operator displays didn't show what they were actually up to.
My guess is that "meter pulsing" would, at worst, upset the grid like the recent case when the big windfarm came off almost simultaneously with another fault. Most of the grid protection stuff is "hard-wired".
But when the public had that fantastic windfall in April 2020 as oil went below $30, and petrol below £1/litre, no such taxes were imposed (on the end user).
The grid did drop once, in a most embarrassing way. A bunch of nukes tripped like dominoes.
And it took two or three days to bring it back up. At the time, they may not have had a procedure in hand for bringup.
The funny part is, all the cellphone users, kept borrowing my POTS phone to make phone calls (at the time, the cell system didn't have backup power -- today, it does, and that grid drop is why there is backup power now).
Yes, there was a solar flare one, but I don't remember the details of the reach of that one. That one was on a fairly long line, and perhaps that wasn't HVDC either. Today, links of that sort would be HVDC, just because you can buy it off the shelf. Some of the power from the recent NFLD Labrador hydro project ($12B), is sold that way. With bidirectional linkage offering flexible solutions if something breaks or needs maintenance. Because that project was a bit late delivering, they did operate the link to it backwards for a while, to support a load near the other end.
New York State uses a lot of our hydro power, and there are long line connections, likely multiple of them, for the purpose. That's because they negotiated a long term contract, at very attractive rates (the power is effectively almost "free" compared to contemporary rate structures).
The government here has just authorized four SMRs, but it remains to be seen what they are, and I didn't see an output listed. This is mostly symbolic, due to the fact they're SMRs. It's like a wink and a nod. You wouldn't have to sell many electric cars to tip one of those over. They're positioned, to take the place of coal or fossil generation facilities. To take the "stink out of the air". I think the number of $5B each for the SMRs was mentioned, so not really "cheap as chips". We're hardly going to make progress at this rate. Each one is sited separately.
The purpose of that, could be just to watch the project cost skyrocket, and see whether there will ever be more SMRs in the future.
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