National Grid are paying EDF to switch off half of Sizewell B. Demand is so low due to lockdown there is too much generation on the grid making it tricky to balance.
National Grid are also looking at Demand Turn Up or variations where they pay for generators to reduce their export to the grid or consume more power.
This lockdown has thrown up some very interesting statistics.
Don't get that, surely people at home all the time still use power, but if manufacturing is not using their share where is everything we need coming from if not here? Brian
This is where we could do with some way to store electricity, quite obviously. Lets flood London and use the Thames barrier as a tidal generator. Brian
Given the lack of extra suitable lakes for hydro storage, someone is now trialling dangling concrete blocks down holes ...
See also
Brian Gaff (Sofa) has brought this to us :
That idea has considerable merit.
But do the sums. For 1000 tonnes and 1000m shaft (deeper than Killingley) you get about 30 MWh.
The Snowdon drop is about 1000m too. But you couldn't put 10,000 tons on flatbeds and tow them, you would have to have motor/generators on a significant proportion of the wheels. So that would give you 300 MWh.
Dinorwic is 9000 MWh.
Say 1000 km^2, 10 metres total height, I make that 15 GWh gross, so 1.5 times Dinorwic.
Quite. It was a tongue in cheek suggestion, very 'green', and useless.
What has this to do with DIY.
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Name them.
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Gravitricity are trialling with 250kW (note lack of 'h' but their blurb mentions 15 minute runtime, so maybe 62kWh) aren't their crowd-funders convinced that gravity works?
Gridwatch shows 'notches' of lowered demand for several days recently, ass though they've used load-shedding, i.e. the opposite of what that says?
The problem is that 'green' energy is simply shit people have known about for years and rejected as being hopelessly ineffective or uneconomic.
There are no real 'breakthroughs' at all.
As far as storage goes water-up-a-hill remains the best method but is limited by lack of - er - hills.
Making hills, or digging holes, is expensive (and carbon intensive)
One of the less stupid ideas would be something like build a barrier across loch Ness and pump water out of it to store and then refill from the sea to generate.
And bugger Nessie.
No those are data errors I am afraid.
When the solar energy estimates cant be scraped from Sheffield
Not sure what you are talking about, but the notches seem to coincide with a loss of solar. I would guess this is something to do with how solar is reported, rather than a genuine drop in demand.
Since the surface is 15m above sea level, wouldn't it drain by itself and need pumping to refill? Not that 15m is much of a head ...
Ah, I did wonder about that, "obvious errors" in the past have been to zero
newshound brought next idea :
A decent exchange rate.
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