What is lacking in this debate is any quantitative analysis. For example by 2025 Estimated peak demand on the grid Total available generating capacity when renewables are at their minimum Saving by industrial load shedding Saving by domestic load shedding whether by pricing or by smart appliances Estimated output from battery storage Difference.
A friend contacted BG about their recent offer of free electricity Sat or Sun but although she pays by direct debit and has a smart meter she was refused because she has no internet connection.
Mine may well be closer between 1/3 and 1/2 of my energy. The rest is mostly cooking which is entirely electric. I heat using very little electricity anyone, just the electric blanket and an equivalent called an electric throw that you use on armchair etc that both use very little energy.
It could well do with just electrical heating alone with the big surge in demand on the network during the ad breaks in major sporting events. The house temp wouldn?t even notice if the heating paused for that time.
[1] When you killfile a troll, you still keep seeing their ghostly presence in others' postings. They're never truly killfiled until everyone else has added them to their own killfile filter lists. :-(
The fact that domestic fluorescent luminaries designed for 20 watt or lower rated lamps were exempt from the power factor correction requirements of the larger wattage fluorescent fittings says it all really.
However, those regulations were drafted way back in the days before the loony greens began to exert undue influence upon politicians determined to win a popularity contest to get into "The House". In the absence of any sane level of pragmatism that once prevailed over the drafting of UK laws and regulations, who knows what might happen today? :-(
On Wed, 31 Aug 2016 17:06:11 +0100, harry w= rote:
:
n there is a dearth of electricity.
Oh dear. Supply and demand. If you can't make enough electricity, put = the price up, people will use less. It's so simple a mosquito could und= erstand it.
-- =
The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of the oncoming train= .
Since the potential output of renewables is zero. (dark cold windless winter night) and PV does f*ck all on a short winters day, you need to be ale to do without electricity for up to a week or more.
Wool shrinks due to mechanical action not temp so any agitation causes shrinkage. YMMV depending on the knit of the fabric.
I occidentally put a hand knitted jumper in once and when it came out it was doll clothing sized rather than a 12. That was a 30C wash but the synthetics setting. Daughter was not pleased.
The suggestion was that people with solar panels on their roofs might also install storage batteries that would not only store excess solar power generated by the householder but also excess grid power when the wind was blowing strongly*, and feeding that power back to the grid when the wind wasn't blowing etc.
It has been discussed here recently.
These batteries would presumably be much like the Tesla Powerwall
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although at a miserable 6.4kWh that example is pretty useless for anything much. But Tesla are now offering a bigger battery for their cars, at 100kWh,
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so assume the Powerwall may eventually reach that capacity.
There are approximately 900,000 solar installations in the UK, although by no means all are domestic
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. Call it 1 million for simplicity and assume they're all domestic, and that all those installations have a 100kWh battery. That gives a total battery storage capacity of 100GWh. Assume the average UK grid consumption across the year is ~33GW. So these batteries would keep the UK's lights burning for ~3 hours on average, assuming no other sources of electricity. On a cold windless winter night grid consumption will be higher and they'd certainly all be flat by the morning.
But they'd possibly be useful for smoothing out the peaks and troughs caused by variable supply, along with load shedding, smart devices etc as discussed in this thread. But there would have to be a massive increase in numbers and/or battery capacity for them to act as primary grid storage.
Wind and solar are complimentary across the year. Solar is useless in winter but wind performs better, especially offshore. Wind drops a bit in summer, and solar picks up a bit. Capacity factors, aka load factors (why can't they just call it efficiency?) for 2015 as follows: Q1 % Q2 % Q3 % Q4 % Offshore wind 46.7 33.4 30.4 50.9 Solar 6.6 17.8 14.5 4.4
The purpose of a smart meter is so that it can detect the electric car being charged and the missing notional petroleum revenue duty will just be added to your electricity bill.
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