Smart meters could soon cost you a whole lot more

No, the issue in the UK (subject of the head post) is not going to be price, but availability.

The problem is that the party almost certain to assume power in November is Labour. They have committed repeatedly to making UK generation Net Zero by 2030. Not that the Conservatives are much better, they have the same goal but for 2035, which is equally crazy.

When all else fails, lets look at the numbers.

Peak demand in the UK is about 45GW. Installed wind is about 29GW, half on- and half off-shore. Say they manage to get 10GW from legacy nuclear, biomass etc, and gas and coal are turned off.

This leaves 35GW to be got from somewhere in December, January and February. Almost every year in these months there is an episode when wind produces about 1% of faceplate for over a week. You are looking to either supply 35GW peak or reduce demand by 35GW peak during this period.

Over time this demand will increase. The move to EVs and heat pumps will double it. Then we have data center and AI use. You have to be able to provide at least 100GW dispatchable by 2035 to keep the UK going.

Aren’t the lows less than 45GW however? Yes, they are around 25GW. It doesn’t really help. You still have to get through 45GW for several hours a day for a week or more and keep the grid in one piece.

The Royal Society looked at this carefully. Their idea of the most practical solution was to excavate and seal 900 caverns and store hydrogen in them. You would then install enough gas generation to supply peak demand and run it during calms. Calms which, as they point out, can be seasonally long (not as low as the winter calms, but far longer in duration).

If this is the most practical solution, you have an insoluble problem.

This is why the current proposal is to limit demand. The UK political class is finally realizing they have a real problem with intermittency and net zero in generation. The idea is one of two things. One would be to raise peak prices high enough to deter us and drop demand by 35GW. How much of a price rise would it take to do that? The advocates never say, but estimates have been made. This is from perplexity.ai:

Specifically, the search results show that in the short-run, the price elasticity of residential electricity demand is around -0.03, meaning a 1% increase in price leads to a 0.03% decrease in consumption3. In the long-run, the price elasticity is estimated to be around -0.43, so a 1% price increase leads to a 0.43% decrease in consumption3

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/price-elasticity-and-qFU0UYrmR3qZO9eCrSa1iQ

You’re a mathematician, figure out how much of a price rise you would need to drop demand by 75% when elasticity is -0.03. Tell us when you’ve figured it out. Several thousand year old math, this one. This is really not much better than the 900 hydrogen caves.

The other thing you can do, which the UK finally seems to be hinting its coming around to, is use the smart meters to reduce demand. Turn off the EV charging and the heat pumps during the calms. But you’ll have to turn off a lot more than that to make the numbers work.

The problem is not pricing. The problem is constant peak demand and intermittent supply. They are frantically trying to find some way of matching the two, but the numbers are so out of sync that its obvious to any observer the only way to do it is to restrict electricity availability to when the wind blows. This is where smart meters in the UK are going.

Its nothing to do with prices. Its to do with producing the massive changes in society and the economy which are required to match demand to intermittent supply, which is the unavoidable consequence of the net zero plans.

And this, notice, is before they move to EVs and heat pumps, which will at least double peak demand. Hopeless.