From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
JULY 20, 2021
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
The government seems determined to destroy the electricity grid:
The government plans to strip National Grid of its role keeping Great Britain’s lights on as part of a proposed “revolution’” in the electricity network driven by smart digital technologies.
The FTSE 100 company has played a role in managing the energy system of England, Scotland and Wales for more than 30 years (Northern Ireland has its own network). It is the electricity system operator, balancing supply and demand to ensure the electricity supply. But it will lose its place at the heart of the industry after government officials put forward plans to replace it with an independent “future system operator”.
The new system controller would help steer the country towards its climate targets, at the lowest cost to energy bill payers, by providing impartial data and advice after an overhaul of the rules governing the energy system to make it “fit for the future”.
The plans are part of a string of new proposals to help connect millions of electric cars, smart appliances and other green technologies to the energy system, which government officials believe could help to save £10bn a year by 2050, and create up to 10,000 jobs for electricians, data scientists and engineers.
The new regulations aim to make it easier for electric cars to export electricity from their batteries back on to the power grid or to homes when needed. They could also help large-scale and long-duration batteries play a role in storing renewable energy, so that it is available when solar and wind power generation levels are low.
This has been on the cards for sometime, with I suspect OFGEM playing the leading role.
Reading between the lines, it appears that the National Grid have told the government that their decarbonisation plans are, if not impossible, highly risky and extremely expensive, as far as providing a secure and reliable electricity supply is concerned.
The new system controller will have meeting climate targets as its main objective, and all else will be of secondary importance.
Government will therefore throw out the knowledge and skills built up over many years by electrical engineers who know what they are doing. In their place, we will probably end up with the sort of eco loons who infest the Committee on Climate Change.
Heaven help us all!
Wait until the AMO finally flips and the UK and Europe drop back to LIA temperatures. It will be an unmitigated disaster. The trend is not your friend.
“The new system controller would help steer the country towards its climate targets, at the lowest cost to energy bill payers, by providing impartial data and advice”
Just how “impartial” is an organisation set up with an explicit objective (to steer the country towards its climate targets) going to be? As “impartial” as Gummer’s Committee for Climate Change?
… the lowest cost to energy bill payers…
your bill is less this month because you got no power …
As in other utility billings , there will be an increasing fixed system accesses cost billed to offset the revenue losses due to falling consumption.
The only way of ensuring lowest cost to bill payers is to drop net zero climate targets entirely. It has been the law since the 2010 Energy Act sponsored by Miliband that OFGEM no longer protects consumer interests, which are redefined to be green interests. The latest hiring to head OFGEM was one of the drafters of the 2008 Climate Change Act. Brierley is fully subscribed to acting in green interests.
Sounds more like they are dumping the responsibility for the grid just before the rolling black outs become a regular occurence.
That way they can blame the problems on capitalism and use it to justify state control of everything.
When Boris was elected the shocked populace were repeating the old Sun Headline, “Will the last person leaving the country turn out the lights”.
It seems that the Tories are turning the lights out themselves.
Loonies the lot of them.
Have these socialists run a pilot to see how many EV owners will discharge into the grid overnight? What is the efficiency?
The Tories are the rabid Right. Far from Socialists.
I see you are still trying to push the myth that anyone to the right of the communists is a rabid rightist.
Mark,
Definitions of left and right are different in the UK and US. In the UK the Tory Government is regarded as and is right wing and it certainly has its rabid section.
That’s my point, in Europe, those who want socialism, just a little bit less of it are declared to be right wing.
Yet they are implementing the watermelon agenda.
The political spectrum as dictated by European socialists.
Communists – who want government to own everything.
Socialists – who want government to control everything. (Not that there is much difference between ownership and control)
Rabid Right – Everyone else.
The rabid right? They may be right of Labour, but they are to the left of sanity.
M Courtney still hasn’t forgiven Thatcher for standing up to the unions.
I can’t see that many people owning a ev particularly in the short term
The plan, openly declared, a least around here, is that a FF powered car will be illegal to use, period.
Were is “around here “?
California
Yes they have. Considerably rigged of course, with a handsome 30p/kWh payola for redelivery to the grid. Almost like the early days of solar panels, which got 42p/kWh.
The very big issue of skills retention in industry and broader knowledge of the capabilities and weaknesses of the underlying infrastructure that having engineers that could easily move from working on electrical assets in the field to operational complexities has had its advantages. We will see where this goes.
I would say that in the UK there is already a complete loss of balance on what is interests of economic development, the quality of life of our citizens, the impact of useful infrastructure on delivering critical services.
The climate alarmist voices have all the funding, all the media attention and all the ears of government. The government for its own sins has extended the technocracy of alarmism beyond climate propaganda; we have those that turn ridiculous RPC8.5 predictions into economic doomsday impact assessments in the Climate Change Committee, we have BEIS and OFGEM energy and industry regulators and the Bank of England changing all the financial markets and corporate financing and tax structures to throw money at green and tax and impeded any progress on anything fossil fuels based; we have the energy industry purging anyone sceptical of applying a more balanced score-card using error corrected and bias checked data out of the management and corporate communications structures… so there is no push back and everyone is talking about the future Net Zero utopia and looking at how they can get there as a group whilst getting rich as a company or individual on the way.
What is missing is the evaluation of the proposals on the security, reliability, vulnerability to weather or cyber attack, amount of infrastructure and complex control systems all factoring into the overall cost of the energy / power systems as well as the impact this has on the economy, the quality of life of citizens and the impact on land-use, the environment in general, industry development, energy, water, food security and broader national security. It is all downhill from here. No one has put together a reliable, effective, efficient or cheaper energy generation, transmission and distribution system moving away from energy dense fossil-fuels and nuclear for wind, solar, batteries and hydrogen. It just is not a viable future for our country.
I spent most of my childhood, through university and beyond studying and understanding weather, climate, atmospheric dynamics before going to work on power control systems, power system control architecture, markets and EU/GB level regulation. I am currently looking into keeping the energy transition to distributed generation and full participation of smart homes and devices in a smart grid in order to keep the lights on and our civilisation working. It is a very interesting, if not completely unnecessary, complex and costly endeavour that won’t change the weather!
What you will find is that as we have to put in place more infrastructure, more variable output wind and solar we will need more backup batteries (not viable quickly or in terms of global mineral resource needs); more other backup solutions which means green-hydrogen or carbon capture and storage. These are cutting edge technology with all its foibles and require a massive amount of infrastructure investment and extra wind and solar generation capacity to actually charge the hydrogen system enough when the wind blows to back it up for up to two weeks when it doesn’t (like currently in the UK and Ireland on July 21st 2021 only 1% of summer heatwave demand is being met by wind the majority is being met by gas turbines). The extra infrastructure will push up the unit cost of electricity considerably. The move to time of use tariffs and smart controls on electricity usage will heavily impact the poor dictating if and when they can heat their homes or run domestic appliances. Trying to offset this more by building more electricity transmission and distribution system to cope with heating and EV charging load will have to be recouped through an average uplift in electricity prices; offsetting the variable weather dependant nature of wind/solar with batteries will never be more than partially achieved and again push up the cost of electricity considerably. Trying to keep energy in a liquid hydrogen form made from green generation and hydrolysis, compression and transportation by tanker or pipeline again requires massive investment in additional wind-farms, additional hydrogen stations, adaptation and investment in the natural gas pipelines and new storage facilities. Again it will take decades to get up and running and cost hundreds of billions to trillions to achieve.
At the end of the day fossil fuels don’t have to be made and the mining and refining process is quite advanced and clean when done in the west. We know how to filter and control emissions to only release mainly CO2 and H2O with controls on soot, ash, NOx, SOx emissions using catalytic converters, condensers and traps. We have existing infrastructure and reserves of gas, oil, coal and uranium for centuries more usage and it is the most energy dense, easily stored, easily transportable, controllable and flexible form of energy we know! Nothing else can match it even for many multiples of the price and a much higher impact on the planet for the same scale of energy usage. The benefits to humanity of developing such energy intensive industry on food production, water provision, goods manufacture and service provision are enormous and enabled by cheap, flexible and reliable energy. The climate lie and all the policies flowing from these will cost us dearly and be very regressive, especially for the poorest in society.
The FSO can play an important role in making the prescribed energy transition to distributed wind, solar, batteries and hydrolysis/generation and vehicle charging with control on when people can use energy a reality… if we can help society realise that this climate scare is a fake hustle by the rich and powerful to get even more richer and more powerful and that the new world order will be even less just with those having enough money to buy EVs, carbon credits, home batteries, home solar arrays etc feeling good about themselves and getting richer whilst everyone else has to go not only without electricity, but probably have lower pay, have a tougher time getting a job in a weaker economy, have more expensive food, more trouble affording heating and being unable to travel far from home…. it’s a brave new world that they are selling to us.
Interested to see your background. I do wonder whether some of the crazy ideas that are coming out have been looked at properly. I see no sign of that in the stuff coming out from BEIS, the CCC, National Grid’s scenarios, and the studies contracted out to the usual suspects among the consulting community who are trusted to come up with the “right answer” rather than the truth. Things like hydrogen seem particularly mad, with electrolysers fed off highly erratic grid surpluses (how much capcity do you build if most of it is barely going to be used?) or absurdly expensive floating offshore windfarms (Hywind’s results just recently show an implied LCOE of £225/MWh – to be used as input to electrolysis? Crazy.), with V2G not far behind. Demand side response seems to assume that you can go on making people’s homes cold if the weather snap continues. There appears to be no recognition of how much storage would really be required to cover for a bad year, or the risks of there being inadequate dispatchable generation across Europe, or the political risks of relying on the unfriendly neighbours, or those who prefer not to have high prices and blackouts themselves by keeping the UK supplied.
2021’s very low winds and interconnector problems should be a wake-up call.
Here’s one voice for some sanity that may interest you, having finally managed to bend the ears of some Parliamentarians:
https://watt-logic.com/2021/07/14/the-maths-of-net-zero/
ROFL this is this part of UK greatness Griff tells us all about 🙂
Never interrupt an enemy as they blow their heads off bypassing the foot all together.
Population reduction by an extended period of natural wastage would have serious benefits for this country (the world?) in many aspects not only energy consumption. The problems of sourcing energy, food, water, roads, housing, schools, medical are compounded by the mass importation of population majority of whom are unlikely to ever depart before death; in fact likely to bear large families in the long tradition of new arrivals into any territory.
Keeping the lights on is probably technically possible for decades to come. However the problem of paying for mass importation of energy in all forms (inc. electricity via subsea cable links), food and myriad other necessities could turn UK into Haiti-Sur-Minche if/when the Pound tanks.
I read somewhere that 30~35 millions should be a comfortable population.
It seems obvious that applying more complex patches to the problem will quickly succumb to diminishing returns vs increasing demands.
low population, low rate of inovation
How would an EV sell it’s DC battery energy back to an AC power system without installing a new inverter?
That’s a good question.
But it’s only relevant if people actually expect this scheme to work.
The fact that nobody has considered these details shows that it’s not being really being taken seriously.
I suspect it is being taken very seriously — by people who haven’t the foggiest idea what they are doing.
The output of the battery would need to be available at the car’s charging connector as AC, sounds like extra power circuitry.
It doesn’t. The fancy computerised charger and inverters are a very expensive item. Much of the cost would be recharged to bill payers, because it’s hard to imagine it would pay for itself otherwise. The UK V2G trial talks of an extra £4,000 over a normal charger as a target cost. Current models are more than twice that.
Welcome to the 21st century. It’s gonna look a lot like the 19th.
Buy a diesel generator and good luck.
good luck on sourcing illegal diesel fuel.
Russians in the old USSR did that with farms and factories removing people who knew how it works and replacing them with political hacks and it didn’t work well.
I predict wood burning stoves will soon be the “new” must have, trending in British homes and garden. 😏
Well, GB will be interesting to watch, just as long as one is watching from a different country. Despite all the the money they have thrown at renewables, as I type this, coal is providing more electricity to their grid than wind.
Will the day come that cars on the grid end up charging other cars on the grid? Or perhaps, brown/black outs being created by everyone trying to recharge their cars after having their batteries drained by an earlier brown/black out? Yep, the future will be very interesting. Perhaps a new version of the dark ages.
Brown, black and dark will be forbidden words. Solved.
Racism is already crime in the UK.
The only alternative can be “green outs”, blamed on martians..
This may be a good change for the U.S. when the fantasy world of climate activists comes crashing down on GB’s heads.
The UK has had decades of rolling out renewables and adapting its grid… there are no ill effects.
We are decades ahead of the US on this
That’s why it’s so funny (albeit inevitable) that all that National Grid know-how has just been disposed of.
In the UK having any scientific or engineering knowledge – or any kind of knowledge – makes you an enemy of the people.
Maybe that expertise will cross the Atlantic and help out in the US.
Like it did in the aerospace industry after the TSR2 airplane was cancelled.
This is good news for those who feel bringing this idiocy to a head earlier before they’ve had time to screw up worse at greater cost and misery for citizens will at least put common sense and professional engineering back on the list of options available to a crazed admin.
Yeah, putting the Grid reins in the hands of climate change warriors who want to be able to drain the charge on your car (and reimburse you fully?), use your car for Grid storage (and charge you for filling your car if not used when you may not want the expense ) and interrupt your washing machine and television “because climate change тм” puts the ‘climate change cuprits’ on non-court ordered service to the public.
Reading between the lines, it appears that the National Grid have told the government that their decarbonisation plans are, if not impossible, highly risky and extremely expensive, as far as providing a secure and reliable electricity supply is concerned.
Well that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Because every year NG publish their future energy scenarios for the UK – and the latest is just out.
summary says ‘Our Future Energy Scenarios (FES) outline four different, credible pathways for the future of energy between now and 2050.’
Future Energy Scenarios 2021 | National Grid ESO
and where do you think the staff from NG operations will end up? This is a separation of commercial operations from oversight – a split of existing functions along existing staff lines.
In griff’s mind, if it’s in a press release, that means it’s already happened.
Go read the document, eh?
The staff from NG will end up in the dole queue or golden hand shakes & early retirement.
It’s clear you have never worked anywhere near the civil service.
My Dad worked in Nuclear physics.
Where do think all the excellent experts in running and building Britain’s nuclear power stations ended up?
Nice retirement pensions with nice houses paid for by idiots like you.
There will still be a requirement to mange the grid: whereas old nukes close. different that, isn’t it?
Good luck with the Consumer Behavior Change t make it work.
It will be forced change with their power turned off and/or burned out from a brittle Hydrogen distribution system.
it’s the only thing that UK governments do, create a vehicle for uber-high paying jobs that they can toss to their fox-hunting friends.
The first joke is that if you read the introduction to the scenarios you find that NG are proud of having adjusted some of the unrealistic assumptions they made last year for which they were roundly criticised. The second joke is that they have introduced some new ones so as to produce very similar results to last year. Dig a bit more, and the unicorns start popping out of the woodwork.
“providing impartial data and advice”.
Hands up who believes that.
Anyone?
Btw, what is impartial data?
IIRC. The perception of the data sample (good, poor quality or quantity) before it’s used in support of whatever theory.
Sounds like what happened in Texas and ERCOT. Same Build Back Better depopulation schemes
England’s going to show us how to become a third-world country?
Texans will send the U.K. our wonderful ERCOT. They are performing at peak performance in forcing the green agenda over all other matters including lives. Heck, will even pay the shipping costs!
It’s a good thing that EV owners will discharge their power into the grid. Sure they will! Looks like it’ll need it. I thought they boasted that up to 33% of their power production is renewable. right now in Britain gas and coal producing 55% of needs including using OCGT which says it’s only used for emergencies in the winter. The wind has been quiet since Sunday now contributing 1.5% of needs! 14% is coming through the interconnections, as someone mentioned what happens to the price of those when the pound goes into the toilet.
These figures at 20:20 on http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk
This is a blunder of epic (Enron scale) proportions.
That National Grid has provided exemplary service for decades and I can’t believe they are going to throw that away for some new shiny looking toy.
I’m just relieved that I no longer live in the UK.
The writing is on the wall. The people of Britain had better brace themselves for more expensive, less efficient, and less reliable electricity in the future. To a great extent they have brought this upon themselves by embracing the climate-change meme. Good luck folks, keep warm.
You get why you vote for.
Too bad so sad.
Brits should stop whining and just vote against insanity.
We don’t have much choice. Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties are all on the same page regarding climate change and net zero nonsense.
The only party not “on message” is the Reform Party which is the old UKIP, but they don’t have the same pull when they were a single issue party.
We didn’t vote for it. There was nothing about the kind of changes being proposed now in Conservative or Labour manifestos at the last election. I wish we could vote against it but there currently isn’t any party that dares to speak against so called climate change.
We reduced coal power to just 3 plants and 2% of electricity supply and it had no effect at all on reliability etc.
We pushed renewable energy to 42% in 2020 and again no adverse effect.
so why would we see any problem going forward?
It’s had an enormous effect on reliability. See this list of margin notices and chart of prices over last winter from Watt-Logic:
Heck, it’s already happening.
dont they know you cant export power from your Telsa
only Nissan leafs have that
just another UK disaster in the making
No power no energy starvation
well which brand of EV is made in the UK?
But they have tiny, range limited batteries to begin with.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/e1ofS/1/
This will be fun to watch (from a distance), I’m British but live in Belgium.
The government have set impossible targets and now will fire anyone who tells them so, hoping the bad reality will go away.
Rather like people who hide in the cupboard when their house is on fire.
Or they could just build a couple of dozen nukes and be done with it…nope, wait, that wouldn’t really fit the agenda, would it.