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Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

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Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#211

Post by spiderfarmer »

AlexandrB wrote: post #32
spiderfarmer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop seeing this through the eyes of a consumer. On a macro scale, your country is not handing hundreds of millions of pounds a day over to other countries. Now imagine if it still was. You'd be even worse off.

Almost every normal person sees this through the eyes of the consumer because paying the electric bill is their primary interaction with the issue. What you're describing is politically a tough sell.

It worked before, so start the buses:

"We send the UAE £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

"We send Saudi Arabia £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

"We send Qatar £350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead"

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#212

Post by cogman10 »

bjackman wrote: post #187
djhworld wrote: post #109

I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install.

For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load.

I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power outage spoil my food.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#213

Post by idiotsecant »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #159
codexb wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in the sense that it's possible to be eating zero calories in the time between meals. You still need the meals. If you're just looking at brief snapshots, it doesn't tell you much.

It was a widely considered impossible to have more than single digit percentage of renewables even for instantaneous figures. That "limit" has been raised again and again as the world gets more experience with it. It's great that we've made so much progress that people can say "it's just 90% renewable for 30 mins" but that's a result of decades of hard work.

You are conflating ideas here and it's getting muddled up. Literally nobody ever said that we couldn't handle 100% renewables for brief periods. The single digit percentage you're referring to is not about the renewables, it's about when the renewables aren't there. Its about maintaining grid stability when you don't have dispatchable sources to do it with. Essentially what we've built is a system where the renewables provide a tertiary function- providing power when they want to, but not in a reliable way, so we still have the same carbon based dispatchable resources.

This is not a serious system. We've done a bit of work on th cheap, easy part. Installing some solar panels is easy and costs almost nothing. The storage and transmission of power is 90% of the actual work!

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#214

Post by djhworld »

phil21 wrote: post #186
roryirvine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with. For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then. I h…

> Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar. Sounds like an incredible hassle at a level I would pay hundreds of dollars per month to avoid. That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me. But I'm also someone who finds having a single event on my calendar for the day disrupts my productivity and mental peace to…

> That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me.

I've been on the tariff for 2 years now, at first I was looking at the prices every day, but over time you get used to how it works and the price watching starts to tail off. The rule of thumb is just to avoid high load stuff during the peak window (load shift) - sticking to those principles you generally come out of on top. Playing the averages is the key.

Nowadays I don't really look at the prices that much other than when it's windy as I might be tempted to charge the car.

That being said though, if current world events continue and the energy situation degrades further - causing my average unit rate to start creeping up, I might consider getting a home battery , solar etc to compensate, or leave the tariff entirely.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#215

Post by idiotsecant »

piva00 wrote: post #76
idiotsecant wrote: post #9

This is a 'lawyer-worded' headline. I am an enormous fan of renewables, I am an electrical engineer who designs control systems for renewables exclusively. My career depends on renewables. Headlines like this do nobody any favors. The problem with renewables is that you cannot run a grid on renewables alone. Many days will have an abundant oversupply, like the day shown. Many days will not. Consumers are not tolerant…

Isn't pumped hydro severely limited by geography in many places? I'm hoping for some other technology apart from pumped hydro or batteries to be used for capturing surplus renewable energy for later use. It's unfortunate that hydrogen seems to be too complex to handle at these scales, it'd be utopian if it wasn't and the excess of renewables could be transformed into hydrogen for use in turbines instead of nat gas...

Pumped hydro needs a hill to pump up. That's why I said storage and transmission. We are laughably bad at moving power from where it is made (or stored) to where it is used and the worst part is it's not even a problem of science or engineering. We have it all figured out!

It's purely a problem of political will.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#216

Post by xp84 »

Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh? I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though). We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed for EV charging at night. We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#217

Post by muskstinks »

bjackman wrote: post #187
djhworld wrote: post #109

I'm on a electricity tariff where the per kWh unit price changes every 30 minutes, you're basically being charged at market rate or thereabouts, the prices for the next 28 hours are announced at 4pm every day. Generally the prices betwen 4pm-7pm are expensive and the rest of the time it's cheaper - although with current world events things have gotten a little spicy lately. On really windy days you definitely get to…

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

I'm following battery prices and you can now get 25kwh for 3.5k. This will be a solved problem a lot sooner for a lot of people.

A heat pump house uses perhaps 40-50kwh in deep winter.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#219

Post by roryirvine »

phil21 wrote: post #186
roryirvine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and the really important point is that you get to see the prices a day ahead, which is what makes it actually pretty easy to live with. For instance, if I know it's going to be expensive when I'd be cooking tomorrow's evening meal, then I won't make something that would need a long time in the oven. And if it's going to be particularly cheap around lunchtime, then I'll plan to do a big load of laundry then. I h…

> Basically, it's just another thing to factor in when planning my day. No more of a hassle than checking the weather forecast or glancing at my calendar. Sounds like an incredible hassle at a level I would pay hundreds of dollars per month to avoid. That sort of mental overhead is crazy to me. But I'm also someone who finds having a single event on my calendar for the day disrupts my productivity and mental peace to…

Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a game for me, and my electricity bill was already low enough that the savings are trivial.

But I'm the sort of person who enjoys being flexible when planning my day. I'll fit chores such as laundry around work meetings. Decide whether to go for a lunchtime run (and thus have an extra shower) based on the weather and having an a big enough gap in my day. Buy ingredients for dinner based on the weather and how I'm feeling. Expected energy cost is just another factor in the mix - and one that only rarely becomes decisive.

The closest the UK grid has ever come to not being able to cover demand was a few years ago when most of our nuclear fleet went offline at the same time in the middle of a January cold snap due to the discovery of a potential maintenance problem in the steam plant. If there were to be a repeat of that scenario, then the spread of domestic dynamic pricing would actually help matters by driving load shifting behaviour.

Re: Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

#220

Post by philjohn »

cogman10 wrote: post #212
bjackman wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we'll start to see gimmicks in home appliances for taking advantage of variable prices. Like for EV charging I assume it's a basic requirement, you simply wouldn't buy a car that didn't let you adjust the charging schedule based on cost. But what about... Freezers? Maybe there are scenarios where your freezer could drop 20° below its usual temp while prices are low, and thereby avoid running the compresso…

You can basically do that today if you wanted to by buying consumer grade batteries and smart switches. A whole house battery would be better, but it's more expensive to install. For the tumble drier and dishwasher, those usually come with time delay features. That's usually good enough if your goal is to timeshift a load. I have a battery for my fridge not for this purpose, but because I'd rather not have a power ou…

With "smart" appliances that can be controlled, there's often a community integration to HomeAssistant ... and then there's the free EMHASS addon which will optimise for profit, or self consumption based on energy prices (both incoming and outgoing) as well as any on-site generation (e.g. Solar PV) batteries etc. etc.

Neat piece of open source software.

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