Your tech and how it works for you

BMRS ELEXON Wind generation forecast:

There is 30GW of wind generation capacity now installed with a lot more to come on line as I have indicated in a previous post. Of that, the record usage at one time was nearly 22GW. Some of it would have been curtailed as per a previous post. Again, wholesale prices can drop to very low values when it's windy which can happen in the winter as well. January tends to be a very windless month (dunkleflaute - dark windless days) and, depending upon demand and possible power generation failures the wholesale prices can reach the eye-watering levels of 99.99p/unit. I avoid charging then for obvious reasons. 25p/unit is looking very cheap in comparison but the situation usually resolves often enough to charge the car at a more reasonable rate. Dunkleflaute is also the reason why I keep our gas hob, gas central heating (instead of our heat pump) and use of a wood burner.

As a separate note, long periods of dunkleflaute are the reason why we will have to keep our fleet of gas turbine power stations for when renewables fail for up to 10 days in a row. Battery storage (BESS) will never be anywhere near big enough to tide us over. Nuclear power plants will help on the non CO2 side. We will have to continue to pay for the renewal and maintenance of the gas fleet even though we don't use it very often despite what the Net Zero cheerleaders will have you believe. Long term reduction in energy prices? I'm not putting any money on that.

https://bmrs.elexon.co.uk/wind-generation

Last contribution Energy Dashboard:

I just use this to see the contributions to the energy demand. Very satisfying to see the wind and solar generation far outstrip the last 3GW of gas powered generation. The reason for keeping that is ‘rotating inertia’ and it is the inertia that keeps the grid stable. The inertia is the huge amount of energy contained in rotating turbines so a very sudden load on the grid (unexpected power station failure) that keeps the frequency and voltage stable long enough for other generation to come on line to take over. Without it the grid would be unstable to sudden outages or trips like the cascade failure in Spain not so long ago. Sometimes we don't get things right in the UK but the policy for grid stability is generally fit for purpose and we have very few outages. To cut the last gas turbines out, the grid is providing more artificial inertia from BESS units (also capable of Black Start) and rotating condensers. These are AC motors with a large flywheel that can instantly become generators on demand. They can also do power factor correction (part of the mains cycle they are a motor and part of the cycle they are a generator) which is important for the efficiency of the grid.

https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live

Thank you ​@Peter E for sharing all of those, and I really love them having a separate comment each - so easy to read and differentiate between each one!

Thank you as always😊

​@Chris_OVO I was keen to follow up on my statement that solar panel farms can increase biodiversity and the effects are not all negative. I’ve just came across this report from 2019 on that.

https://bsg-ecology.com/impacts-of-operational-solar-farms-on-biodiversity/

It's a relatively short report contained in that link and the conclusions are in section 3 if you want to skip straight to that. It does give some hope that we are doing something that both generates carbon free power and has a positive effect on the environment although I can understand people's wishes not to be living next to one of these sites.

Peter

​@Peter E “it is estimated that 70-95% of ground remains available, and that this has the potential to support wildlife” 

Thank you for sharing the article! I’ve only had a brief scan through it but i’ll take some time to give it a proper reading. It’s great to hear that these sites could benefit from such minimal human intervention over countless years. 

Just come across another resource, Ember Energy, which may be of interest. It's a commentary about energy use across the EU including record highs in solar power production and the rapidly diminishing use of coal.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-is-eus-biggest-power-source-for-the-first-time-ever/

I keep an eye out for how other people use their tech and here is someone's blog where they have tech and they use their battery for arbitrage (trading electricity at different rates) and have reduced the cost of their supply to a minimal amount. The downside is there are a lot of technical automations and some of these are based on external servers being reliable so there will be outages and losses. The level of automation / system maintenance is another factor you have to decide on.

My own preference is less tech / simplicity at the expense of not getting that last bit of the savings. I also look for a solution that is low maintenance/cost, low dependency on external systems/servers, sustainable in the long term and one that could be operated by my partner in my absence.

Enjoy the read. There are lots of ideas here.

https://plord.co.uk/blog/home-electricity-1-year-update/

Peter

Thanks ​@Peter E for that interesting article - some great info in there!

I figure that the more ideas that you present, even if they are not ones you would go for, the better the chance of someone finding a good fit for their individual circumstances. I will happily admit all my best ideas were pinched from someone else who decided to put them out there.