UKC

Publish a few isolated but related facts, add a bit of politics, stir in some ignorance and you have a story.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2315863/Big-brother-switch-fridge-P...

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

feels like a dailymash article.

In reply to Kemics:
It is in the Telegraph as well.

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

Will I laugh at this, or just be reminded how rubbish the Daily Fail is..?

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

If they do this with ovens, it'll confuse me. To me, the light going out means it's hot enough to put food in.

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

Typical Mail hysteria.

The technology has real environmental benefits; typically avoiding having to start and stop a dirty standby power generator for a few minutes, eg for brewing up during the commercial break just after there's been a murder on Corrie.

The stystem is already being rolled out for large industrial users which are able to absorb a temporary dip in demand (but they do get a share of the cash paid out by the generating companies)

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

They could make a killing if they do it in hospitals.

In reply to kevin stephens:
Great to see the well informed debate in the comments posted my Daily Mail readers, eg :

"If you want to stop this rubbish then vote UKIP and get us the hell out of Europe... DannyBoy , Exeter, United Kingdom, 28/4/2013 14:32"

In reply to kevin stephens:

It's kind of a common theme on the DM comments. Whatever bad things are happening, UKIP will fix it. Whatever policy I disagree with, UKIP also disagrees.

In reply to kevin stephens:

As always with articles from this toxic rag, you have to skip to the end to get some semblance of reality.

"‘It will have no material impact on the operation of fridges and freezers switching will be for a few seconds and only occasionally.
‘Consumers’ produce will remain cool in their fridges and frozen in their freezers.’

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

Don't worry, we are building windmills all over the place. An excellent use of our resources that is bound to save us from rolling blackouts...

Oh, hang on a minute, we're f----d.

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb: Doesn't take much to get the ukc daily mail readers to reveal themselves.

In reply to Sir Chasm

It even finds readers who can do simple maths, who read the regulator's reports, and who would like to think they will still be plugged into an infrastructure at least as capable as it was at the end of the last centry.

There is almost no spare electrical baseload left. The regulator and the energy companies are both warning of blackouts. There is no grid scale storage for renewables which form but a paltry part of our supply.

Increasingly aggressive load shedding is coming to our grid. It's going to be in appliances and when that isn't enough it's going to be the smart meters, and when that isn't enough it's going to be rolling blackouts. At which point perhaps some heads will come out of the sand.

That's an opinion formed without any newspapers, the daily mail included. Just label it is that if you wish though.

In reply to wintertree: "Increasingly aggressive load shedding is coming to our grid."
Good.

In reply to MJ:

I appreciated it!

In reply to wintertree:
This is about load management, not load shedding.

Apart from pumped Hydro, I don’t think grid scale storage is yet available, even for the current electric supply.

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb: It's a job.

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb:

One possibility of energy storage from renewable energy sources relies on the storage of heat energy in domestic water systems.

Picture the "smart grid" at work;

Wind blowing at a rate of knots at 04:00, low demand for electrical energy being generated at the many wind farms. Electric immersion heaters switched on remotely across the land and excess electrical energy used to produce heat energy for use later on. No need to burn gas, oil or other fuels locally for water heating or reduced demand from traditional power stations for water heating at 06:00 or whatever time people have their timer set for.

I

In reply to Sir Chasm:
>> (In reply to wintertree) "Increasingly aggressive load shedding is coming to our grid."

Yes, nothing like watching infrastructure regress because of a collective failure to plan ahead.

In reply to wintertree: What do you want, perpetually increasing energy usage?

In reply to Ianto Bach:


Yes, that would allow wind generation to displace 10% of the oil and gas used in heating domestic hot water, instead of displacing 10% of the fossil fuels used in generating electricity. It makes more sense than deloading nuclear and coal plants.

As the energy can't be got out of the water and put back into the grid, and as it displaced DHW fossil fuel consumption, it is not however a storage system that will do anything about the lack of electrical base load we are facing.

I try not to be negative but all the magic fairy dust in the world can't build sufficient grid scale storage. A US$35,000,000 battery bank can keep a small town going for 7 minutes. Thats how expensive storage is.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/08/dayintech_0827
 

In reply to wintertree:

How can we expect several private foreign energy suppliers running our power stations to plan ahead? That is not how privatisation works.

In reply to wintertree: Everyone puts the kettle on, but what we dont see is that some turn on, then pause for a few millseconds and start heating. This gives the grid more time to react. That is a step forward.

They also dont turn on a standby power generator in a tea break, these things take a day or two to turn on. Its not about storage, its about adapting the grid.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

That is pretty much what sets society apart from its predecessors. Energy is the key enabler to every part of our lifestyle and our future. Energy usage is not our problem. How and where we get it from is.

From an engineering perspective, forced load shedding only needed when you run really close to your limits. No sane system is run that close to its limits. I want a system with sufficient headroom that these measures aren't needed. That extra few percent brings redundancy, reliability and an air of first world living.

I agree we can cut energy usage from bad sources, and that is slowly happening - car fuel sales are down, appliances are getting better, houses are more insulated. It would be nice to see this fed from a grid with decent safety margins, instead of one being brought low by underinvestment in new baseload capacity and dotted with little windmills that make prope think we are addressing the problem when actually we are collectively putting our fingers in our ears and saying LaLaLa

In reply to wintertree: Its not about redundancy, i think this is about switch big loads on and tea breaks. By doing this we can protect the grid from the problems they create. It will have more time to react.

In reply to itsThere:

No, it's about having a more elegant way of shedding load to avoid blackouts or blackout cascades when a single power plant goes offline in an emergency and we have no spare capacity.

We have coped just fine with massive spikes like the "Eastenders effect" for decades with pumped storage. Gas turbine plant can spool up and come online very rapidly. We can forecast cold periods (demand) better than ever before . TV viewing and kettle boiling habits are much more spread out now we have more than 3 TV channels. In many ways life has got easier, not harder, when it comes to load management.

This is an attempt to put a finger in the dyke that is our energy policy, as are smart meters.

In reply to wintertree: Nope its when they make a mistake. Its called DSR-SFC (Demand Side Response delivering System Frequency Control i think) and will not turn off your devices to an extent that will cause you any problems.

Page 12 http://www.acer.europa.eu/Media/News/Documents/121221-DCC%20-%20Evaluation%...

DSR SFC will not be noticeable to consumer and therefore is classed as ‘Non
-essential’ demand from - http://www.eirgrid.com/media/No3%20DCC%20Demand%20Side%20Response.pdf

So when there is an unpredicted event, this will protect the national grid and is cheaper than the damage that could be caused. "Random delay timer of 5 minutes on return to normal operation" so the grid has time to react.

In reply to itsThere:

Thanks for the references, I understand now.

So unlike perhaps the argument about smart meters, this is no big brother proposal and the headline is wrong.

The problem would seem not to be caused by consumer demand, it is because of the introduction of wind as a power source. This is a non managed supply and suffers from short term fluctuations (minute by minute or less) and requires to be smoothed out.

Appliances such as fridges store energy and are switched on permanently in most homes. When considered in volume they can actually be utilized as a very short term energy reserve or buffer and can reduce the amount of grid reserve that is required. This managed solution is apparently more cost effective but has little effect on the amount of power consumed!

In reply to MikeYouCanClimb: Addmittidly i dont know much(anything) about it and found that from google, after i found the standard they were talking about. Its the same kind of backoff that is used elsewhere to prevent congestion, which is how i knew what the dailyfail had twisted into big brother.

There was also references to other events(two dates) where the grid was not so happy, but it didnt say what happend. It just said this could prevent those events. I think one was the royal wedding.

In reply to wintertree:
.. Gas turbine plant can spool up and come online very rapidly. .

True, and these type of stations will be needed to smooth the intermitancy of wind, but who is going to build them to sit there doing nothing a lot of the time and not earning when they are not generating ?

Our Energy industry is run by several(mostly) foreign private sector companies, and whilst everyone might agree that these gas plants will be needed if we end up with less than the approx 20% redundancy on our coal and Nuclear stations, but no one is building them !

We are closing coals stations without anything to replace them short term. If the government are now expecting the private sector to get together manage this upcoming reliance on wind by building gas stations off their own back without incentives, or subsidy from the taxpayers, or alternatively (or additionally) huge price hikes, they will be living in cloud cookoo land.

In reply to Jim C:


The only positive thing I can think of is that gas plants are relatively quick to build, so once the blackouts become tangible people can change their minds quite quickly. Mind you we were down to 24 hours of gas supply at one point during the winter, and it's not beyond reason to expect our gas supplies from abroad to become much less stable.

My main hope is that one of the non-Tokomak fusion projects is going to deliver within the next 5 years - Lockheed Martin, EMC2 and the US Navy, General Fusion or someone else who hasn't yet made themselves known. If none of these pan out we have a start choice between a new generation of coal plants, a new generation of fission plants or to accept energy poverty. All the solutions need an outlook far exceeding the next general election, and are not of much immediate benefit to private industry. Not good.