UKC

Ive  just woken up half asleep everything being strangely very quiet wondering where I am and what the  hell  going on.

This is the 3rd power cut in about a week and the 2nd in less than 24 hours in my area.

It really gets you thinking how reliant we are on the stuff.  It's a pretty frightening thought how society would start to crumble without it.

Can't even make myself a cup of tea.  

Not unless I rummage around my camping stuff in the dark to find a stove.  

First world problems...... Grumble grumble grumble.

Oh and grumble ......

I'd imagine that's an underground cable fault. The fault's blowing the main fuse, the DNO guys are putting a new fuse back in, but the fault isn't blowing the fuse straight away, so they think it's fixed. It'll go completely at some point, then they will be able to find where the fault is and make a permanent repair. 

When I checked online it said LV (low voltage fault affecting 72 homes in the area)   It came on and off several times before stabilising.

It got sorted by the time I woke back up by 4 .  So cup of coffee is a go .   

I need it for its back to work today with me .

I welcome power cuts here - the radio spectrum reappears from under the end-stopping noise and hash generated by OpenReach's broadband installation and I can hear short wave again.

Use it as a training exercise for brexit day?

Well I've no idea where "here" is for you.  The rest of that post I'm scratching my head at ?

Are you saying you can here in the radio frequency spectrum ?

That's surely some super power/disability . 

Our cottage and the rest of the valley were supplied by overhead cables, so I always had a standby generator for when a falling tree took out the cables. Last year the supply was put underground and I got rid of the generator. Feeling quite exposed now ;-(

And now the powers-that-be are saying that new builds must all be electric in 6 (?) years time, and of course we must all drive all-electric cars as well.

The first thing that needs to be done is get the current (no pun intended) system to work properly and with almost zero chance of going tits-up before trying to add to the burden.

Our biggest power outage was due to water ingress into a join in a burried cable up the other end of the village.  They shut the whole village down whilst they spent 12 hours digging around to find and then fix the problem...

I’ve got   2x 12V 120 Ah deep cycle units that will run our modern lighting, fridge/freezer and boiler for ages with a decent ~1 kw inverter.  I can always jump the car over to the system to recharge it...  Which, with 24 kWh sat in the fully charged Leaf will last quite some time... The Leaf can supply > 1 kW at 12V when turned on until the HV battery runs down...

There's no need to worry about underground cables!
youtube.com/watch?v=O_kLqxyfdMk&

Have you not got a little camping stove all ready for your next trip? I would have thought the folks on this site might be slightly better prepared for the apocalypse than most.

Obviously you didn't read the rest of the post .  

Yes 

 I have 6 stoves laying about in various locations . 

Realistically the present system works very well. Upgrade for EV's can't and won't be sequential, it will be progressive and it'll work fine.

jk

If you're referring to the National Grid, it may be working at present but hasn't got much resilience.

That's my understanding too but objectively it does currently work very well.

jk

Indeed I can hear signals when the noise level is reduced by a power cut.  Otherwise I have to go some distance away

Once the subject of back up power/generators, how do you retrofit into a domestic dwelling? Presumably I'd need a dedicated connection point and some way of disconnecting the house from the grid before switching to backup and vice-versa?

We did ours as part of a total rewire.

To be safe and to be legally compliant you need a “break before make” 2-pole changeover switch to select between “grid” and “local” after the DNO cutout and meter and before the distribution board.  We did this only with a secondary DB feeding lights, boiler and a small set of sockets including the fridge/freezer.

The key is to ensure the local generation is fully isolated from the grid, and that if you switch back to the grid with loads active, collapsing inductive energy from the loads can’t be injected back to the grid (hence break before make switch - some DIY recommendations aren’t very safe... ).

Earthing needs some thought when using local generation.  Smaller inverters and portable generators are not normally neutral-earth bonded so you must create a bond somewhere for RCDs and RCBOs to work.  This must not be connectable to the grid in any way.  Ours lives inside our inverter (when in standalone mode) and in a short commando socket extension for the generator that is labelled as such.  If you normally get your Earth from the DNO and not local TT bonding the correct way to handle that is beyond my ken. 

How easy or hard this is to do really depends on the state of your consumer unit and how much space there is to rearrange things...  Potentially you can just whack a 16 A commando inlet on the other side of the wall from the distribution unit and add a changeover switch to the utility cupboard.

In my case the inverter is an inverter/charger that can load shift mains connected solar panels through static batterys to charge our EV at night. It does double duty in providing battery backup that integrates the solar inverters by running a local micro grid.  It can also integrate generator power with the batteries and solar to minimise generator running time by load shifting.  (A generator on at night is both an annoyance for sleeping and a calling card to transit driving thrives).

It'll work fine - that's what they said about Brexit.

Thanks. Very comprehensive.

Brilliant analogy, but for the small detail difference: we know how to design and deliver an electricity grid that matches the specification, we have a very good idea what that specification should be and how the requirements most likely evolve over time.

jk

But does the specification that the current (I've done it again !) grid has been made to match up with the future specification if every home in the country goes to electric central heating and cooking (rather than mixed with gas), and every car goes to electric from petrol/diesel.

No, of course not. Why would or should it? We upgrade these things as we need to, doing so significantly ahead of time is uneconomic, as is failing to deliver the service people expect. We aren't going to electrify our roads and heating systems overnight, even if an ambitious 5-10year timeline is set for no new fossil burning cars and appliances these things have very long service lives.

Didn't we do this a couple of weeks ago? I genuinely have no idea how people look at a complex system humans built to serve their needs then conclude we can't change it as our needs evolve despite the evidence that we have done so many times before. When did we learn to feel so helpless.

jk.

Won't the UK completely fail because replacement systems are not in place if we leave without a deal ?

What?

As I understand it in the event of no-deal we will immediately lose the continental and Irish sea interconnects which is probably tolerable in isolation and re-negotiable reasonably quickly. I forget but maintenance of these may be one of the EU's temporary no-deal emergency measures, they had certainly sought to address the interdependence of NI's and Eire's electricity supply. Longer term out of EURATOM with no-deal (which is only really a weak for Britain re-negotiation starting point) I suppose we'll run into problems keeping our nuclear stations online but by that point I think it'll be the least of our worries, it's the short half-life medical isotopes we'll miss first.

jk

A very simple answer to this is to go look at the daily overall consumption graphs on Gridwatch.  Yesterday the peak demand was 42GW, and the overnight min was 26GW, so we have 16GW in hand overnight.  Eyeballing that graph, it looks to me like there's something in the order of 100GWh of potential supply available between midnight and 6am.

A small incentive to EV drivers to charge between midnight and 6am is trivial to set up, and the best way to heat your house on electricity is with a heat pump running overnight to store heat in underfloor systems, so it's perfectly possible to put almost all of the extra demand into that gap.  Electric cooking obviously happens on-demand, but that's a relatively small component. 

And there's a huge advantage to increasing the EV population - they represent an enormous battery themelves.  We're not far off from the point where we'll leave our EVs plugged in all day, and a smart grid can call on their capacity to help round off the daytime peaks by feeding a portion of their charge back into the grid.

The electricity network has little and decreasing redundancy, but plenty resilience. There's a whole myriad of measures in place to account for spikes in demand and the swift increase in the amount of inter-country HVDC connections should see us through anything short of a Europe-wide crisis coupled with losing major generators of our own.

Perplexing isn’t it.  People who comment that the current grid isn’t fit for the world 25 years from now rarely if ever question if the oil supply infrastructure we have now is fit for the world 25 years hence - both can and will change, just as they have always done.

The grid as it is has enough spare capacity overnight to charge an EV fleet of perhaps 3,000,000 cars or roughly 15 times the current fleet.  But the grid isn’t standing still.  It is well behind the times with the OLEV grant having installed a lot of chargers without the “smart” capability to come on late at night, an oversight DNOs are now trying to fix. Scottish Power for example just started offering obscenely low unit rates for overnight EV charging with their smart charger.

To do this with old buildings requires ripping up all the floors and replacing them, together with upgrading the electrical system. Great for old buildings, but a major obstacle in the millions of existing housing stock.

That assumes that people can park and recharge during the day. I don't see the parking firms that currently can't be bothered to even tarmac their car parks putting in charging units, and businesses aren't going to do this without some hefty financial incentives. Also I don't see councils or power firms putting in all the charging units along the roads without central government paying for it - and everyone is claiming to be poor and blaming everyone else for the fact that no investment is going on, either in road or service maintenance.

Yes, retro-fitting wet UHF costs, and it's going to take a significant increase in gas prices to make it economically viable as a standalone measure.  But gas prices will only increase with scarcity.  It's already a no-brainer in new builds.

An awful lot of cars spend their daytimes on their home driveway. 

National Grid has never been an early adopter but even more important is its revenue being dictated by the regulatory KPIs set by Ofgem. The RIIO framework has just entered its second of two periods and if the KPIs aren't written in such a way as to drive smart grid innovation then smart grids won't be innovated. It's one of many flaws in having a regulated private monopoly rather than a state-run body that can just hop to whatever its told to rather than having to maximise profits for the shareholders by hitting the most KPIs for the lowest spend.

Actually hadn’t thought of that, our camper van is outside with a couple of huge batteries. We’ve a couple of wood burners so like you, just need to run led lights, boiler and internet. I can always run the engine on the van if the power is off for a long time. Just picking up a 1kW inverter now!

You can indeed, and the service regime for a vehicle’s Diesel engine is pretty lax compared to a 2-stroke petrol genny.  

Beware the cheap Chinese made inverters on places like Amazon however.  Their isolation between AC and DC systems is shockingly bad, so your DC system can end up floating at > 110V AC with respect to ground.  Which is fine if you plug a laptop or toaster in to it in your camper, but bad news if you plug your TT-bonded house in to the camper, as suddenly it’s DC system including chassis Earth is a giant electric shock machine with respect to the ground.  This is why I’m old school and like a decent transformer based inverter - proper intra-system isolation.  (This assumes you neutral-earth bond near the inverter to give correct RCD/RCBO operation in the house).

If you got so frequently power cut in your area, it seems like preparing a standby generator might be necesarry. Small home use generator is good, such as gasoline, diesel. solar and even other types.

I have a 6k propane generator, lasts about 4 hours on a 20lb tank, but since propane is for ever I plan on getting a large tank installed and feeding my dryer, generator and stove from the one tank.

I'm happy with mine. how ever it's important to remember that power from propane will cost you double the cost of power from diesel fuel as propane has a lot less "energy" when compared to diesel.