Emily’s Not So Smart Energy

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

h/t 1saveenergy

Emily Gosden writes in The Times about the wonderful new world of smart meters:

Irene Farrell gestures towards the electric fire on the wall of her living room. “I never put that on now.” The 86-year-old used to rely on the fire and a plug-in halogen heater to keep warm, because the old electric storage heaters that were supposed to heat her tenth-floor flat in Newcastle were so useless. “It was dreadful. Freezing cold all the time. My husband was an invalid and the cold affected him terribly.”

Last winter, for the first time in her 13 years here, things were different. Smart control boxes wired into the storage heaters have transformed the way they work, keeping the flat warm throughout the day and putting the octogenarian in the unlikely vanguard of a transformation in the way that Britain uses electricity.

The nation’s energy system has been built around the principle that power stations will supply enough electricity to meet demand. Now, with the expansion of intermittent wind and solar farms, the industry is looking at ways of reversing that relationship, adjusting demand to match available supply.

Last year the National Infrastructure Commission identified flexible demand as one of three innovations, alongside interconnectors and batteries, that could help to reduce the costs of Britain’s drive for green energy by up to £8 billion a year by 2030.

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The rest is the usual hogswash, that we have seen many times in the past.

But what is really interesting are the comments, all of which are highly critical: