By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby/Joe Public
Centrica, the owner of British Gas, plans to use its customers’ hot water tanks to create a virtual power plant which could help National Grid prevent future blackouts.
The UK’s biggest energy supplier hopes to harness household gadgets with energy capacity equivalent to a large power plant by 2025. The plan could help to balance the energy system without any perceptible impact for British households.
Centrica said it has developed sophisticated software algorithms to harness thousands of smart appliances to respond when the energy system is under stress.
These devices will automatically use electricity when there is ample renewable energy on the grid, and then pause their energy use when National Grid needs help steadying the energy system…..
The home devices will be aggregated alongside Centrica’s existing flexible power supplies, totalling 2.5GW of electricity capacity, mostly from business and industrial customers.
Many have long argued that smart meters will in the future allow energy companies to cut off our appliances, but it has usually been denied.
Clearly this is what they are now planning. Things like hot water tanks will, I predict, just be the thin end of the wedge. Wait till they turn off our heating, computers and TVs.
If they are so desperate to plug shortfalls in supply, they must be in a more dire position than I thought. It would, of course, be much easier just to keep that extra 2.5GW of dispatchable capacity instead of closing it down.
Meanwhile, John Constable has discovered that Hornsea wind farm was paid £202/MWh to reduce output in August, a day after the blackouts they caused:
https://twitter.com/aDissentient/status/1178695935620198407
Maybe the National Grid will use our smart meters to make us use more power than we want, when there is too much wind power on the system!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 1, 2019 at 11:18AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 