I want to know why, and who shut down the most viewed topic in the Club forum. Its Engineering content is obvious, and very large indeed. The answer to the problem is supposedly Electricity, and yet we cannot discuss it!
The IOT allows money to be made selling gadgets. Telling folk to turn things off and walk to the shops instead works as well for the climate but is not so profitable.
Amusingly all the big demand management projects such as smart car chargers that can also be inverters all assume it will be over the internet.
We already have a connection by the mains, and if we retain and formalise the behaviour that falling frequency is an indicator of overload, (and inverters can be configured to do that) we can do demand management and high/low rate metering and yet dispense with all the internet stuff completely. If we were to charge more for every minute of consumption when the grid is below 50Hz than for consumption when it is above, and allow heaters and so on to be self organising as to when they came on, based on frequency, then we could get non-critical domestic loads on and off in a timescale that would allow a far more graceful response to any situation like the problems last year when Hornsea disconnected.
Of course there is not as much money to be made doing that.
The IOT allows money to be made selling gadgets. Telling folk to turn things off and walk to the shops instead works as well for the climate but is not so profitable.
Amusingly all the big demand management projects such as smart car chargers that can also be inverters all assume it will be over the internet.
We already have a connection by the mains, and if we retain and formalise the behaviour that falling frequency is an indicator of overload, (and inverters can be configured to do that) we can do demand management and high/low rate metering and yet dispense with all the internet stuff completely. If we were to charge more for every minute of consumption when the grid is below 50Hz than for consumption when it is above, and allow heaters and so on to be self organising as to when they came on, based on frequency, then we could get non-critical domestic loads on and off in a timescale that would allow a far more graceful response to any situation like the problems last year when Hornsea disconnected.
Of course there is not as much money to be made doing that.
