Preparing the UK Electricity Network for Rising Cooling Demand

A good starting point would be to look at how countries which already have this problem and have been dealing with it for many decades, manage it - so look at Southern Europe around the Mediterranean, some of the US utilities in the hotter states. They're all ahead of Britain on this topic because of their existing climatic conditions. A few observations I would make:

Firstly, we don't want to be pouring money into network and generation infrastructure to meet peak cooling, or heating demands, that lasts for short periods, resulting in under-utilised assets, high costs to businesses and consumers and exacerbates our already high electricity costs. We really want to be aiming to use the capacity we already have efficiently, so that leans towards solutions like flexibility / DSR, where competitive.

Many of those countries are ahead of Britain with their smart metering, and are also ahead of Britain on their time of use tariff offerings, with the hot countries typically having consumer TOU tariffs where the prices reflect the high costs of power and shortages of capacity during peak times for aircon / cooling demand, charging higher prices during the peak to incentivise people to shift demand to other times of day where possible. Compared to pouring money into upgrading networks or building peaking capacity, or even battery storage, DSR is generally the more economically efficient approach.

In the US states where cooling demand is a major contributor to peak demand, many of their electricity suppliers operate Demand Control / Load Control programmes, where they can automate control of air-conditioning loads, to shut-down or turn-down aircon loads for short periods in response to grid demand, or local demand conditions to manage loads on the system.

Now it's interesting that if you look at many aircon units and heat-pumps sold in the UK, typically the imported models, many have 'Smart Grid' capabilies already built-in, typically inputs to trigger the units to reduce or limit load, or shut-down, or in reverse to ramp-up demand by increasing heating or cooling. But of course, these are just control inputs and capabilities, to use them depends on the local country having some form of local or nationwide Demand-side Response comms infrastructure to provide the control signals, to connect into these heat-pump/aircon units - various other countries have these types of DSR systems in place and use them to manage these loads, for controlling aircon systems, heating systems, or other off-peak loads like EV charging.

In Britain we're years behind these other countries, we don't have a system for providing DSR controls to household loads, so anyone fitting aircon today is almost certainly not going to have automated DSR in place. But it's an area where Britain really needs to catch-up and start getting this infrastructure in place, not just for cooling, but also for heating and EV charging.

A good starting point would be to look at how countries which already have this problem and have been dealing with it for many decades, manage it - so look at Southern Europe around the Mediterranean, some of the US utilities in the hotter states. They're all ahead of Britain on this topic because of their existing climatic conditions. A few observations I would make:

Firstly, we don't want to be pouring money into network and generation infrastructure to meet peak cooling, or heating demands, that lasts for short periods, resulting in under-utilised assets, high costs to businesses and consumers and exacerbates our already high electricity costs. We really want to be aiming to use the capacity we already have efficiently, so that leans towards solutions like flexibility / DSR, where competitive.

Many of those countries are ahead of Britain with their smart metering, and are also ahead of Britain on their time of use tariff offerings, with the hot countries typically having consumer TOU tariffs where the prices reflect the high costs of power and shortages of capacity during peak times for aircon / cooling demand, charging higher prices during the peak to incentivise people to shift demand to other times of day where possible. Compared to pouring money into upgrading networks or building peaking capacity, or even battery storage, DSR is generally the more economically efficient approach.

In the US states where cooling demand is a major contributor to peak demand, many of their electricity suppliers operate Demand Control / Load Control programmes, where they can automate control of air-conditioning loads, to shut-down or turn-down aircon loads for short periods in response to grid demand, or local demand conditions to manage loads on the system.

Now it's interesting that if you look at many aircon units and heat-pumps sold in the UK, typically the imported models, many have 'Smart Grid' capabilies already built-in, typically inputs to trigger the units to reduce or limit load, or shut-down, or in reverse to ramp-up demand by increasing heating or cooling. But of course, these are just control inputs and capabilities, to use them depends on the local country having some form of local or nationwide Demand-side Response comms infrastructure to provide the control signals, to connect into these heat-pump/aircon units - various other countries have these types of DSR systems in place and use them to manage these loads, for controlling aircon systems, heating systems, or other off-peak loads like EV charging.

In Britain we're years behind these other countries, we don't have a system for providing DSR controls to household loads, so anyone fitting aircon today is almost certainly not going to have automated DSR in place. But it's an area where Britain really needs to catch-up and start getting this infrastructure in place, not just for cooling, but also for heating and EV charging.

we don't have a system for providing DSR controls

There are some examples in the UK - e.g. Octopus's Agile tariff - together with a few gadgets (e.g. battery systems) that dynamically adjust according to the current (and future) prices. It is all very supplier specific though - there really need to be a generic supplier-agnostic system if it is to be taken up by appliance manufacturers in general. A obvious potential solution would be for appliances to be able to "tap into" the home area network (HAN) provided by smart meters - but that does seem to be closed (at least I've not seen any public specifications of now to listen in to it).

   - Andy.