UK households paid to use electricity during Covid-19 lockdown

I presume it should be considered a rebate scheme rather than free electricity.


Andy B.

Damn and blast! I swapped from Octopus this year 'cos whilst they were cheapest a year and a bit ago, they were not this time around.


I'm just waiting for petrol to go under £1 per litre - not far to go at the local Asda! ?

Is that article serious?

It appears that we are going against the saying..'there is no such thing as a free lunch'

Legh

The day’s electricity prices are split into 48 half hour periods, with a different “market driven” price set for each period. It has always been the case that under some circumstances one or more of the periods could be either zero cost or a negative cost (the generators pay people to use electricity). It can also go very high for one or more periods as well. It is only since the introduction of the smart meter that it has been possible to pass this on to the end customers, if that is what the meter operator decides to do. 


Regards,


Alan.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone actually gets paid (overall lower bill for consuming during the specific hour).  Although generator companies can be willing to pay a bit to get rid of energy, in order to get their subsidies, there would presumably be costs for use of network.  Perhaps some suppliers' tariffs stick that mainly in the fixed cost rather than the kWh cost.


(I live abroad, and pay an hourly spot-market energy price. It's been very low or negative recently. But the network charge and the 'energy tax' are each about as big per kWh as the normal energy price, so the overall cost per kWh is still some 60% or more of the usual. That said, I've recently been thinking, and studying a little, that this network charge is inordinately much. Looking at the OFGEM site it seems the charges made by UK DNOs must be lower.)

I suspect you are right, and at the end of the quarter or whatever the bill period is, the total will never be negative, but even if nega-watts are only on paper it is interesting to see how much drop in demand gets you to the first occurrence of 'too cheap to meter' - originally predicted for an all nuclear future, but never happened then of course.


The related interesting thing is the fact that the falling demand is allowing a greater fraction of the generated power to be inverter derived (i.e. not synchronous spinning generators. ) Note that although wind turbines do spin they are not synchronous generators, so for this purpose count as inverter derived. Any phase shifts of the timeing of the peak in current vs the peak in voltage with load are created by programmable timing in the software of the switching devices.

According to gridwatch   we were running from more than 50% wind power some time last night - which is probably a first as well. Perfectly sensible to turn the gas taps down when not needed, and reassuring to see that the grid stability mechanisms seem to be working rather well, and  the fluctuations in frequency that are evident seem to still obey the correct relationship to demand/supply.

Down to about 40% wind this morning and falling as demand picks up.

As a comparison, the wholesale price was very high on 4th March. Period 37 (18:00-18:30) was £2.242 per kWh and the following half hour, Period 38 was £1.708 per kWh before prices dropped again. 


Regards,


Alan.

Again, according to Gridwatch, as of 14.10, although wind is down solar is up and the total is still around 50%.  The frequency is still very stable, maybe this is going to be the pattern for the lockdown.