UK households paid to use electricity during Covid-19 lockdown

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.

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.