Looks like things are happening - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64372264

But I still don't have an answer to my original question of how they decide what 'normal' usage would have been (and if it's open to manipulation by the unscrupulous). Does anyone have any more detailed information?

    - Andy.

Looks like things are happening - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64372264

But I still don't have an answer to my original question of how they decide what 'normal' usage would have been (and if it's open to manipulation by the unscrupulous). Does anyone have any more detailed information?

    - Andy.

If you have a smart meter, it can be switched to half-hourly billing.  It woild only take a few months for your supplier to work out what you typically use over the peak periods.

You could deliberately use more electricity at peak times for the whole year, in order to get a rebate on the short periods when there's a shortage of electricity.  But most people won't bother.

We're left with demand management to keep the lights on – rewarding the rich at the expense of the poor, and all using taxpayer funds

So near, and yet so far. A couple of weeks ago, when the air was mild and the wind was blowing strongly, it became fashionable to thumb your nose at Vladimir Putin. We made it through the winter of 2022/23 without the blackouts he tried to inflict on us. Russia can keep its filthy gas and oil – we can do without it thanks to our cheap and plentiful renewables.

Not so fast. Temperatures have plummeted again, Britain is becalmed by an anticyclone, and the National Grid is warning that supply is going to be tight this evening. Coal plants are being dusted down several months after they were supposed to have closed, and the National Grid is activating what it calls its Demand Flexibility Service. This means customers signed up to the scheme can earn up to £6 per kilowatt-hour saved if they agree to turn off their appliances between 5 and 6pm.

It is not hard to spot a slight issue with this offer: the more electricity you use on a normal Monday, the easier it will be for you to cash in today. As with so many green subsidies, it perversely rewards the well-off at the expense of the poor. If you own an 18 bedroom mansion you can easily claim your fee by switching off the lights in the east wing and delaying recharging your Tesla until 7pm. If you normally use only one electric light, there will be no savings for you. And needless to say, the free electricity for some households will ultimately be subsidised through higher bills for everyone else.

But there is a far bigger problem with trying to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar power through demand management. The gaps in supply are far too big to be filled in this way. Britain already has enough installed wind and solar capacity – 38 gigawatts of it – to theoretically meet 100 per cent of average electricity demand. On a good day, such as we had a fortnight ago, solar and wind generate more than 50 per cent of our energy needs. But this morning at 10 am it was down to 19 per cent, and at times in December it fell to less than two per cent. If you are going to try to build a grid based on wind and solar, and try to manage demand by paying people to switch their appliances off, you are going to have to chuck such enormous quantities of money at people that they are prepared to spend days on end shivering in the dark.

The trouble is that that is more or less what the Government is trying to do. For years it has incentivised the green energy industry to build more and more wind and solar farms. Energy storage, on the other hand, has followed way, way behind. A few token – and very expensive – battery installations have been built, but, together with pumped storage systems built between the 1960s and 1980s, they can only store enough energy to keep Britain powered-up for less than an hour. Meanwhile, the steady baseload provided by nuclear is shrinking as old reactors shut down and new ones fail to open; Hinckley C is still years away.

At the moment we fill the gaps with gas-generated power, but once that has been removed from the grid, as the Government intends to do by 2035, all we will have to save us from unplanned blackouts is demand management – which is really just blackouts through bribery. And if that doesn't work, the price will rise even further whereby the less well off will be literally left out in the cold. If that happens we can all look forward to mass civil unrest and the consequences such actions will have upon us all.

It's madness. If is impossible for everybody to use less than normal for any sustained period.

Perhaps, maybe not as once better insulation etc is fitted, as will happen with sustained high prices, the reduction is permanent, but in any case demand destruction is probably only a small part of what will happen. A lot of the gain is in time shift - rather like the storage heater idea -  folk will not do the washing or charge the car at peak times, but instead earlier or later when power is cheaper. The problem is the averaging period.  You may put the washing off for a day or two, but probably not many will have enough clothes or storage to hold for a week, and  suspect car charging will be even less flexible.

There are a lot of quite crummy Victorian buildings with solid walls where the heat goes out with a time constant of half a day or so, these will need significant insulation to ride over more than a few days without heating.

By the way, while the govt is encouraging new builds to avoid gas, the real financial pressure is coming from the fact the north sea is looking a bit flat compared to years ago, and we are now an importer, rather than an exporter, and as more countries make that transition, it may be good money for the last producer standing, but expensive for the rest of us.

Mike.

PS some figures from the 2020 BP statistical review also explain the weaker UK financials note recent slight improvements in production rates with new technology - of course the downside is the cost and the fact  it is being emptied all the quicker.

mapj1 said:

There are a lot of quite crummy Victorian buildings with solid walls where the heat goes out with a time constant of half a day or so, these will need significant insulation to ride over more than a few days without heating.

Tell me about it, though my house is Edwardian (circa 1902) and I hope not crummy. However, after the recent cold spell, the thermal mass of the house has cooled noticeably. When the fires were lit by a maid well before the householders got up, rooms might have been warm by breakfast time, but not any more. It takes time to heat a room.

However, Mike, I think that you missed my point. If everybody changes their habits, the normal is reset to the new one. Mind you, the M27 was grim this evening. I could only leave when the day's work was done and that seemed to be the same time as everybody else, so perhaps the majority of people have little choice about their consumption.

I agree that market forces will drive change.