Can we have large scale CHP from existing power stations? Iceland does.

Iceland's Hellisheidi (pronounced heltliss-haydee, not Hell is Heidi!) geothermal power station sends 130 MW of heat along a 25 Km hot water pipe to Reykjavik, where virtually all buildings are district heated from it. It also produces 300MW of electricity.

Doesn't this call the bluff of those who say that it is impossible to use our relatively large gas fuelled - and nuclear -  power stations to provide CHP heat on a  multi-hundred Megawatt or even Gigawatt scale to British cities?

Heat is now a big issue for carbon reduction - we can't go on burning gas in small boilers just to heat our draughty houses for ever.

Is it time for a pilot CHP scheme? 

Perhaps we could heat Bristol from Hinkley C?

Last meeting of ECC Committee discusses DSR - a bit late?

The difficulties faced by companies such as Kiwi, Tempus and Passivsystems in delivering demand side response against regulatory inertia are highlighted in this discussion in front of the last meeting of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee before its absorption into the BEIS Committee.

The relevant discussion is at

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/energy-and-climate-change-committee/news-parliament-2015/energy-revolution-evidence-16-17/

staring at 10:15 on the video.

If we do not get this right, we are in danger of perpetuating highly polluting diesel or coal fired stations for peak supply.

It is not good enough to say that consumers don't understand it.

Behavioural issues must be addressed in tandem with regulatory change.

Disaggregation - a long word that can help us

About five years ago, I invited a new startup, Green Running, to show me their wares. I was looking for new ways to find out how much electricity we were using at Torbay Coast and Countryside Trust, and where we were using it.

At that time, the technology was not yet there to analyse the existing signatures from different appliances that would allow their device to identify each one, and thereby provide easy to read information of consumption over time, appliance by appliance.

Green Running may now have the technology that can do just that. If so, we can all see exactly where we are using electricity and when, and take steps to reduce and/or time shift it.

If we all do this, we can do away with several large power stations, apart from making the lives of BEIS civil servants much easier - (a trivial benefit) -

 it will provide several key outcomes:

• Substantially reducing the cost of providing new capacity
• Substantially improving the forward reliability of our electricity system
• Substantially reducing the carbon emissions per unit generated

Happy time-shifting!

Do we want brownouts?

The normal mains voltage in UK is 230V. But there is an acceptable range which is legally defined as +10% -6%, i.e. the voltage can range from a maximum of 253V to a minimum of 216V.

It is sometimes suggested that the power supplied to the grid could be limited by using some of this range.

If we had a simple system (which we do not!) where the voltage was the same at all supply points, we could theoretically reduce consumption by up to 37% by reducing the voltage from 253 to 216

In practice the available range is very much smaller, and is reduced further by local intermittent renewable generation. Anecdotally, when my PV system is at full output and I switch off all loads, my voltage rises to about 250V, near the maximum.

Nonetheless, a few percent of power reduction is available.

For example, reducing voltage at peak demand times in winter from 230V to 223V would result in a peak power reduction approximately equal to that of a Hinkley sized power station. It would give no noticeable dimming of lights or other unwanted results.

We wouldn't of course need to even think about this if we all avoided unnecessary consumption at peak times in winter!

The What, Who and When of Domestic Electricity Demand in UK - (the right answers can be found below).

Our new Prime Minister Theresa May has pushed the pause button on Hinkley C. Do we need it? How many more nuclear reactors will we need? How will demand patterns affect their profitability? Are we allowing ourselves to be hostages to our own irresponsibility?
Now is the time to take domestic demand response seriously and save £50 billion, even if we go ahead with Hinkley.
You and I as informed consumers (you are informed because you read this blog!)  have the power and responsibility to influence Government to mount an information campaign, perhaps under the Behavioural Insight Team to reduce peak consumption by 7GW to 45GW this winter.
We can do it.

Jeremy Rifkin - 7th European Summit of Regions and Cities

This is the best video I have seen all summer, worth watching if you are interested in the transformation of the economy to a sustainable model.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time there was a village. In the winter, it was cold. The villagers heated their houses with wood. They also used wood to boil water to wash their clothes, and their dirty dishes, pots and pans.

The wood came from a store in the middle of the village. It was a small store, but the villagers paid several wood choppers to keep it full all through the winter.

One winter it got very cold. The store nearly emptied, and the villagers were worried. “What if we have another very cold winter and one of the wood choppers falls ill?” they thought.

So they asked the village elders to do something about it.

The village elders thought long and hard, and came up with a solution. “We will ask the neighbouring village to supply us with chainsaws like the ones they have, so that the wood choppers can cut wood more quickly” they told the villagers.

“Hooray!” said the villagers, “but how much will the chainsaws cost, and how much smoke do they make?” “A lot” said the elders “but there is no alternative”.

One of the villagers saw a way out the problem. He realised that the reason they thought they needed the chainsaws was not as it seemed at first sight.

The wood choppers could keep up with the daily demand for wood; it was just the fact that all the villagers used wood at the same time in the evening that was the problem. If they used wood in the night or the morning, it would give the choppers time to fill the small store and not run out.

So they all agreed to do their washing when the wood choppers said there was plenty of wood, not all at the same time, and not when they were using a lot of wood in their fires to keep warm.

The villagers lived long, warm, clean, prosperous and happy lives ever after.