Why we have to shift time-of-use
habits in our electricity consumption.
1. The Flood.
I arrived in Denver Colorado on 12th September
2013, with the intention of driving over the Rockies to Aspen, where I would
meet Amory Lovins and others associated
with the Rocky Mountain Institute, RMI.
Amory has espoused a low or zero carbon energy economy for
over thirty years.
But I arrived in the middle of the worst rainfall and
flooding in Colorado since the arrival of European settlers – probably the
worst for over 500 years.
To compound this, I drove north towards Boulder, near where the flooding was at its worst.
I tried to enter Boulder by five different routes, all of
which were initially closed to traffic by flood water.
I even drove to the North of Boulder to Longmont, the town worst
hit by the flooding. I saw a full scale river in flood pouring over a big
highway – something I can only describe as a biblical experience.
Eventually I managed to get to my hotel on the outskirts of
Boulder. As I arrived, the flood waters were rising, and I had to wade through
three foot deep water to get into the hotel, whose reception area was beginning
to flood.
Getting out of Boulder the following morning was no easier.
The roads to the West, where I wanted to go, were either flooded or subject to
rock falls. On one road, an entire section had been washed away.
By the afternoon, the main highway west had reopened, and
together with a large number of other cars, I headed out into bright sunshine,
and an exhilarating drive over Independence Pass to Aspen.
What did the flood mean to me? I could have seen it as some
kind of divine message, or as evidence for climate change.
I chose to interpret it as an exciting prelude to a
significant journey.
2. Rocky Mountain Institute
My
hosts in Aspen, Todd and Wendy Mitchell, were exceptionally kind and helpful.
Wendy had stayed with us in Devon to learn cheesemaking from my wife Mary Quicke, and now has her own dairy at Avalanche Cheese . Todd was an expert in renewable energy and was a serious investor in new
technology through Two Seven Ventures. He knew many of the key people at RMI and in the low carbon
businesses of Aspen.
Todd
introduced me to Amory and to many of his associates, including Nathan Glasgow
, a director of Sun Edison, a major PV company.
I
had left England with a theory that we could quite quickly expect to see PV and
electric vehicles integrated harmoniously into the UK grid, with the storage capacity
of the cars’ batteries providing a daily flattening of the demand curve, which
is very peaky, and expensively met by having large amounts of fast reacting
combined cycle gas turbine stations perpetually on standby.
Nathan
disabused me of the idea that this would happen anytime soon. Using electric
vehicle batteries as described would void their warranties and thus render the
process too costly, even with the feed in tariff and the subsidy on the
vehicles.
Alex
Hill of Amatis Controls
introduced me to the work he is doing on the Internet of Things- using the
internet to control devices including
electrical appliances – clearly of relevance to managing energy demand.
Amory
Lovins is inspirational – there are myriad opportunities to promote the low
carbon economy he said, and wrote a message to that effect in my copy of his
book, Reinventing Fire.
3. My return to England
So I returned to England excited but with no clear answers
or direction. How could I contribute to the process of the decarbonisation of
our electricity system? We had already installed over 150 kW of PV at Occombe Farm
in Torbay, at Quickes Farm, and at our home.
I discovered that in Canada and some parts of the US, a
company called Sequentric, led by Daniel
Flohr, had begun to install large domestic
hot water tanks with three immersion heaters in them, and that the electricity supply
companies could switch them on and off without leaving the customers short of
hot water. This enabled them to cut the peaks and fill the troughs in demand at
relatively low cost. Bizarrely, from an
English point of view, many Canadians rent their hot water tanks from the electricity
companies. This made it easy to gradually roll out the new tanks and get the
load management they were after.
The stock answer I got in UK to this sort of system was that
we would have to wait until the rollout of smart
meters for it to be possible – and that would not happen until 2020!
4. Time of Use Shifting
I realised that what it came down to was not so much how
much electricity we all used, but when we used it. Our entire wasteful and
carbon guzzling electricity system was set up to give people as much
electricity as they wanted, at the time
they wanted it, and at no variation in price except in the middle of the night
if they opted for the economy 7 tariff.
So no-one had any reason to even think about when they used electricity
during the day.
Except of course for people who had fitted PV systems- they
very quickly realised that electricity was “free” to them whenever the sun
shined – and they were busy shifting their time of use accordingly!
I know because I am one of them- I use my washing machine
when the sun shines, and will often
adjust the time when I switch on my immersion heater –and even when I
cook – to make use of the electricity I am generating myself.
I realised that much of the time shifting was easy,
convenient, and even automatic, when I began to fit time switches to appliances
– or use the time delay facility on my dishwasher.
I also realised that if enough of us did it, we could start
to close down fossil power stations, and use more renewable electricity.
I’m doing it; can I help you to do it?
See my site theintelligentplug.com
to find out how you can.
And as a final thought, here's Amory Lovins (what a wonderful name) at his TED talk best .....
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