How to close power stations easily, cheaply and with no loss of comfort.

Introduction

It's time!

Time to make electricity affordable.

Time to save the planet.

Time to keep the lights on.

If I told you that you could make a significant contribution to doing this without even reducing how much you use, and without any expensive equipment, would you believe me?

Most people probably wouldn't.

They might say there's no such thing as a free lunch, there must be a catch.

But there isn't!

In the UK, every winter weekday, from 3 to 8pm, peaking at around 5.30, we use seven large power stations (7 Gigawatts) worth of electricity more than we do at any other time. Why? Because some people are coming home from school and from work, and it's getting dark. Most offices, factories and shops are still working.

But here's the good news - That peak, which is about 14% above the normal daytime level, can be easily avoided.

If we all time-shifted our consumption out of the peak by an average of just 350W (3½ bright old fashioned light bulbs) the problem would be solved. You don't even have to reduce your overall consumption, although that too is good - just use it at different times.

You can easily do this by delaying the use of dishwashers, washing machines and tumble dryers, and by having a time switch on your immersion heater. For example, if you usually use your dishwasher at 6pm, delay it by 8 hours until 2am if it has a delay timer.

If you ask people in the electricity industry, many of them will tell you that the problem will be solved by smart meters - unfortunately it won't!

Smart meters in themselves will not switch anything off, much less work out when to delay consumption for specific appliances. They will allow for more complicated time-of-use tariffs in future, which will penalize us for using electricity at peak times, but even these will rely on us to respond by switching things off or delaying them coming on.

In this guide, I will go through in detail what the present situation is with regard to electricity supply, and how you and I can regain some control over how we use it, for the benefit of all of us, and of the planet.

1.       The current situation

Not only does our electricity consumption vary wildly throughout the day, the way it is supplied does as well.

Please bear with me through the graphs that follow - the pain is worth the gain!

To see real-time graphs, go to http://nationalgrid.stephenmorley.org/

Here's a chart showing the production of electricity from all major sources on Monday 15th December 2014 - a fairly typical mid-winter weekday:

 

This chart tells us a lot about what is going on. The peak production which is the sum of all the different types was about 51 Gigawatts. The biggest contributors at the peak were gas (CCGT, which stands for combined cycle gas turbine) and coal, at 17.43 and 16.81 respectively. The next was nuclear at 8.1, with wind power at 2.92 and others all below 2GW each. Of course it is well after dark at 5pm in mid-December, so there will have been no solar photovoltaic electricity.

The next thing to notice is how the different sources vary through the day.

Nuclear is more or less constant, for two reasons, firstly it is quite difficult to speed up or slow down a nuclear reactor in a hurry, and secondly there's not much point in doing so, as the fuel cost saving is very small. The cost of nuclear power is almost all in the construction and decommissioning, very little in the fuel.

Wind power bears no relation to demand, because wind turbines are left to run at the maximum output the wind allows. There is a bit more wind in winter than in summer, but not reliably so.

Gas and coal vary with demand. They are the sources that bear the brunt of daily variation in demand. Gas in particular can be ramped up and down very fast. If it were not for our concerns about climate change and security of supply, gas could easily supply all our electricity needs.

Now let's take a look at what happens at the other end of the day - the minimum or trough consumption, which happens not surprisingly in the middle of the night:

This is the chart for 2am on Tuesday 16^th December 2014.

Total production is about 32 gigawatts, just under two thirds what it was at the peak. The difference between peak and trough would be much greater if big industrial users didn't manage their consumption to use more at times of overall low consumption, and less at other times.

But look at which sources are bearing the brunt of the change. Not nuclear or wind, which as we have seen do not vary in their output with demand over the day. Coal has come down from 16.8 to 12 Gigawatts, a reduction of 30%, so proportionately less than the overall reduction of 37%.

Now look at gas. Gas fired production has fallen from its peak of 17.4 down to only 3GW, a fall of 83%. It is gas that is overwhelmingly bearing the brunt of demand variation over the day.

Consider now what would happen were we to increase wind power by a factor of two, from 4.6 GW to 9.2 GW at the time of minimum demand. That's more than the total gas fired production at that time. What would need to happen? Could gas-fired production be reduced to zero? Could coal fired power be reduced sufficiently quickly to balance the supply? In practice, it is likely that even more of the demand would be switched to gas throughout the day, and gas would have an even more extreme range to cover. Some people think that would be a good thing, because gas is much less carbon intensive than coal. But it would also mean that more gas power stations would be needed but providing less electricity each, thus making gas-powered electricity more expensive. There are some inconvenient truths here: more wind power means more expensive gas power, and PV makes no contribution at all to peak demand. They are still a good thing if you want to reduce carbon, but they have their own limitations.

2.       What are we currently doing about it?

There are some projects underway looking at ways to influence demand in peoples' homes. They are funded by the Low Carbon Network Fund, overseen by OFGEM, and electricity distribution network operators (DNO's) are obliged to take part in these projects.

The projects are looking at both technical and behavioural resolutions of the issue of demand management. However, they are all in the context of the introduction of smart meters over the next seven or so years.

Meeting peak demand reliably is a major issue for the Government. No one really knows what demand will be in ten, twenty or thirty years' time, or how it will be supplied. So we find ourselves in a situation where we are forced to pay whatever it takes to build a very large new nuclear power station, Hinkley C. This station on the Somerset coast will produce 3.2 Gigawatts, more than half the current peak electricity demand of South West England. It will do so at a cost of between 16 and 24 billion pounds, depending on whether you believe EDF or the EU, who came up with the higher figure. That's £8000 per kilowatt, about what is needed for each household in the region. Ouch. Even over thirty years, that's £266 per year each on top of our bills.

Hinkley is probably a done deal - they are already at work on the site. But how many more Hinkleys will it take to satisfy our demand for electricity?

Some people put their faith in more gas fired power stations. These have the advantage of being much cheaper to build, very flexible in their output, and lower carbon than coal or oil. But how long will the gas last at reasonable prices? How much carbon will they put into the air? If we have more wind and other renewable power, how expensive will it be for gas to fill in the unpredictable shortfalls in supply when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, or when the tides are wrong or the waves are small?

And what about those smart meters? Will they solve our problems? The short answer is no. Smart meters in themselves do not switch anything off. They simply provide information on how much we are using and when we are using it. They provide the basis for the introduction of time-of-use tariffs, which will eventually motivate some of us to use less electricity at peak times, by charging us a lot more for it, and less at other times. If the introduction of time-of-use tariffs is voluntary, then those - usually poorer- consumers, who don't choose to go over to them, will just be charged more for their electricity all the time. 

Another concern with smart meters is their cost. To fit them to the 26 million domestic households will cost about £350 each which is nearly   £10 billion, and there is much debate over what the net resulting savings will be. The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, (chaired by Margaret Hodge, a left wing Labour MP not previously associated with penny-pinching attitudes) cast doubt on the idea of a mass rollout of smart meters, citing not only their cost, but also their technical obsolescence in the face of app-controlled smart plugs and other fast-moving developments in the sector.

The timescale for all of this to happen is also very long and may well be getting longer. 2021 is currently predicted for the completion of the smart meter rollout. As yet there is no indication of when time-of-use tariffs may be implemented, but they require smart meters before they can be brought in.

There is an underlying theme to all of these issues - cost! It is expensive to deliver top-down solutions to providing reliable electricity whenever it is wanted. Does the solution lie elsewhere?

3.       The Answer!

It is unusual for there to be a simple cheap and easy solution to a seemingly intractable national problem.

This is an exception!

Let's start from the other end of the problem - us - the consumers of electricity.

If we all time-shifted 14% of our peak consumption, about 350 watts per household, away from the period between 3-8pm on winter weekdays, the peak would disappear and we would need seven fewer large power stations. That's seven coal or gas power stations we could close without the need for replacement.

We can do this with minimal loss of convenience by delaying the use of dishwashers, washing machines and tumble driers into the middle of the night, and by fitting time switches to our immersion heaters, for those who have them.

If instead of consuming electricity at peak times we did so at trough times, it would also enable much higher levels of renewable electricity to be fed into the grid.

The conventional response to this message is - other people won't do it, so what difference will it make if I do so?

But we are very remarkable people.

In 1984 we gave £150 million to Live Aid for famine relief in Africa.

Our foreign aid budget is £11 billion. Most of us approve of it, otherwise politicians wouldn't do it.

We now recycle most of our rubbish, sorting it into categories, all for no direct reward.

Why? Because we know it is the right thing to do.

We know that our own personal contribution to the effort is statistically insignificant. But we do it anyway - because we know that if we all do it, it does make a difference.

There are many other examples of altruistic collective action which we now take for granted. They all started out as a new idea, which caught on.

If we all do it, we will save up to £35 billion, over £1000 per household in generation capacity costs.

The carbon emissions of our electricity will fall substantially.

The strains on our creaking distribution structure will be eased, thus reducing the risk of power cuts.

Taking responsibility for our electricity consumption is a remarkably easy opportunity to make a difference.

Do it, and tell your friends you are doing it.

4.       Is time shifting the only answer?

Most of the people I talk to about time-shifting have their own, different solution to reducing carbon and improving the efficiency of our electricity consumption.

In one sense, they are all correct. There are myriad ways of generating, saving, and storing electricity, and I will go through some of them to explain why time-shifting is the key enabler to any attempt to reduce electricity's financial and environmental costs.

Intermittent Renewables

This encompasses virtually all renewable forms of electricity with the exception of biomass and hydropower. In particular, wind, solar, tidal and wave power are intermittent, that is they cannot be called upon (dispatched in the technical jargon) consistently at peak times. Some argue that over a wide range of technologies and a wide range of locations, there will be some degree of reliability, but that may be a long way off.

However, with time-shifting the problem is transcended. The more time-shifting we are prepared to do, the more intermittent renewable electricity becomes possible. Without it, the UK would struggle to have 20% renewable electricity, because there would need to be no danger of renewable generation exceeding the capacity of the grid to absorb it at trough times. Summer troughs can be as low as 20GW which puts a technical limit to renewables at that time of about 10GW. The National Grid has documented this eloquently on their website.

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power, though expensive and potentially dangerous, is reliable in the sense that it can be called upon to deliver power at specific times. However it is not easy to speed up and slow down reactors in a hurry, and in any case the costs are nearly all in the construction and decommissioning, not in the fuel used in generating the electricity. If nuclear reactors continue to be used to generate continuously through the day, then it is advantageous to time-shift demand away from peaks and into troughs to make best use of the power.

Fossil fuels

There is a desire to minimize the use of gas and particularly coal fired power stations. However, the economics of these depends on their load factor - that is the proportion of the time they are running. British Gas (Centrica) has been arguing for some time that increasing the amount of renewables is reducing the load factor of gas power stations, thus increasing the cost of production. We as taxpayers will be asked to pick up the bill for the extra costs of gas-fired power. Time-shifting would redress this balance, allowing for fewer gas stations operating at a higher load factor, thus reducing both costs per unit and the amount of gas needed to meet the lower peaks.

 Storage

Storage costs money. At the moment the only cost-effective form of electricity storage on a Gigawatt scale is pumped storage, that is pumping water between two reservoirs at different heights, and generating electricity by allowing it to run back down again through a hydro-electric generator. There are inevitably losses in this process, in addition to the capital costs of the system. With time-shifting, less use of pumped storage will be needed.

Other forms of storage, for example batteries, flywheels, compressed gas, are more expensive. But the costs of these technologies relative to alternative solutions that is important. Time-shifting is cheaper than storage, usually by a factor of ten or more. In fact it can be regarded as a form of storage, of demand rather than of supply. There are cases where storage is nonetheless essential, for example in uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) for vital computer systems such as in banks or hospitals. If you have a laptop computer, you have one! Time-shifting will enable these stores to be smaller and less expensive.

New nuclear

There are designs currently being developed for smaller, possibly less dangerous and cheaper nuclear power stations, for example Thorium reactors. These could be as small as a lorry container, easily transportable to remote sites, and back to central depots for refueling, perhaps once every ten or twenty years. The cheapness and convenience of this sort of reactor does not allow it to escape from the same economic factors as a large reactor - that is they are much cheaper to run continuously than to vary with demand. So once again, time-shifting will improve their cost-effectiveness.

In summary, all electricity technologies, old and new, work much better if demand is managed to minimize peaks and troughs.

5.       Smart devices

I have already explained how we can easily and conveniently time-shift our electricity consumption using very simple time switches and the delay timers found on modern appliances.

So why are there a plethora of devices available to do what appears to be easy to do anyway?

For the last five years or so, we have been trying to solve the demand/supply mismatch problem technically. That is, to come up with increasingly sophisticated devices and software to do what we can already do without them. We have put the expensive technical fix solution ahead of the cheap behavioural change solution.

An additional problem with this approach, as well as the cost, is that you need the behavioural change anyway. However many fancy devices we have, we still have to change to use them - the question here is whether we choose to do it, or have it forced on us. Compulsion is likely to be counterproductive. For example there is already a resistance movement to smart meters, which are sometimes seen as Orwellian in nature, intruding into peoples' homes to find out more about how they live their lives. Others object to the idea of increased levels of radiation from the necessary signal transmission from smart meters. Whilst I am personally relaxed about these issues, they are real for many people.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with using new smart devices, quite the contrary. It's just that they are no substitute for individual action, just a tool for implementation, to be used when the cost is justified by the additional savings or convenience.

Let's take a look at some of the devices coming on to the market.

App controlled switches

Devices such as the Belkin Wemo switch work through your Wi-Fi broadband system. Using a smartphone, you can tell it to switch on and off at will, from anywhere in the world. You can also program it to come on and off at specific times. For the purposes of simple time-shifting to avoid the existing peak, it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It would however be very useful if you decided to delegate the time shifting of appliances to someone else. Why would you want to do that? It may be that your electricity distributor has local stress points where it is useful to reduce the load for a period. For example, in areas off the mains gas supply, many people use electric storage heaters. It would be useful for the electricity distributor to have more control over exactly when they go on and off, to avoid a sudden surge at midnight. They might even want to switch them on during the day if there is a surge in renewable power. Eventually they will be able to reward you for offering the opportunity to do just this. But not until you have a smart meter!

Appliances with built in internet connections (the Internet of Things, or IOT)

Why would you want a dishwasher with an internet connection? It's another way for the distributor to manage demand on your behalf just as the app-controlled switch does. It's something we will need when gas fired power stations are phased out and no longer provide fast-changing supply in response to our fast-changing demand. It's entirely unnecessary, though, to time-shift away from the existing peak today.

Immersion heater diverters.

For those of us with solar PV systems, devices such as the Immersun or Optiplug divert electricity to the immersion heater when there is a surplus of solar electricity. This is a useful form of personal demand management, which maximises the benefit PV owners can get from their electricity tariff.

In future it could be useful to do this over a local area, where the overall level of PV is so high that there is a difficulty in distributing the surplus away to other areas in times of low demand and bright sunshine. Then, everyone will benefit, not just the PV owners.

So there are many ways in which we can refine or delegate control over our demand, but generally they are not dealing effectively with the peak demand issue we face today. 

We come back to the simple use of delay timers and time switches to effect immediate change.

6.       The Next Steps

• Tell your friends you are doing it. Word of mouth is very effective, as Alex Laskey of OPower tells us (google Alex Laskey YouTube).
• Let community energy groups know about it. They are also good at spreading messages amongst motivated and environmentally responsible early adopters
• Lobby for community groups to get rewarded for making it happen. Sarah Harrison of OFGEM has already suggested that this is on the cards. (Renewable Futures conference, Bath November 2014.)