Oh dear, just watched this
not sure if I agree with it all, but I have said how I charge my batteries with off-peak, so I can export during the day can't help with the situation, so how long before tariffs change.
"Interesting"
I generally agree with much of what he says, it's a pity there's so many mistakes - such as one point where "frequency dropping -> pay industrial users to use more lecky" when it's the other way round.
Ai generated vids that just ignore the real world are just click bait... grid load is measured by frequency of electricity
Wrong. Neither voltage nor frequency tell you what power is being drawn - simple example, you can switch off your main switch, the voltage and frequency at the meter will still be 240V* and 50Hz, but there's no power. Switch everything on and max out your supply, the voltage and frequency don't change**, but the power drawn does.
How NESO knows the power being supplied and consumed is by metering - various large suppliers and load centres (ie. the larger substations) have metering, and this is fed back into the control system which tallies them all up.
What changes in voltage and frequency do tell you is how the grid balance is changing - if the voltage and frequency start going down you you have an excess of demand over supply; and vice-versa. You correct that by asking generators to open or close the taps. The system could be happily at nominal voltage and frequency if both supply and demand were just (say) 10GW; or if both were at (say) 60GW.
* Technically, our nominal voltage since harmonising with the EU is 230V +10%/-6% (the +10% was to allow our system to carry on unchanged v.s. having set it at +6%.) In practice, nothing changed and most people get "around" 240V.
** The voltage will drop slightly due to losses in the transformers and cabling to your house
Its that mointering of frequency that tells the grid what is producing power
Wrong. As above, metering at key points tell the operators what is producing power - except for the unmetered embedded generation which simply shows as a reduced load.
... so the first claim is panttrurnings, the grid does monitor the solar input and account for it by two means, predictive and reactive, predictive is just weather mointoring and reactive is a decision tree.. at its base is turning down the turbines, you don't need to shut down a nuclear power station to limit its output, just dump the excess heat from the steam generators to the cooling towers, same for gas.
Wrong again. They can estimate the amount of solar by weather forecasting and actual readings, and over a large area and "many" installations, that probably gives a reasonable measure. What they cannot do is measure it - as the video correctly points out, all these small scale installations merely appear as a reduced load.
As an example, suppose you have an array that can produce 3.5kW and it's a bright sunny day so it's doing just that. But you are using 3.5kW internally (perhaps running the immersion heater to use it instead of exporting it for a pittance and your other loads are 500W) - so nett power draw on the grid. The grid has precisely zero visibility of whether you have everything switched off (hence using no power), or are running everything off your solar (and hence drawing no power from the grid.) But if the solar stops, then you suddenly dump a load on the grid - "probably" your immersion will be switched off, but you'd still drop 500W onto the grid. Multiply that effect by "many thousands" of installations, and the effect can be considerable.
Even if they ask your "smart" meter, it can only show them the nett amount - it simply has no knowledge of what's going on downstream other than the nett amount you are importing or exporting (i.e. the result of local generation minus local usage.)
What did he think there was some giant meter somewhere ??
Not one giant meter, just metering at key points - yes they really do know what each large power station is feeding into the grid. As an aside, the system is also set up to spot inconsistencies - e.g. where the power measured at one point is significantly different to the sum of what's measured downstream.
Other obvious lies - Pricing - electricity would never be 1/3rd of what it is today
I agree, I'm a bit sceptical of that claim. But they could be a lot lower if we had a different system for pricing. As it is, we've a system set up for maximising prices and profiteering by the (e.g.) wind lobby who keep going on about how cheap wind lecky is.
He also missed the huge plus of solar... it makes electricity when we need it - during the day.
Ah, that old mistake - it's not true in this country.
In some countries there's an element of that - people run air conditioning when it's sunny. Here it's different.
In summer when we have the best solar, we have little heating demand. In winter when we have "poor" solar, we have high heating demand - the example he gives of a pan-Europe static high pressure zone is very real, "very little" wind generation, very little solar (even though the sun is bright, it's low in the sky and days are short). But here's the main problem - people like the house to be warm when they get up (typically before the sun comes up), and they like to have a hot meal when they get home from work (typically after the sun has gone down.) As a result, a very significant proportion of demanded power is asked for when the sun simply isn't shining - and even during the day, at it's peak the solar isn't all that great and we still rely on other sources.
And these periods aren't short. I still recall Dec 2010 - we had about two weeks of bitter cold, near zero wind, and where I lived it didn't get above freezing during the day. Do the sums, think about what battery storage costs, and now sale that up to "many" GW for a couple of weeks - if you go "all Yorkshireman" and exclaim "How much !" then you might just be starting to realise how expensive some of these solutions are. Extra points if you then realise that the battery capacity needed would consume several years of the current total global battery production.
Pumped hydro is a good battery, but look up what we have now (there's lists on Wikipedia) and you can see that they are good for very short term (e.g. their original requirement to cover the "millions switch on the kettle during the commercial break in Corrie"), but capacity is limited. Technically we could build more, but go looking for suitable sites (lakes the size of Windermere would make a great bottom pool) and I think you'd find it would be very expensive (both financially and politically) to actually do it.
The jist of policy from many in the renewables lobbies is that we have to freeze in the morning, definitely not have a hot shower, and forget about having a hot meal when we get home from work. No, no-one will ever admit that, but that is the primary function of smart metering - to create a system where instead of trying to meet demand, they simply price the poorest into living that sort of lifestyle through variable time of day pricing.
While I see a certain mount of doom-mongering in the video, apart from a few mistakes it's not that far from reality.
What would probably make a huge difference would be a) add a massive amount of sources such as nuclear, and b) rapidly controllable useful loads such as electrolysers to make hydrogen that could rapidly follow changes in renewables output and load, keep the nuclear plants running at a steady state, and produce something that could then be used for further CO2 reductions (such as making synthetic fuels to decarbonise transport.) From a technical standpoint, that's the way to make this net-zero work - so of course, it is not what is being pushed for.
and note how high the voltage is, don't think I have ever seen it at 230 volts. And I see more and more solar arrays being fitted, and think how many more can the system take?
