Extreme Gridwatch Events Winter 2022/23

[Oldgreybeard]

Nicely contextual snapshot there dan
Lads, I popped over to my ok neighbour they have a toddler ween, & were totally unaware of any grid problems, ..another neighbour has xmas lights blazing (for 5 days? ..whilst xmas lights are all low draw, its this or big problems, & the public is generally not ready to listen, but it will panic & listen less.

Suggest those with immediate & ok neighbouts esp the old & toddlers get the heads up.. 6pm draws nearer.

Fire ready, candles ready headtorches etc..

All's well (except with that tesla & their inept uk phone staff)

It's a sad fact that there are a lot of people who have little or no interest or understanding when it comes to energy saving. Two years ago I helped with a talk at the local village hall, organised by someone from a sustainable future type body. One stand out from some of the questions was that many people seem to struggle to understand watts and kW and time. Some of it was down to problems with numeracy (like not being able to grasp that 1kW was a thousand times more power than 1 watt), some of it was down to an inability to understand the concept of energy being the product of power and time.

I concluded that to be effective we'd really need to do some sessions on basic numeracy, then move on to some on how to estimate energy used for any appliance, just from its power and the length of time it's on.

What surprised me the most was that the older people present (over retirement age, some in the 80's and 90's) had a far better grasp of energy than many of the younger people. Not sure why, but I think it may have been because the older people still had some recollection of needing to reduce energy use from decades ago.

[Book_woorm]

Jo public will only start to listen when National Grid start turning areas off! All sources of power have there problems and I guess that people wise enough to be in this forum understand those limitations others don't.

[dan_b]

Day ahead trading data for tomorrow.
Literally every HVDC will be importing at full capacity. I wonder if that means France has managed to switch on a couple of nukes in the last few days?!
This is from an excellent Twitter feed called EnAppSys.

[Moxi]

https://watt-logic.com/2022/11/10/frenc ... on-update/

Nope they still have big issues and the Regulator is holding fast on several problem plants but allowing less safety critical issues to carry over to the next outage.

Around 5.4GW of capacity will be offline until January/ February of the new year.

Lets hope for everyone's sake that none of the other reactors in the UK or Europe hit any critical issues.

Moxi

[nowty]

I heard on the news that both the UK AND France need to net import tomorrow.

[Mr Gus]

off-topic, but (@OGB)
Yup, very likely, ..doesnt help when there is the £ shilling, pence, + kg vs lb ...& americanisation to boot.

Staet with a watt, add the term hour, and ask them to apply that to the basic larger amounts consumed not merely an on standby display...
Then tell them alexa, google assist & siri have those answers for moments of failed recall.

Ask them to download (if applicable) a few safe, pre checked converter apps for those measurements that still confuse them...

Then the "back of the new telly sticker" power consumed ..& point out if you dont watch it often why replace it with a leaner model.
Give them the cost of that 1000 hrs over a year & divide it by 4, ..point out that heavy use can be seasonal / toddler / young family so the split is easier to see in context.

Point out that to a large extent many folks having possession of a tablet means 3 people can watch separately, be it youtube, amazon catch up tv... likely for less energy (inc their internet home hub) for less energy than, a typical "g" rated 42 inch philips tv with all modern acoutrements (so for the sake of context a £379 philips from my old muckers at richer sounds https://www.richersounds.com/philips-43pus7906.html (43 inch is now mid size tv)

Context comes via pre-existing kit on the home.
Furthermore, a typical 10 inch tablet "hands up if you have an amazon kindle" in day to day use over an 8 hr carried about day of "this that & the othet" is "xx" of a kilowatt hr ...a tablet has to run "typically" off its charge & chared overnight to 100% = xx watt hours / xx of a kWh ..so ***this month around xp per charge" ..& leave it at that rather than digging deep & glazing then over...

Bloke with tool in shed at the back thete, portable radio, drowned out by intermittently used belt sander rated at 1000w ...used tor short bursts, 5 mins per hour = xx watts, so costs... ..& your radio at 12 watts for the 4 hrs in the shed... a whole xx.

Dont deep dive a volunteer audience, engage, throw ask for hands & do light math scenarios & ask them to scale up & practise thos maths, its just maths skill at home on a few random products..

You can optionally bore / entertain via the dyson **hoover** EU power argument for classification & miliseconds of high power starting load ..which then levels off.

All depends on your audience & their purpose, ..teaching via entertainment worked well for jonny ball "be jonny ball" (.the other jonny was "morris" & he was the fella who talked animals at various zoo''s)

Sell your knowledge to the willing listening individuals, entertain the rest, walk outs start with the least entertained pulling their other half away from your 2 way sales pitch.

Slides are slow, lap tops & freeze frame / a portable wipe board,

Props can be a pot it note for quick math ..madam our kettle, fast boil? ..2 mins at xxx = the not overfilled water for your cups of tea (hand her the post it npte to wave at her other half, tell her thats also roughly the cost of the individual post it note (so please find a use for the blank side) ..she now knows, & wont forget unless it disappears into her haand bag! ...boil a kettle with a power meter, ..make tea for throat lubrication whilst talking)


You dont need to be an a magician, but you need to have the audience flow with you.
In sales I sold millions of pounds more than my colleagues by this sort of process of involvement, ditto prior to sales on a phone diagnosing kit ..so much so I got a stalker or three when in sales my bonuses were slashed as the positive feedback, letters to my bosses, questionnaires was deemed to much to be real & showed up my colleagues both in my dept & across the company. ..unfair but "life"

Keep it light OGB ..avoid being a professor

[Oldgreybeard]

The approach that worked with SWMBO (who is not at all technical and has a fairly short attention span with technical stuff) was the good old water analogy. I've spent ages working through stuff with her over the years, and holding a 2 litre graduated jug under a tap, and relating the volume of water in the jug to the amount of electricity we're using seems to work a treat.

The other thing that has worked is making a Home Assistant dashboard with gauges that have red, amber and green sectors. No real effort to do, and she can now just pull up that dashboard and if the "needles" are in the green she knows it's OK to run stuff.

[marshman]

1kW? Wow that is low!

Assume it meant 1GW

Wind now down to 0.31GW at 18:18 according to gridwatch down from over 15GW just 36 hours ago - and likely to stay very low for the next day or so. That is an awful lot of storage required to cover that shortfall for that period if we want to ditch FF.

Grid frequency up over 50Hz so no real shortage of power, but "high carbon" according to National Grid 279 g/kWh CO2

[Swwils]

Oh wind needs storage? Who knew? Lol.

[nowty]

In the very first post of this thread I was wondering,

"I was wondering whether the UK will be importing or exporting on Tuesday ?. If we are exporting, I am not sure where all our energy will come from as we will be burning everything. If we are importing will Europe be running its gas reserves down too much too early ?"

It seems I didn't have to wait till tomorrow to know the answer as even today we are importing at nearly full tilt.