Extreme Gridwatch Events Winter 2022/23

[Mr Gus]

Lads, wife received 3.50pm shell recharge app notiification.....

"to protect the stability of the national grid, we are introducing randomised delays. this means from the moment you plug in to charge, you may experience a random delay of up to 10 minutes before your charge session starts. this will avoid many devices switching on / off at the exact same time, & soften the impact on the public electricity network. this is a default setting that will be applied when you set a charge schedule but you can of course overide the randomised delay in the shell recharge app"

***nb currently this is only available for 2.0, home advanced 2.1, home advanced 2.2 , & advanced charge points

it is coming soon for other models.

[Oldgreybeard]

Lads, wife received 3.50pm shell recharge app notiification.....

"to protect the stability of the national grid, we are introducing randomised delays. this means from the moment you plug in to charge, you may experience a random delay of up to 10 minutes before your charge session starts. this will avoid many devices switching on / off at the exact same time, & soften the impact on the public electricity network. this is a default setting that will be applied when you set a charge schedule but you can of course overide the randomised delay in the shell recharge app"

***nb currently this is only available for 2.0, home advanced 2.1, home advanced 2.2 , & advanced charge points

it is coming soon for other models.

Been the case since earlier this year. All new charge points must be "smart", to allow this randomisation and also to allow load shedding if the grid gets into trouble. This was designed in to the smart charger spec around three or four years ago.

It's interesting to look back at how this problem was address with storage heating, when that was rolled out about 50 years ago. Back then the required variation in timing was handled with a thing called a Teleswitch, that used time codes broadcast on Radio 4 LW. These codes were phased so not all the countries storage heaters turned on at the same time, each region had a slightly different off-peak time slot. When the Teleswitches were replaced with time clocks, the normal variation in accuracy provided the variation needed.

Cynics might suggest that a simple time switch would be fine, as we know that they are very unlikely to be accurate enough to all turn on at the same time. However, we've become "smart obsessed", even though there is a fair bit of evidence to show that smart stuff isn't that reliable in practice. Very much a moot point here, as with no mobile signal the mobile dependent devices (which seems the be the majority of these things) wouldn't work, anyway. For anyone with a WiFi connected charger then the way around it is to just bar it from connecting, when it will revert to being dumb and reliable.

[Mr Gus]

Thats the norm yes OGB, however I am pointing out its implementation on this thread based on sketchy national grid in current climes..

They are a bit late to recognise & activate this function bearing in mind data / discussions here over the past few days exceeding the norm.
Also, why now when the urgency was pared back within an hour or so of national grid warnings at the beginning of the week. ..govt orders not to scare the pub!ic with the truth of the European situation!?

[Oldgreybeard]

Thats the norm yes OGB, however I am pointing out its implementation on this thread based on sketchy national grid in current climes..

They are a bit late to recognise & activate this function bearing in mind data / discussions here over the past few days exceeding the norm.
Also, why now when the urgency was pared back within an hour or so of national grid warnings at the beginning of the week. ..govt orders not to scare the pub!ic with the truth of the European situation!?

The law was that they had to only sell smart chargers after, I think, June this year, but they had another year (I think) to activate the timing scatter. Some charger manufacturers have been a bit quicker than others to get things up and running, but I doubt that BP will be the last.

[Mr Gus]

Who has already physically **activated** this delay currently though? ..in autumnal energy crisis of 2022 !?
(never mind it being a requirement to be able to implement on all new chargers for maybe 4 years now)

[nowty]

There will be no randomised delay at Nowty Towers on either of our two EV chargers.

OK there might be some interference from the Octopus Intelligent tariff, but I'll put up with that to get the extra hours for cheaper.

[openspaceman]

Has anyone got an insight into the strategic effect so far of these few times we have been asked to cut electricity use for an hour?

I haven't jumped ship from Eon next but they are not offering mean off peak rate yet and it will be moot whether I will gain from it as my 6.5kWh battery (5.85kWh usable) probably won't last me most days with the long nights.

[nowty]

Has anyone got an insight into the strategic effect so far of these few times we have been asked to cut electricity use for an hour?

Thats up to the first two x one hour sessions from Octopus, so that's shaved about 0.1GW off the demand.
They were only test events so if there is a real one, expect a lot of publicity about them with increased attendance.

[Bugtownboy]

It, is it saved or shifted earlier or later ?

[Tinbum]

Perhaps a bit of both. Shifted but perhaps saves a bit of co2 because its shifted to a source thats more renewable?