UK Wind Record

[ALAN/ALAN D]

Ref " Cold tonight and consumption high.
Is this a Gas record ?
George. "





The gas could have been used here.

[dan_b]

I guess this is something the Grid will have to work out - do these demand side incentives actually work or are there unintended consequences once hundreds of thousands of people start behaving in ways not expected?

I do not see the point of the saving sessions storeing demand up and all coming at once - seems to be making matters worse. Must be missing something.

[John_S]

Perhaps there is a case for different parts of the country having staggered start and finish times. Eg some start and finish half an hour earlier and some start and finish half an hour later.

Are there any statistics to say how much savings were achieved at grid level? I would have thought that a 0.55 GW target might have shown as a slight dip in demand, but no signs of that yesterday.

[nowty]

I guess this is something the Grid will have to work out - do these demand side incentives actually work or are there unintended consequences once hundreds of thousands of people start behaving in ways not expected?

I do not see the point of the saving sessions storeing demand up and all coming at once - seems to be making matters worse. Must be missing something.

The session was designed to reduce circa 0.5GW of demand, which it almost certainly did. If there was no saving session, the peak gas record may have been even higher at around 5pm.

At 6.20pm the demand was down against the peak and dropping rapidly. It may have been a supply issue, like pumped storage or interconnectors.

I note the actual's verses forecast demand have been way out during some of these colder days, maybe the leccy demand for heating and EVs are finally starting to bite.

[Jinx]

Might be best to stagger the times by supplier rather than area, less likely to cause localised issues.

[nowty]

Might be best to stagger the times by supplier rather than area, less likely to cause localised issues.

To put it into perspective, the Saving Session reduction only accounted for 1% of total demand.

The peak demand at 5pm was just short of 48.91 GW and the saving session estimated purchased volume reduction was 0.487 GW.

The difference in day ahead demand forecast and actual demand was around 10% going in the wrong direction.

Gonna need a bigger boat springs to mind.

[Krill]

The saving sessions need to be longer: if the peaks last from 1600 to 1900 then the DRS should cover the full time period as well. THe issue being that all of us lot with batteries will wait until the end of the period to dump our excess stored energy, so they would need to stagger as everyone points out.

Just can't do it by supplier because everyone in our cohort is essentially with Octopus.

Or they could just subsidise batteries for everyone.

[Adokforme]

The saving sessions need to be longer: if the peaks last from 1600 to 1900 then the DRS should cover the full time period as well. THe issue being that all of us lot with batteries will wait until the end of the period to dump our excess stored energy, so they would need to stagger as everyone points out.

Just can't do it by supplier because everyone in our cohort is essentially with Octopus.

Or they could just subsidise batteries for everyone.

Quite agree Krill, Subsidise or at least offer some incentives along with PV. After all, if a good proportion of the population were onboard, like us, the peaks would be no where near what they currently are.

[Jinx]

Good point Nowty, I’d hope the intention is that these tests prove the concept and it’s rolled out to all suppliers and the incentives become generous enough to get many more onboard, a tenfold increase, possible, I know very few people aware, let alone actively participating.

[dan_b]

These trials will certainly generate a lot of data for behavioural scientists to pour over if nothing else!
It's interesting as I think organisations generally underestimate individual behaviours on a large scale - remember the UK Govt didn't think people would adopt or accept the COVID Lockdowns.

Slightly related point, the updated legislation for EV charge points was designed to reduce the local network/grid impact of 100,000s of EVs all being driven home and plugged in to charge at essentially the same time, creating another huge spike in demand. There is now a default setting to charge off-peak, and there's a "random start delay" feature too - so even if 100 cars scheduled to start at 5.30pm, there would be a random 15 min spread of the start time across those 100 chargers...