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Posted on 04/13/2026 6:34:44 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain’s record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills.
Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs.
The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity.
Many suppliers already offer more than 2m households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid.
The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills.
The offer could prove particularly popular this summer as households brace for the government’s cap on dual fuel energy bills to rise to almost £2,000 a year from July due to soaring energy market costs since the US-Israeli war on Iran began.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
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I bet it’s a trap.
We will have excess energy.....tomorrow.
Turn on your lights during the day. Read by candlelight at night.
It does make sense to use the surplus power directly rather than store it in batteries. No conversion loss, less expensive electric hardware.
Only in Britainistan! 🤪
So much for “energy conservation”
Have they reduced the cost?
If they reduce the cost there’s no need for “urging”. Supply and demand will take care of it.
Use your North Sea oil, Britain.
Shouldn’t they store it for next winter? 🤔😊👍
Or in honest speech, “please don’t run anything during non-peak hours or the grid will collapse.”
(said in the Oliver Twist adult voice)
“M O R E ???!!”
ERCOT routinely does this at the wholesale level. Midday sun or middle of the night and a front is coming across the panhandle and West Texas.
You can get RPP plans that have zero cost kWh from 2300 till 0600 and some do all weekends from 2300 Friday till 0600 Monday morning.
Of course you pay higher rates for the peak rates but if you have a smart home with remote controlled outlets, AC, water heaters ,dryers , stoves all via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth , Samsung has the best for these large energy loads every one of my appliances is a Samsung with full home hub controls, the Mitsubishi spilts are as well. The bonus is if you have ppwerwalls you can charge them for free at night and then drop the grid all together from 0600 till 2300 if you wanted too. Your bill would then be the monthly meter fees , and any kWh used on peak virtually zero if you had 30-60kWh worth of Powerwalls.
Depending on your T&D provider who is completely separate from your retail power provider you would still be responsible for your transmission and distribution charges even off peak , Oncor charges day and night regardless of if your RPP is charging you for the energy it bought off the wholesale market. Oncor & AEP still will charge for every kWh moved across their wires unless you are selling power to them and the purchaser pays the T&D not the seller.
I read that some places pump water uphill to reservoirs, using excess electricity and water. Similar to a battery, when electricity is needed then water can flow back down thru generators to provide power. Why doesn't the UK do that?
They need to use or shed excess energy during the midday hours, to keep the grid from destabilizing. Australia has been doing this also. Sounds great—free energy!! It is necessary because there is no way to store large amounts of energy at the scale of the grid. But the bill keeps going up regardless.
It's been cloudy today and will be for the next several days, so I fired up our System 2000 boiler with one of 3 timers I use to control it, for one hour.
That heated 80 gallons of water in a super insulated storage tank and the 2 foot+ thick concrete floor of our kitchen.
We will have hot water for about 3 days.
When there is at least a few hours of sun, we have hot water for free stored for about 3 days.
We've been heating our water with mostly solar for about 40 years.
When it's sunny, you do the laundry, the dishes, take showers, etc.
You try to reduce that when it's cloudy.
If the enviro-whackos were serious about the environment, they would push heating water with solar.
It is far safer and easier to store energy this way than with electricity.
The only problem is, it is harder to turn solar hot water systems into money laundries for democrats than solar panels.
If the UK were to extract all technically recoverable oil and gas from the North Sea, it would last approximately 15 to 20 years at current consumption rates.
Total Reserves: Estimated remaining recoverable reserves (proven and probable) are in the range of 2.9 to 7.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (boe)
In 2025, the UK’s total inland energy consumption was 164.5 million tonnes of oil equivalent (Mtoe). While total oil-specific consumption in barrels of oil equivalent (boe) for the full year 2025 is still being finalized in reports, data from late 2024 showed daily consumption at roughly 1.3 million barrels per day (bpd).
7.5 billion boe. Is around 5770 days worth or 15.8 years of the UK kept it all for themselves and didn’t increase consumption.
I have done much work as a Petro Geo out of Aberdeen Scotland the current figures are 70-90% of the existing economically recoverable reserves have been exploited with Brent above $100 tertiary recovery become somewhat economical in some areas not all but you need to expect the price to stay above $100 for some time to justify the structural investments needed for tertiary recovery methods.
Britain needs nukes there grid is smaller than ERCOT in Texas alone and France is roughly equivalent in megawatts of capacity. 50 ish one gigawatt sizes reactors solves their energy supply issues for 60+ years which is expecting them not to be relicenced at 60 years age for another 20 or 30 yr. Britain is small enough that nuclear district heating makes sense as well as geothermal energy storage of said nuclear heat for years worth of energy storage.
Ask MIT for the tech it already exists.
Round trip eff for electricity is irrelevant on a terawatt year scale ,plus district heating is not a double Carnot hit it’s heat in heat out at 90% round trip eff. Store heat and use heat which is more than half of the UK primary energy consumption is heating , homes,water,and buildings.
Just save it for the winter.
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