@toodles 

As it is my birthday today, I had to request my Amazon Echo to ‘Play BBC Sounds’ for this programme when I returned from a very enjoyable Italian Restaurant meal.

Happy Birthday. 🎂🍷🎁

Evan is joined by:

A whole bunch of people with a vested interest... 🫢😁😂

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00237z4

The Bottom Line: How Smart is the Smart Energy System?

Regards, Toodles.

Nor do I think the political flavour of my local MP is hugely significant. After all, I'm going to be putting forward information rather than asking them to vote on a contentious issue.

Let's turn this point the other way around and ask ourselves "Do we think that my MP would benefit from having issues on this RHH Forum brought to their attention?"

In almost every case the answer will be a resounding 'Yes!'
There will be very few MPs who aren't interested in making progress towards combating Climate Change and 'solving' the energy crisis.

We should also remember that the bulk of their intray is usually filled with constituents' problems.
It's a refreshing change to receive a 'briefing' which they can actually do something about.

were I an Octopus employee I'd be pushing the billing platform as fast as possible to become the de-facto standard, and take the smarts out of the regulated equipment

I'm unsure which way to understand that last phrase.

There are some unused features in our Smart Meters which would be most beneficial to households with pre-payment meters and/or in energy poverty.

Equally I don't yet know of any Supplier's billing system which is accurate for households on ToU tariffs.

There are two major ways in which we can provide genuinely useful briefings to our MPs:

1: When we come across a government proposal which is based on poor science, we can point out why and then suggest an alternative.

In the context of this topic, I've stated earlier that the DESNZ proposals to control (switch off) appliances in the home is flawed.

As a 'free thinker' without any direction being given to me by 'party policy' I can pose a different solution to reduce the early evening peak demand:

What if we changed the Boiler Upgrade Scheme such that the £7500 subsidy to install a heat-pump was only applied to models which had a storage battery to supply them?

2: When I read of energy-related Planning Applications and government strategy which omits an essential detail, then I can write to an MP and local Councillors to highlight that.

Let me give two current examples:

a: In North Devon, White Cross has an application to bring ashore a cable from Phase-1 of the Celtic Array. That's a floating offshore wind farm which they want to connect to the grid at the closest possible point.

The idea is to bring the cable ashore in the public car park at the north end of Saunton Sands, a stunningly beautiful sandy beach facing west. They will then join the marine connection to a pair of underground cables, which are taken in an an easterly direction below a golf course, before turning south and running 6km south beneath a SSSI. What's not to like?! 🤔 

Due to the inevitable backlash, White Cross resubmitted lots of extra documents and the Local Planning Authority (LPA) has opened up a second period of public consultation.

As this area isn't local to me, I don't understand how this will affect tourism and transport. So I'm really interested only in looking at the technical detail. That includes the cable voltage, its current rating, and where it is to be connected to the Bulk Supply Point transformer on the banks of the River Taw.

So I skimmed through the titles of new documents until I came across the Outline Cable Specification and Installation Plan.

Turning to p.33, I find that Appendix A is a completely blank page, having only the title at the top and the document reference in the footer!

Why do I think that is?

What could possibly go wrong by granting planning consent for an item which has no descriptive detail?!

b: On Friday 12th July, the new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero issued three Decision Notices for large-scale solar farms which had passed through the Planning Inspectorate. That process replaces the usual application to the LPA for grid connections of 50MW and above. They are deemed Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects.

The three applications are:

Gate Burton Energy Park;  530MW & Battery Electricity Storage System (BESS), connecting at Cottam Grid Supply Point (GSP)

Mallard Pass Solar Project; 350MW, connecting at Ryhall GSP

Sunnica Energy Farm; 500MW & BESS, connecting at Burwell GSP

I was interested in seeing what Planning Conditions had been stipulated by the Planning Inspectorate in respect of the two applications which included commercial battery storage.

The answer was NONE.

And the reason quickly became obvious. The Inspectors had only gathered information on the details which the three Applicants had supplied within their document libraries. Neither Gate Burton nor Sunnica had provided any specification of the battery storage element in their proposals. Nowhere did they stipulate

• the capacity of the BESS in MWh
• how the import/export current flow is controlled or limited by National Grid
• the battery chemistry, which affects potential environmental hazards such as contamination during initial installation and later routine maintenance
• the control and monitoring systems by which the BESS is operated

On the map above you will see I've also marked a point on the 400kV transmission grid just south of the two gas-fired generators at Little Barford.

That was the site of a lightning strike on Friday 9th August 2019 which initiated a cascade effect. 150MW of embedded generation was 'lost' to 1.1m customers at 16:52.
The grid frequency dropped to 48.8Hz - sufficiently low that it was no longer possible to bring additional generators on-stream.

Although the technical outage only took a few minutes to resolve, the 'load shedding' process removed supplies to end-users across a large area of East England, including hospitals, airports and the East Coast mainline railway. It took a couple of days before all supplies were restored.

If there was anywhere in England where you would want to see great detail required for 3rd-parties to connect to the 400kV transmission grid, it's in that area between Nottingham and London!

Planners, Councillors and MPs won't notice these omissions unless we tell them.

In a democracy we enjoy the right to hold these parties to account.
To a large extent, we have a responsibility to do so without there first needing to be a disaster to stimulate us into action!

And yet staff on BEIS and then DESNZ have taken two years to devise these proposals. That doesn't come cheap!

Compared to a poorly executed development and rollout, some civil servants for a few years looks to be a bargain. But I'm not sure such long iteration times help with system development; were I an Octopus employee I'd be pushing the billing platform as fast as possible to become the de-facto standard, and take the smarts out of the regulated equipment (i.e. meter reading and load control over the internet, cybersecurity experts be damned).

I'd be surprised if it's as high as 50.

And yet staff on BEIS and then DESNZ have taken two years to devise these proposals. That doesn't come cheap!

It's a 'technical standards committee' which DESNZ proposes to pick up our responses and create a regulatory framework to implement these proposals. How are they going to incentivise suitably knowledgeable experts to sit alongside them and weave this bag of nails into a Decision Notice?

They'll need it to be signed off by Ed Milliband and Ofgem, neither of whom will want to approve regulations that will be seen as antagonistic to us consumers.

My input was to be anonymous but I’ll happily state that my comments were along the lines of a customers express permission must be required, safety must come first and why reinvent wheels when control protocols are available commercially. I’m particularly sensitive to the hackers paradise that such a central system could become.

As background chatter I've been on technical standards committee a couple of times and it requires extreme technical insight which the governmental members present didn’t have. On another occasion a colleague was on a standard body and it needed the brightest and most politically acute (for commercial exploitation by competitors) person we had. Not a civil service role.

I do find it worrying though that we can have large organisations supposedly working on our behalves who have huge holes in their knowledge and experience yet are responsible for future plans that affect us all (and the whole world) so fundamentally in the future.

I think you just defined the current system of democratic government as enacted in the UK. I believe Sir Winston Churchill was - perhaps erroneously - credited with the quote which, paraphrased, is "It is the worst possible system, except for all the others."

I do find it worrying though that we can have large organisations supposedly working on our behalves who have huge holes in their knowledge and experience yet are responsible for future plans that affect us all (and the whole world) so fundamentally in the future. Is this the point at which we start uttering ‘Be Afraid, be Very Afraid’? Regards, Lazy Toodles.