Reply to post: Re: Points from a briefing

UK.gov was warned of smart meter debacle by Cabinet Office in 2012

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Points from a briefing

Batteries are commercially viable - not for everyone, but definitely for some.

This is true, but the real change comes with electric vehicles. In very broad brush terms the following are true:

Buying an electric vehicle doubles the average house's electricity demand

If more than about 30% of people have EVs the distribution network can't cope

If more than about 5% of people have EVs the generation system can't support concurrent charging anywhere near peak demand

With an EV you're going to have a 40-80 kWh battery on the drive

....so household batteries in the 1-10kWh range are a bit pointless

And what this means is that the EV charging needs to be centrally and cleverly managed. The crappy auxiliary load switch on a SMETS2 smart meter won't cope. And if EV demand is managed automatically, then with more than about 2.5% of the car fleet as EVs, the price of "flexibility" falls dramatically, and the whole point of smart meters, smart appliances, and time of use tariffs disappear. BEIS are going to add vast cost and complexity to the energy system for the simple reason that they aren't clever enough to see the big picture (which is also why they threw vast subsidies at rubbish technologies for the UK like biomass and PV).

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