UK Households To Be Urged To Use More Power This Summer As Renewables Soar (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0181722764
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/04/16/0030206/uk-households-to-be-urged-to-use-more-power-this-summer-as-renewables-soar
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar
> Households will be [2]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.
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> Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million 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.
[1] https://slashdot.org/~AmiMoJo
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/14/uk-households-power-renewables-soar
Octopus (Score:5, Informative)
I've said it elsewhere but...
At least one electricity company in the UK (Octopus) is already doing this.
Last year I had about a dozen "fill your boots" sessions from them, where they tell you a timeframe and in that timeframe not only is all electricity "free" (they only charge you for what you would have normally used in that period, any extra is free) but they enter you into prize draws, etc. for participating.
I used them to not only do all my chores, heating, cooling, cook dinner, etc. but also to fill my solar battery bank from the grid (which I then used to reduce my grid usage over the next few days). In fact, that's how I discovered what the maximum draw I can pull through my main consumer unit is before the main RCD trips.
I even did things like charged up all my cordless tool batteries and the like too.
This isn't new, but making it "official" and widening it to all electricity suppliers is just obvious.
I don't know what the electricity companies will think about it, because they seem to be largely profit-making worthless privatised entities, and asking them to help people reduce usage of their own product is nonsensical (I remember schemes were the water companies were supposed to encourage less water use, this involved sending you useless tat to drip-feed your plants and suchlike, and similarly for electricity companies, which involved sending you a free lightbulb).
But I suppose with the right incentive (e.g. penalising low usage or offsetting the extra usage against their later energy purchases, etc.) it might prompt them to take up the scheme too.
It's largely irrelevant, long-term, though, because as far as I'm concerned energy production is not democratised. I myself intend to be utility-independent by retirement, and electricity was the first and easiest to achieve, and I'm way ahead of schedule there.
Re:Octopus (Score:4, Informative)
It's really not nonsensical, actually. Base load can be incredibly expensive. If they can avoid firing up the most expensive plant, they make more money. It's really that simple. Even though it seems "free" to you, what's really going on is that you have become part of the supply side of the equation by using power when it's there, and then _not_ using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on. This is really a case where everybody wins.
Re: Octopus (Score:1)
Have you heard of decoupling policies, which are widey used, at least in the US?
AI: "This policy turns the "nonsensical" into a viable business strategy. By removing the penalty for selling less, utilities can actually lead conservation efforts without going out of business."
How? (Score:3)
How, exactly, is a private household supposed to increase their energy usage in the summer? Mine Bitcoin? And how will using more energy reduce their bills? This just shows the unintended problem with solar: It needs to be coupled with lots of storage - not hours, but weeks.
Re: (Score:2)
Turn the German-made air conditioner to "glacier mode" or, as Al Bundy referred to it, "blitzkrieg."
Re: (Score:1)
Same way as I did last summer - plug in the car, do the washing, turn on a/c, charge a standalone battery... it was great!
Re:How? (Score:4, Interesting)
Air conditioners when it is hot during the day. Run dishwashers or washing machines during the day instead of at night.
Re: (Score:2)
> How, exactly, is a private household supposed to increase their energy usage in the summer? Mine Bitcoin? And how will using more energy reduce their bills? This just shows the unintended problem with solar: It needs to be coupled with lots of storage - not hours, but weeks.
You could mine Bitcoin, I suppose, but the obvious thing to do would be charge up your EV. Energy storage on wheels!
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't followed the developments for a while now: does V2H finally work, is it available in most EVs?
Re: (Score:3)
Turn on your immersion heater. Wash/dry your clothes and dishes. Stick that roast in your electric oven. Charge your EV. Turn your fridge down a degree, or put some bottles of water in to cool for later. Run the AC.
Re: (Score:2)
The headline appears to be nonsense. It's not really about encouraging people to use more electricity but to time-shift their usage of appliances which draw a lot of power.
A good problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like a good problem to have tbh, Maybe we can greatly reduce the usage of our gas plants for a while. I can't help but think this might be a sign we need a load of batteries though, To store up this power and smooth out delivery.
Re: A good problem (Score:1)
Should Rivian move its battery-powered plant to the UK?
Re:A good problem (Score:5, Funny)
To smooth out even current excess power would require £20 billion in batteries alone. Since this is britain the project to do it would take 20 years and cost £150 billion and then get scaled back and cancelled at a cost of £300 billion
Re:A good problem (Score:5, Insightful)
There are plans to build a 1GW battery a mile away from me (in the UK), in open farmland. It's next to a solar farm, half a mile from 4 onshore wind turbines but, as expected, the usual crowd are having a strop and it's held up in planning. Not only are these batteries needed, it's far better than another crop of 600 houses!
As for free power during sunny/windy spells, my supplier offered that last summer. I used it to charge my PHEV and got around 100 miles of free driving out of it!
Re:A good problem (Score:4, Interesting)
We have moved beyond NIMBYs to BANANAs - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.
The government promised to do something about them, but whatever they have done isn't enough.
Re: (Score:3)
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs) What does this mean please ? It's been bugging me...
Re:A good problem (Score:5, Interesting)
So years ago I was helping out with a project to build an industrial tablet computer. They had picked Windows CE because the app developers were familiar with Windows. It was supposed to support a Microsoft technology called Silverlight, which was similar to Adobe Flash, for making the UI. Problem is, it just didn't work. Microsoft weren't interesting in fixing it either.
So I found Silvermoon, an open source version of Silverlight. It was a bit buggy, but we eventually got it working. While debugging some memory leaks, we found an interesting bit of code.
const int one = 65536;
To avoid using floating point maths, because back then some ARM chips either didn't have FPUs or they were slow, the code used the old trick of multiplying everything by 65536 (2^16) to create what is effectively fixed floating point maths using only integer instructions.
I just found it amusing that they decided to call the variable "one". It's actually a reasonable solution, and it did work.
Re: (Score:3)
Thank you for taking the time to write that :) My brain is no longer itching... A search turned up no real info as you can imagine.
Re: (Score:2)
> what is effectively fixed floating point maths
>> No longer floating if it is fixed ;)
>> More information [1]here [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic
Re:A good problem (Score:4, Informative)
There was a study from a university, I've lost the link now, but they estimated that to be 95% renewables and 5% other, we would need about 100GWh of storage of all kinds. The government is estimating to hit out 2030 target of 95% renewables+nuclear we need about 30GHw of batteries and 5GWh of longer term storage.
For reference, as of the end of 2025, China had over 200GWh of battery storage installed, and it's increasing exponentially.
Another point of reference, the new Sizewell C nuclear plant has already hit £40 billion, and is still rising. So £20 billion for batteries, if accurate, seems like a bargain for ultra low carbon, clean power.