The promised essay.
My starting point is that we need smart grids, and smart meters are warranted by their role in enabling smart grids.
Consider some scenarios:
- the sun is shining at chateau
@Drago and his solar panels are generating. But it's not shining elsewhere in the country. So we'd ideally like
@Drago not to run his washing machine etc just yet but to export the maximum juice he can into the grid. We need to give him a financial incentive to agree to this - and we need a mechanism for signalling to him that this is what we'd like him to do.
- the strongest winds are moving from south to north across the country overnight. So ideally we'd like all the people in the south to get on and charge their electric cars as soon as possible, but the people in the north to delay starting charging till later in the night.
- a street of 200 homes now all have electric cars - but the electricity supply only has the capacity to charge 150 at once. If we rely on chance, we get away with it most of the time, but every now and again too many people try at once and a fuse blows. Either we upgrade the electricity supply- or we have a mechanism to coordinate the charging of cars.
- a ship drags an anchor over a submarine cable (or we have too many lightning strikes too quickly over the Pennines) and the UK looses a gigawatt of electricity instantaneously. Instead of having a power station sitting there all ready to generate at a moment's notice - the present situation - we simply delay charging everyone's electric cars for twenty minutes (or, if there aren't enough charging, ask those that are, to export from their batteries for a bit)
Note 1: it is common ground that this sort of functionality is way beyond what the current UK smart meter program is delivering - this is about future vision
Note 2: demand management delivered through frequency sensitivity could deliver the last scenario but not, I think, the others
Note 3: although I do happen to work in the industry, and although I had a very peripheral role in the smart meter program a few years ago, I am not an expert on system ops and I'm sure my colleagues who do would feel even my vision is distinctly limited
Note 4: batteries, as
@McWobble correctly points out, are hard to envisage ever being rolled out to the extent necessary to solve our energy storage needs. But given that we're about to have a whole load of batteries connected to the grid for chunks of time anyway - in cars - we'd be crazy not to make what use of that we can. Other distributed storage is possible. There was a project on a Scottish island where they paid to insulate people's hot water tanks better, then, when the wind blew, they used the electricity to heat the water hotter than you usually would and store energy that way.
Oh, gosh, I completely misinterpreted that. Sorry swansonj over missing your apology! There's defniitely no need for you to apologise once more for my own ineptitude - that's my fault, I should have read your post more carefully and wound my neck in.
