Hello,

I am wondering what your opinions on smart grid and peak shaving are. Conventionally, I think of smart grid as the opportunity to have more points where electrical data can be monitored and transmitted to a central location. Possibly, smart grid could also be the capability of remote switching. I think by combining these two, when faults occur, the number of loads that are put out of service can be minimized.

Applying this to peak shaving, as a cable is reaching it's thermal limit, loads may be shed in order to ensure the cable is not overloaded and damaged.

Does anyone have more points to elaborate on this, or points that my opinion may not be correct? Please let me know!

Best,
-Stephen

Particularly, do you think people would allow remote switching, or would they be upset to give up the control of their own loads despite the fact that it may be better for the greater good.

It shouldn't be too hard to include an override feature but there would need to be a price penalty.

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Jonno

It depends how much of a financial incentive you are willing to give them.

You could give someone a second meter with a lower tariff, on the understanding that anything connected to that meter could be turned off for short periods if there's a supply shortage.

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S P Barker BSc PhD MIET

Edited: 01 February 2013 at 01:10 PM by ectophile

Remote switching is already very much an option for heavy industrial consumers, in order to allow the grid as a whole to react to high demand. Some loads, such as refridgeration, are very well suited to this - others obviously aren't!

This is called Demand Response by National Grid, though normally customers will make arrangements indirectly via aggregators. In the same vein, it is possible to enter into arrangements whereby backup generators can be synchronised for short periods. The financial incentives for large sites are quite strong - last month I read an interesting article on this in the Energy Institute's "Energy World" magazine (January 2013) to which I would recommend to you to for more details.

For domestic use... It would surely depend on the ease of use (ie automation) and a good enough incentive. I believe there are smart appliances such as washing machines that can already do the automation side, but even if not, in my line of work (PV) we have solutions for customers using comparitively crude relay-based switching on older appliances to get their dispatchable loads to match generation. Consumers managed to grasp the idea of Economy 7 well enough - we just need the meters and the tariffs.

As for applying this to specific cables, I think UKPN are doing some studies into this with a view to improving penetration of large-scale embedded generation without having to upgrade lines. It's part of an R&D programme called (inventively) "Low Carbon London", in which they're also trialling a number of other cunning measures.

James

I believe UKPN are possibly the most significant player (in Eastern Power Network as well - here called Flexible Plug & Play), though other DNOs are active in this area as well.

Makes a lot of sense to use dynamic measurements to optimise the utilisation of existing hardware.

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Jonno