Four years ago when I was looking to replace the car I was driving the furthest thing from my mind at the time was wondering how and where my electricity came from.
I was living in a 24 year-old semi-detached house still using the original gas boiler with which it was fitted and quite happily heating the house with gas and using electricity as I had been doing for the last 35 years since leaving home.
Then I got an electric car. Despite the fact that I had been paying extortionate amounts of money to put petrol into all the fossil-fuel powered cars I had driven since passing my test aged 18, now that I was using my home electric to charge the car I suddenly started to worry about my electricity bill.
It’s one thing to realise that your everyday activities around the house have a cost impact when it comes to electricity. It’s quite another to see that number jump quite significantly when the amount of power you’re putting in to your electric car can exceed the daily electricity usage for the whole house.
The fact that I was better off then before because even with the increased electricity usage I was spending far less than I was for petrol didn’t matter. Prior to getting my EV I was paying £X per week for electricity. Now I was paying £2X. That was a problem.
So the first thing I did was go back and look at one of my old electricity bills to try an understand what the situation was.
I dissected the contents of the bill (I was with British Gas at that point on a dual fuel tariff) and I discovered that I was paying a set amount of money for every kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity I was consuming regardless of when I consumed it. That figure was fairly high in comparison to the other companies providing electricity. But because I was on a dual-fuel tariff I was more concerned with the gas price. After all the vast majority of my energy bill for the year was made up of the gas I was using for heating the house and cooking food. Low in summer when the heating was off. High in winter when the temperature dropped.
But electricity was another matter. I was using a chunk of electricity every day — especially if I put on something like the electric oven to cook food or used the microwave/ kettle/ toaster at breakfast time.
But the overall amount wasn’t a stupidly large amount. Which meant that once I started adding 20 to 30 kWh of charge per day to top off the batteries it made the differential look terrifying. Suddenly my electricity usage was increasing tremendously. In summer — when gas usage was low — it started to climb above the amount I was paying for gas. And with the reasonably high price per kWh I was paying British Gas it seemed like I might have made an error buying the electric car.
Surely this wasn’t right?
But then I had a look around at what other EV drivers were doing.
That’s when I learned a few facts about how electricity usage varies throughout the day. First thing in the morning — when people get up for breakfast and run their electric showers etc, the pull on the electricity grid is large. Later in the day when they get home, make dinner and switch on the TV it spikes again. But outside of those times — and especially in times such as the middle of the night — the need for electricity was low. In fact it was so low they had to curtail electricity generation in certain instances because they were producing too much.
So certain innovative companies decided they would try and get people to time-shift their electricity usage to be outside those peak times. Which is where time-of-day tariffs come in. A time-of-day tariff basically says “I’m going to charge you a lot of money if you use electricity at peak times. If you use it outside those you’ll pay a lot less”.
In fact companies like Octopus Energy went further and said “If you want to charge your car between midnight and four in the morning we’ll virtually give you the energy for free” That’s ideal for someone like me who can plug their car in when they get home from work and leave it plugged in all night. The car would only pull power from the grid when the tariff was cheap. It meant I could fill my electric car (at the time) from completely empty to completely full and pay around £1.50. For context, that’s less than I was paying for a single litre of petrol at various times during the ownership of my fossil-fuelled car. If I was doing this every night for a month it meant the increase in my electricity bill was around £45. That’s less than I was paying for a full tank of fuel in my old Honda Civic. I was doing that three times per week.
This was all good.
I wanted more.
So I looked into electricity a little deeper. That’s when I learned about peaker plants.
Peaker plants are power stations which come on from time to time to provide a boost of energy when the demand increases higher than the grid can deal with at the moment. This usually coincides with the spikes I mentioned earlier- early morning and early evening.
If the grid is pumping out a basic level of electricity — enough to power the country during the middle of the day — when people get home at night and start turning on appliances, especially in winter when it’s dark and cold, the demand for power increases quickly. Around the country there are power plants that are running at very low capacity just waiting for these spikes. When they come they can ramp up quickly to boost the energy supply to the grid. The problem with these peaker plants is that they are usually fuelled by natural gas or (to a lesser extent) coal.
This has two knock-on impacts. Firstly it increases the amount of pollution and carbon dioxide being pumped into the air. Secondly it means power stations need to buy coal and gas to fuel these plants. This is expensive.
I thought to myself “How can I help resolve this issue?” The answer came with a little bit of investigation and searching on forums : Time shifting of electricity usage.
It works on a very simple basis which is best explained by the Breakfast Scenario.
Imagine I come downstairs in a morning to make my breakfast. My usual meal is porridge, toast and coffee. I make the porridge in the microwave.
So what I usually do is I come down, fill the kettle, put two slices of bread in the toaster and crank the microwave up to maximum to heat the porridge. All three items are plulling power from the grid at the same time. The microwave is pulling 900w, the kettle 2kW and the toaster around 1kW. As they are all running at the same time the grid needs to supply almost 4kW of power to my house to accommodate that.
But imagine the following scenario: I come down in the morning and I put the microwave on. While the microwave is working I fill the kettle and prepare the coffee. When the microwave has finished I switch the kettle on. While the kettle is boiling I put bread in the toaster, ready, and take the porridge out to cool a little. When the kettle is boiled I push the lever down on the toaster and finish making the coffee.
By the time the toast is done the coffee is ready and the porridge is cool enough to eat.
But the maximum amount of energy the grid has had to supply to my house is only 2kW — when the kettle was on.
I still get my breakfast but the grid hasn’t had to provide peak power of 4kW to me. My energy usage is the same but the power draw has been reduced by 50%. I’ve time shifted my electricity usage (albeit on a small scale)
Now imagine this scenario but on a much bigger scale — nationwide. Instead of everyone cooking their evening meals at 6pm why not delay that a little until 8pm? Or eat earlier. Instead of putting the tumble dryer or dishwasher on at 6pm why not leave it until the middle of the night? Instead of taking a power-shower right when you com home why not just do a quick wash in the sink then shower at 10pm before you go to bed?
Individual actions will accumulate to the point where the spike that occurs in the morning and evening will be smoothed out over the day. This, then, has a knock on impact on the amount of energy we need to pull from peaker plants. Reducing the need for peaker plants reduces the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as well as lowering overall energy bills.
But how easy is it to do this? At a fundamental level it’s really easy if you’re willing to make a few changes. I’ve already mentioned a couple of examples of how you can spread the load over the day. But these require physical steps to be taken.
What we really need to do is to automate this. Take the stress out of having people make the decisions needed to make this happen.
There are several ways we can do this.
You may have heard of the governments drive to install smart meters in houses. This has several benefits over the old dumb meters. With smart meters you can take advantage of the time-of-day tariffs I mentioned earlier. This means you can save money by time-shifting your electricity use. But the other thing smart meters can do is help control electricity usage. The naysayers have decried this as ‘The government is going to stop you charging your EV overnight through the smart meters!’. That is, of course, a gross over exaggeration of the truth. What the smart meter will do is manage the power draw from the grid by default to stop an EV from charging at peak times (such as 4pm to 7pm) Outside of that there’ll be no problem with charging. Oh, and you can always override this if you need to.
The second way of doing this is using batteries. I was lucky enough to get a solar array installed alongside a storage battery earlier this year. What this does is it allows me to take electricity at the cheap rate and store it for use during the expensive time. If the battery fills in the middle of the night — as mine does if I’m not using the solar array - I can use that stored energy to make my dinner at 6pm — right in the middle of the peak energy usage time — knowing that all the electricity I need for that will come from my storage battery and not the grid. This has a dual benefit. Firstly it reduces the peak power pull from the grid. Secondly it means the price I’m paying for my electricity is lower because I’m using the cheap time-of-day tariff (or free solar) to charge the battery and the car.
Thirdly it’s through the use of tools such as Equiwatt. This is an app that connects to your smart plugs and lamps and manages them on your behalf when the electricity mix is relatively high in carbon. They have ‘events’ linked to peak power usage. You can opt in to these events. The app will turn appliances and lights off during these events and reward you as a result of doing this. The reduction in power draw from the grid helps to balance the power requirements and reduce the need for peaker plants.
Fourthly we do this through the use of Virtual Power Plants. At the moment this is a concept which works really well with people using the Tesla Power Wall battery pack.
What happens with a Virtual Power Plant is that the battery packs that are opted in to the scheme can be called upon during times of peak power requirements (i.e. when peaker plants would be spooled up to help) and provide power from their batteries back to the grid. This reduces the draw from the grid and decreases the need for peaker plants.
There are already trials ongoing in the US with virtual power plants and they have been very successful. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that if the number of battery storage units increases nationwide we can include individual’s non-Tesla power packs in schemes such as this.
Linked to this is the concept of V2G. This means Vehicle To Grid. If you’ve bought your new electric car — which will probably spend the best part of 90% of its time stationary — wouldn’t it make sense that electricity stored in the battery of that vehicle be available to the grid to use in peak times? That’s exactly the concept of V2G. There are trials going on around the world with V2G at the moment and they seem to be working quite successfully.
The maths is very interesting. Take the UK. If we get 10 million EVs plugged in overnight on V2G systems and they each provide 7kW of power to the grid (Which, over one hour will lose the car approximately 20 miles of range) this will give the UK 70,000,000 Kw (or 70 GW) of power. For context, as I write this at 9am on a Saturday morning in mid September the UK grid is using a little under 25 GW of power. Checking historical data, the highest draw on the grid during the week of January 16th 2022 was slightly below 50GW.
There are issues with V2G at the moment in that only a small proportion of the EVs on the road are designed to enable this. They also need expensive units installed at each home. But as we progress with the technology these barriers will be overcome.
Once power companies see the benefits of this, reimbursement plans will come into place to pay people for using their home storage or vehicle battery so uptake will increase.
But why do we want to reduce the power peaks?
That answer lies at the heart of decarbonisation.
You will all have heard the refrain a lot of the fossil-fuel lobby use to decry renewables “What do you do when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?” It’s almost like they think this hasn’t occurred to anyone in the renewables arena.
But what’s underneath this sentiment is actually a legitimate concern. What they’re really saying is “When it’s the middle of winter and we need energy to deal with the spikes at tea time how can you scale up wind and solar to meet that demand?” The answer is you can’t.
But if you can alter the grid to ensure that those spikes are as low as possible the need to have gas- or coal-powered peaker plants drops considerably.
If we can use renewables such as tidal power, wave power, storage batteries, hydroelectricity, offshore- and onshore-wind, and solar energy we can create a system where the various generation types will produce enough power to remove the need for peaker plants. Time shifting energy usage through storage, smart meters and human intervention will create a system where the need for gas and coal plants will disappear. Or, at the very least, be reduced to a level that is much, much, lower than we currently have.
But is this really possible?
Many people seem to think it isn’t. They say that the transient nature of renewables, coupled with the increased need for electricity to power electric cars when all new fossil fuel sales are banned in 2030, will put such a strain on the grid that we won’t be able to deal with it.
National Grid don’t think this is the case, though. In fact they’re keen to remind everyone that we are generating less electricity now than we were ten years ago so there is certainly excess capacity in the system. They don’t see an issue with more electric cars on the grid.
Can we ’time shift’ enough usage to smooth the peaks in demand completely? Potentially — especially if the tech solutions I mention above come into play in a widespread way. But even a small movement will reap benefits.
Because of the huge price disparity between fossil fuel and renewables any shift towards wind, solar, tidal etc will have a dual benefit. Firstly, it will reduce our dependency on foreign fossil fuel providers (particularly important now that the North Sea reserves are virtually empty and fracking will provide such low volumes). Secondly, the cost to provide the renewable power is an order of magnitude lower than buying fossil fuels. It’s also an energy efficiency thing. In the first 11 days of August 2022, for example, the UK generated 3TWh of renewable electricity. To generate the same from gas (which has higher conversion losses because a lot of the energy is dissipated as heat) we would have had to by 7TWh of fuel costing £900m (equal to approximately £30 per UK household). Even if renewables and gas were priced the same the savings would have been around £514m due to the increased efficiency of renewables. This year alone record levels of solar power across the EU avoided the need to purchase 20bn cubic feet of gas which would have cost £25bn to import.
But will we get situations where the majority of the power we can produce comes from renewables and — for whatever reason — we have dull, windless days for many many weeks? Sure, it’s always a possibility.
But there are numerous examples of countries (or areas within countries) that are 100% reliable on renewables. Not just wind and solar (although Orkney produces so much renewable energy from wind turbines the government is subsidising residents to encourage them to buy electric cars so they can absorb the excess energy), but tidal power, wave power, geothermal power and hydroelectric power. The solution is to ensure the right mix of these in the right place with appropriate use of storage and associated technology to make it happen.
Of course if we really wanted to reduce the amount of pull on our electricity grid we could take a look at all those crypto miners…
