What is a smart grid?

Well lets flip this around. If we consider the French electricity grid, 80% of electricity in France is generated by nuclear power stations. By definition, these power stations are always on. Notwithstanding maintenance periods and such like, the power is flowing no matter the demand.

A smart grid simply allows supply to match demand, and vice versa.

Creating a smart grid is a crucial piece of the puzzle for the future UK energy grid. It will:

1. Manage demand through live pricing mechanisms
2. Remotely control when power intensive devices call for power
3. Store surplus electricity for use later
4. Provide real time data to consumers and producers on energy demand & generation

How does this affect me?

Let us consider electric vehicle charging at home. If the entire nation switches their car charger on at precisely 00:30 hrs, this has the potential to cause problems. One feature of smart EV chargers is that they will swich on at very slightly different times (determined remotely), thus managing the demand. The car driver won’t notice any difference when they get in their car in the morning, but the grid will remain stable.

In the future, one of the potential uses of a car battery will be to power the home (Vehicle to Home or V2H) or the grid (Vehicle to Grid or V2G). The typical car battery is 40 kWh, with larger models now sporting 80 kWh batteries. The typical UK household only uses about 10 kWh per day. So a fully charged vehicle has the potential to power 8 homes for a full day.

In the UK at the moment a number of trials are underway to experiment with this V2H & V2G technology. The technology itself works just fine, but what the energy companies need to experiment wi-th is the consumer behaviour aspect. For instance, will the average citizen be happy to plug in their car at 1700 hrs only to see it drained of power for the following 4 hours? “What if I need to do an emergency 100 mile drive?”

A smart home battery mitigates many of the concerns over variable supply and demand, and allows the average citizen to contribute to the decarbonisation of the energy grid. The battery allows you to store the excess power generated during the day from you own personal solar array for use later when you do need it. Similar to the car battery trials, if this technology is rolled out nationwide over the course of the next 20 years, we can see a lot of possibilities open up. Tesla have coined the term “Virtual Power Plant” for this concept).

A future in which hundreds of GigaWatt hours (GWh) of storage capacity are available in homes and vehicles and distributed around the country means that the current requirement to ‘turn on’ a dormant gas powered power station is no longer necessary. Therefore we don’t require expensive under-utilised infrastructure.

In one version of our future, one could imagine a scenario in which the proliferation of V2G charging points is so extensive that your vehicle is plugged in whenever it isn’t on the move. That way the energy companies in conjunction with the charge point operators and the vehicle manufactures could deposit power into the battery of the car, and remove it later when required. The electricity wouldn’t be yours, but simply stored there!

This is an exciting and fast developing topic.

Let Brimstone Energy be your partner as we navigate these changes together.