Smart Energy Archives - Creative Connectivity

Reclaiming NIMBY – Nuclear in my Back Yard

What do Plymouth, Weymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth have in common? They’re all South coast towns in England, and for the past fifty years they’ve all been happy to host small nuclear power plants within a few miles of their town centre. In the not very distant future, they might be joined by a lot more British towns and cities as nuclear enters a new phase of rolling out SMRs – Small Modular Reactors. That could be the best energy decision any Government has made for the last seventy years.

The small nuclear reactors these towns host aren’t connected to the grid – they’re the ones that power the UK’s fleet of nuclear submarines which visit these and other ports. The concept behind an SMR is to scale these small reactors up to a level where they can be manufactured cost effectively as standard power plants which can be located wherever a baseload electricity generator is needed.

Is Carbon Capture the new Fusion?

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research. It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors. At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”. That last claim was made in 1954. It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity. However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream.

What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage. Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s. You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing. Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion. Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change. The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story. In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans. The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.

Saving Energy – The Myth of Vampire Power

There’s nothing like an energy crisis to bring out the urban myths about what’s stealing all of our electricity. The most prevalent of these is the concept of vampire or phantom power, where devices which are left plugged in or on standby are demonised, with the claim that they consume kiloWattHours of energy, pushing up our bills. Given that electricity prices in the UK look set to triple this year, that’s a big worry. However, many of the figures I see being used to support this are decades old, which means that some of the advice being given is misleading or downright wrong. So I thought it would be a good time to look at exactly how much power our devices actually take, so that people can make informed decisions.

Smart Meter update – Let’s do a DDOS

If you’ve been following the GB Smart Metering story, you’ll already know that it is one of the worst examples of a Government led IT disaster, which has already cost the taxpayer around £20 billion. In the latest twist to the sorry saga, we have just had the bizarre phenomenon of National Meter Reading Day, when millions of energy consumers effectively performed a Distributed Denial of Service attack on the 31^st March, by submitting their energy readings. It resulted in the websites of most of our leading energy suppliers crashing.

The background to this is that consumer energy prices in the UK have just taken a substantial hike. On the 1^st April, a price cap enforced by the Government was lifted, allowing energy suppliers to raise tariffs. On his popular Money Show Live TV program, Martin Lewis urged customers to make a note of their meter readings on 31^st April and to submit them to their supplier’s website. The following message went viral:

NetZero nepotism – Boris’ COP26 cop out

Back in 2010, I was the CTO of a small energy startup, designing connected domestic energy sensors, along with some fairly hardcore data analytics, to help consumers work out what was contributing to their energy bills. It was a fairly crowded market as small companies saw the potential for promoting energy efficiency to consumers and investigating ways to use emerging battery technologies to smooth out household demand and reduce cost. Few of those companies survived. Energy suppliers acquired some, then shut them down as they realised that persuading consumers to spend less money didn’t really fit well with their business model. The energy suppliers also had bigger issues, such as dealing with the Government’s impending Smart Metering programme. A few of the startups have survived and were looking forward to renewed interest arising from the UK hosting the COP26 summit.

A couple of months back I started to hear from them that promises to be involved in the events surrounding COP26 were being withdrawn, because space needed to be allocated to other companies that were “closer” to the Government. It seemed that what you knew was less important than who you knew. NetZero nepotism appeared to be kicking in. It felt reminiscent of what we saw at the start of the pandemic, where companies with engineering expertise were asked to help design and build ventilators. A few months later, those efforts were quietly put on the shelf. Instead, contracts for PPE and Test & Trace took precedence. They were easier for Government ministers to comprehend than real engineering, so could be packaged up in marketing campaigns and handed out to the Friends of Dominic and Matty. This week’s damning report from the Public Accounts Committee has described Test & Trace as “muddled, overstated, with an eye-wateringly expensive budget of over £37 billion, which has failed on its main objectives”. That £37 billion is not vastly different from what the equally muddled and overstated Smart Metering programme will have cost the consumer by the time it’s complete, showing that the Government is not generally the best judge of who can deliver, or the way to do it. If we want to achieve our NetZero objectives, it’s vital that we don’t go down the same route.

Smart Meters, Fake News and the IoT

Do smart meters spread Covid? Of course they don’t. Not even the fake news community have suggested that. As regular readers will know, I’ve been socially distancing from smart meters ever since the British Government took what was basically a good idea and morphed it into a £15 billion IT disaster. Despite that, I still got Covid.

Do smart meters encourage fake news? Absolutely. Here in the UK we have a Government funded agency called Smart Energy GB, which specialises in misleading advertisements in an attempt to persuade people to install the world’s most expensive smart meters. I believe they may have the honour of producing the largest number of advertisements from a Government body to be banned for misinformation. But they’re not letting a little issue like that stop them from peddling more fake news.