Communities

As costs of energy double and redouble in the UK, and the government prepares to announce details of a bailout for householders, 100,000 off-grid households face winter out in the cold.

The bailout is likely to be based on previous utility bills, and as off-grid homes do not buy from utility companies they are being left out of the calculations. Van-dwellers, liveaboard boaters and permanent dwellings that are energy independent mostly rely on oil, butane or wood for heating and cooking. All of these will be in short supply this winter.

A document from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy published on 29 July, states: “Evidence suggests up to 400,000 would not receive EBSS support due to these circumstances compared with approximately 29 million that will.”

Gypsies and Travellers fear missing out on energy bills support and the National Bargee Travellers Association says thousands of “liveaboard” boaters could be locked out of the support payments.

Dan Hooper, an environmental activist nicknamed Swampy, who achieved prominence for his tunnel protest activities, lives off-grid in Tipi Valley, a 200-acre former farm in Wales.

He and others in the community generate sustainable electricity from solar panels supplemented by bottled gas and wood burners for heating in the cold winter months. Bottled gas prices have risen by 40% in the past 12 months.

Dan Hooper, AKA Swampy, said: ‘Government should not allow the energy companies to charge these extortionate prices.’
“Government should not allow the energy companies to charge these extortionate prices and make so many people miserable while they are making record-breaking profits. It’s all about human greed. We need to consume less,” he said.

He added that while he has some protection because his home is extremely well insulated, “Everyone should get these payments, which could be used to help people get their energy in more sustainable ways such as from solar panels.”

For Terry Green, a Traveller living with members of his family in a caravan park in East Sussex, the energy price hike has come as a “big shock”. He lives in a caravan with his wife. His three children and his grandchildren live in other caravans on the site.

“We’ve lived on this site for four years. It’s one of the best sites I’ve been on and I wake up every morning and thank God when I see my children and grandchildren around me. But when we add up the increased cost of paying our electricity key meter and bottles of gas I don’t know if we can afford it.

“A lot of Travellers will have to go back to the old ways of cooking outside on an open fire. Why should we be forced to do that? We should have equal rights with everyone else. Greed has crept in. It’s ruining the world.”

Friends, Families and Travellers, which supports Gypsy and Traveller communities, has written to …

Sunnova will use a 20 year old law to get around current regulations…

With an energy crunch looming and up to ten years wait to get a grid connection for new housing developments in some parts of the country, UK housebuilders are looking into off-grid solutions.

“Housing developers could invest some of the money that they would otherwise spend on securing network capacity on solar panels, batteries and energy asset control systems,” said Jojo Hubbard, boss of City of London energy company Electron. “This would enable new developments to connect faster, use the grid while it was available and contribute flexibility services (or even excess renewable energy) back to it at times of shortages. Payments for these services need to allow them to recoup the additional spend on clean, flexible energy assets.

“Building these local markets for network capacity will be essential for places like west London. We are then in a position where developers of new, fully electrified homes can give back to the grid rather than experiencing it as a block for construction in certain areas. This approach not only saves costs on network reinforcement costs for all energy bill payers, it also gets us to net zero faster,” said Myers.…

New renewable energy projects in Britain are facing a 10-YEAR wait to get their power onto the country’s national grid.

Incompetence at the top levels of National grid PLC and OFGEM, the state regulator, has led tot he bottleneck. As a result promises made by Britain at COP26 cannot be met and net zero targets are at risk due to delays “caused by poor planning and investment in infrastructure,” according to Bloomberg.

The UK recently set out ambitious new goals to more than double existing renewable generation capacity, adding 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, 70GW of solar by 2035 and 24GW of nuclear by 2050.

But developers say they are being told that they will have to wait six to 10 years to connect to the regional distribution networks because of constraints on National Grid’s network.

“The majority of large developers are now seeing construction-ready projects being delayed as a result of long queues and excessive charges to get access to the transmission system,” said Catherine Cleary, specialist engineer at consultancy Roadnight Taylor, which advises companies including British Gas owner Centrica and solar developer Lightsource BP on their grid connections.

“Although there are proposals for new infrastructure, the lengthy timelines for this threaten to derail the net zero targets.”

The issue of who pays for improvements to the electricity distribution network is crucial given that it is privatised, with the FTSE 100 listed National Grid providing the bulk of the central transmission network across Great Britain and supplying the six regional monopolies whose pylons, poles, wires and cables carry electricity to end users.

The monopolies’ investments and how much they charge consumers are regulated via price controls set by watchdog Ofgem, which has been under pressure to get tough after being accused of allowing the companies to make excess profits. The regional distributors earn their revenues from a surcharge on customer bills, with up to a fifth of the typical household energy bill — or roughly £371 a year — going towards the cost of the distribution network.

National Grid says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.

Roisin Quinn, director of customer connections at National Grid, said it was working with Ofgem and the industry to address the long queues, including by changing processes so that developers can no longer take network capacity before they have planning permission or have even started construction.

The company is proposing to upgrade the network on a project-by-project basis, building bigger substations and more overhead lines. “We are taking action at pace, along with the wider industry, to speed up the process for customers based in areas with longer waiting times,” she said.

However, the industry is concerned over the …

Gridbeyond is one of a new breed of companies, a grid aggregator offering to save money and energy for companies and communities, by selling the surplus energy they are generating or storing, back on to the grid.

Its all about resilience. In the same way that you would futureproof your apartment if you were going to put it on AirBnb, Gridbeyond futureproofs your energy system, so it is fit for purpose in the wider world of smart energy provision, as well as guaranteeing the energy provision to your own home or office.

Although this does currently require a grid connection, in the future off-grid communities could make use of the same technologies to balance the loads between them and share resources.

Part of the service is the way it stores cheap grid electricity when prices are low and then releases it (possibly the same day) when prices rises, with batteries paid for and housed by their clients.

In old fashioned terms the deal they are offering is arbitrage – taking advantage of market volatility to take a cut.

But its more sophisticated than that.

The Gridbeyond version of the service treats energy as a “Flexible asset” in order to “monetise the flexibility,” CEO Padraig Curran told me. Gridbeyond takes the flexibility clients have (whether in generation, storage or demand), and uses it to obtain the best prices both for buying and selling power on a minute by minute basis with the grid operator and energy market.
“You have huge amounts of flexibility in homes – the trick is to harness it in a cost effective way –we are all becoming more interconnected – this will be the gateway.”

Gridbeyond focuses on industrial processes – water, paper, cement – with larger power generation resource and patchy demand – long intervals of low or no demand, followed by a need for large amounts of power at short notice. Again – the same principles apply in any situation where there is a worthwhile amount of surplus power generated at certain points of the day.

The profits from the Flexibility are used to” fund battery deployments behind the meter,” said Curran

Resilience

“We are permanently monitoring the system – the generation, storage, and any demand or other constraint on supply” he said.

This where the designers can build in resilience so they are never caught out by peaks in prices – they do this by monitoring and controlling –their software allows them to go into any site – “any asset “ as Padraig Curran calls it – meaning any machine, generator or motor –using electronic sensors which communicate back to the key software.

One day the whole grid will work like this – only it wont be a grid any more – it will be a non-hierarchical set of autonomous systems that communicate via the internet and permanently allow energy trading between any two …