Comment by IshKebab
7 hours ago
I don't see why that matters. You use the same amount of energy and the demand is smoothed out at grid scale (yes I know about tea in ad breaks).
7 hours ago
I don't see why that matters. You use the same amount of energy and the demand is smoothed out at grid scale (yes I know about tea in ad breaks).
You can get things like cheaper overnight tariffs when the demand is lower - if you have some sort of storage system - like a hot water tank - in effect the electricity company is distributing some of that smoothing function to things like hot water tanks, storage heaters or batteries.
If you have your own solar ( either direct solar water heating, or solar electricity generation ), the hot water tank is a simple, cheap, reliable energy store.
Sure capacity isn't that great - but pretty much every house in the UK used to have one, so it adds up.
Houses in the UK typically have 100A supply and the whole local grid is sized assuming people use relatively small amounts of electricity. If everyone gets an electric car and a massive heat pump, lots of local transmission will need upgrading
Right but unless everyone is drawing large amounts of power at the same time it doesn't matter if you use 1kW for 10 hours or 10kW for 1 hour. To the grid they look the same.
One interesting case where "at the same time" actually does happen is overnight car charging. Some chargers are configured to start charging exactly when a cheaper tariff kicks in, which causes big transient issues for the grid. I think modern chargers have a random delay to help with that.
> Some chargers are configured to start charging exactly when a cheaper tariff kicks in, which causes big transient issues for the grid. I think modern chargers have a random delay to help with that.
Here in the UK some electricity providers offer 'smart' charging (e.g. Octopus Intelligent Go).
In that situation the energy provider controls when to charge the car - e.g. you say "I want the car at 80% by 7am tomorrow" and the energy provider controls the timing of charges.
That's how my EV charges - I plug it in, and Octopus control it.
Benefit for me is that whenever the car is charging my entire home's use gets the overnight rate (even if part of the schedule is charged during the day).
Benefit for Octopus is they can use my car to balance grid demand / schedule the charge when it is most financially effective for them.
I can - at any time - override that logic if I just want it to charge at a specific time for whatever reason.
(I presume this sort of arrangement is becoming more common in other countries too)