Households Are Being Paid To Use Less Electricity: Will it Work?
It’s just before 9am on a Monday, and I’m rushing around my house turning everything off. The TV, normally on standby, suffers the ignominy of being turned off at the wall. There’s a mad rush to make my wife’s first coffee of the day (my tea is already in a thermos). My office fan heater, normally on all morning in mid-winter, falls sadly — or exhaustedly — silent. I put on a woolly hat. Finally, at my desk, writing this, I unplug the laptop and let it run off battery. My house is now, other than the perhaps the fridge-freezer, using almost zero electricity.
This isn’t a power cut, or in anticipation of an expected power surge. I’m taking part in a voluntary ‘demand management’ scheme — part of the UK electricity network’s ongoing experiment for winter 2022/2023. More than 1 million households (including mine) and businesses have signed up. And if it works as well as The National Grid hope it might, it could unlock the same power as a new nuclear power plant, but with none of the cost.
The simple truth is — as much as we like to see ourselves as unique individuals — we all tend to use electricity at the same times. Our energy suppliers don’t get the luxury of providing according to our average usage across the day — they need to provide enough to cover the peaks: the times when all our heaters (or desk fans /…
