How Smart Home Batteries Could Solve Renewable Energy Storage

But would you be comfortable giving Big Government total remote access to your home battery?

It all started for me one year ago. My energy provider in the UK asked if I’d like to take part in an energy saving trial. Being somewhat of an energy nerd, and Editor of a climate publication, I was likely to say yes anyway. But there was an extra sweetener — they would pay me for it. And in the middle of a cost of living crisis, with energy bills the highest in living memory, I happily plonked that sweetener in my cup of English Breakfast tea, gave it a stir, and gulped it down.

The National Grid’s ‘demand flexibility service’ scheme (DFS) was deemed a success — a million-or-so households and businesses in Great Britain signed up, including me, and were paid to cut back their electricity use for specified one or two hour time slots (typically at peak times — ie. cooking their dinner an hour earlier or later than they would, to smooth the national load curve). Despite only running 13 trial ‘saver sessions’ over the course of winter of 2022/23, the impact of DFS was significant, reducing demand by 2.92 gigawatt hours (GWh) during peak times. (I wrote about my experience of the scheme in more detail here).