Category: Smart Energy

Smart Meters will need secure, low power wireless to connect to devices. This section of the blog looks at the issues around choosing these, what they enable and the opportunites to reduce energy consumption.

The UK’s Heat Pump Strategy is in DEEP Trouble

Here in the UK, the Government is trying to persuade householders to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps.  It’s a key part of their net zero strategy, tackling the 13% of CO2 emissions that are attributable to gas-based home heating.  The “one size fits all” message is “Heat Pumps Good, Gas Boilers Bad”.  The Government has set a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps each year by 2028, rising to 1.6 million annually by 2028.  To help achieve this, they have introduced a Boiler Upgrade subsidy, but the latest Government statistics show that only 16,959 applicants have replaced an existing gas boiler with a heat pump since the scheme began in May 2022, which is a little bit short of the 1.4 million target for that period

These targets were set without much understanding of the difficulty or cost of retrofitting heat pumps.  Much of Britain’s housing is old and not very suitable for conversion.  Having set the policy, the Government initiated a major study in 2019 called DEEP – the Demonstration of Energy Efficient Potential, to provide evidence to justify it.  DEEP’s remit was to quantify the real effects, costs and returns of upgrading the structure of older houses.  They’ve just published the results, which basically says it’s not economic for these older properties.  It suggests that the payback time for heat pumps in older homes, along with the insulation upgrade to make them suitable is “generally over 100 years”.   So, where does that leave the plan?

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Mr Smart Meter takes charge of UK energy policy

What could possibly go wrong?

Back in 2009, when Ed Miliband was Energy Secretary in the closing days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, he announced Britain’s Smart Metering programme, promising to install smart meters in 26 million homes by 2020.  He stressed that “it’s important we design a system that brings best value to everyone involved”, with projected consumer savings of billions of pounds.  Fifteen years later, it’s still floundering, having cost consumers over £20 billion.  Now Ed’s back as our energy supremo.

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Why politicians fail at energy policy

This week, the UK’s opposition leader, Keir Starmer, outlined his plans for the United Kingdom’s energy policy, delivering his party’s national mission on clean energy.  The key plank of this is to do for oil and gas what Maggie Thatcher did for coal.  Margaret Thatcher had an ulterior motive, which was to try and break the power of the coal unions. Keir Starmer appears to have no ulterior motive, other than a desire for a glib soundbite.  In explaining the policy, he posited that stopping any new North Sea oil and gas exploration licences would let the UK concentrate on more renewables.  Explaining why he thought that was a good idea, he claimed that as renewable energy isn’t subject to global price surges, we would not be held to ransom when global demand causes costs to soar.  Instead, we would have a British energy company making British energy for British people.

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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.

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GB Smart Metering hits the halfway mark

It was all meant to be done and dusted by the end of 2018, with smart meters installed in every home in Great Britain, with an extra two years to finish off the “difficult” ones.  That was quickly revised to make the end of 2020 the target date, since when it has been consistently pushed back as the industry has struggled with executing a badly thought out programme.  Last month, the latest figures released by the UK Government for working smart meters (the graph excludes the ones which have been fitted but aren’t working), show that we haven’t quite made it to the half-way mark yet, with electricity smart meter fittings approaching the 50% mark, with gas lagging slightly behind.  It’s taken around 8 years to get this far, which suggests that we probably won’t have the rollout complete this side of 2030.  Whilst the number of installations is increasing, within the next few years, the connection technology they use looks as if it will become obsolete, so we’re going to have to start replacing or upgrading many of those already installed.

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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 31st 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 1st 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 31st April and to submit them to their supplier’s website.  The following message went viral:

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