New Tech: How Smart Is the Smart Energy System?

The Bottom Line

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Business

4.6 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 26 September 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The UK's power grid is undergoing a huge shift towards renewable energy, but running homes and businesses solely on this new form of electricity will be a delicate balancing act and will pose new choices for consumers.

Evan Davis and guests discuss the challenge of matching supply - from wind and solar - with an increased demand from electric vehicles and homes using heat pumps rather than gas boilers.

Part of the solution could be consumers themselves - homes with EVs, solar panels or battery storage could act like mini power plants, sending energy back to the grid, as well as taking from it, and getting paid in the process. But that two-way exchange could bring harder decisions - would you let your energy company switch off your fridge for an hour to ease pressure on the grid?

Evan is joined by: Cordi O’Hara, president of UK electricity distribution, National Grid; Hamish Phillips, net zero business development director, Centrica; Jordan Brompton, co-founder and chief marketing officer, Myenergi.

Production team: Producer: Simon Tulett Researcher: Drew Hyndman Editor: Matt Willis Sound: Jonny Baker and Tim Heffer Production co-ordinator: Rosie Strawbridge

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.9	Thanks for downloading this episode of the Bottom Line podcast.
0:08.8	It's even smarter than the radio version with lots of extra content.
0:12.7	If you like it, you might want to check out the other episodes we've made about electric vehicles,
0:18.0	such as electric cars made in China from earlier this year. Anyway, enough
0:23.1	plugging the archive onto the show. Hello, welcome to the programme. Now, imagine a world
0:29.6	where we say goodbye to gas and petrol. Where cooking, cars and home heating are all electric,
0:35.2	where most of our energies made by the sun and the wind when
0:38.8	they feel like obliging us, and where loads of us have battery power at home, keeping our
0:44.2	soft grid much or some of the time. Well, that is in fact the destination to which we are heading.
0:50.0	It is surely the biggest change to our relationship with energy since electricity was invented.
0:55.0	But with it come all sorts of interesting challenges for those managing the electricity grid,
1:01.8	such as how you make it work, matching supply and demand at all times.
1:06.2	And to work, the grid will need to be smarter and more flexible. So today, we want to hear what that
1:14.2	means. In fact, here is one question that has been suggested might arise. Would you mind if your
1:20.8	energy company turned off your fridge for a few minutes every now and then just when the power
1:25.6	supply is tight.
1:32.0	Well, there are lots of other questions too as we peer into the future of the electricity grid and we have three guests to help us.
1:34.6	And first up is Cordia O'Hara, President of National Grid electricity distribution.
1:39.5	I think, Cordy, you just have to tell us what National Grid is.
1:42.1	We own and operate the National Grid transmission system in England and Wales.
1:46.5	That's the big motorways of energy that come across the country through overhead lines or underground cables.
	...

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