The only thing she’s right about is the expense of ecofriendlier boilers. I’d like one, but it’d cost £20-25k to replace all my pipes and radiators before factoring in the actual boiler for another 5k or so. The £7500 rebate the government is offering doesn’t change the equation of “I can’t fucking afford that”.
Correct term is Brownouts, Jill. It’s when the power draw exceeds capacity and some areas can get power while others can’t. Videos games taught me that one Jill. Had to decide who got power in Mojave, Jill.
Technically, what you described is a rolling blackout. A blackout is when power is totally lost. A brownout is when the voltage sags below the minimum specs.
The power grid will initiate rolling blackouts rather than let the whole grid brown out. Brownouts can actually be a lot worse than blackouts. A lot of equipment will try and compensate and so make the problem worse, as well as cause whole new problems.
On a grid level, brownouts will also cause the frequency to drop. This can cause phase differences, and so cause equipment to blow up (or rather shut down, so it doesn’t blow up!)
I remember I was working in a factory when we had a brownout (some electricity pylon had collapsed and so we only had 50% capacity via another pylon and it wasn’t enough to run all the factories in the area). Just like you say, the equipment really hated it. Most of the equipment is fine if you just shut it off without warning, not supposed to do it but it’s usually fine, but the low but not zero voltage caused no end of issues.
Also all the LED lights decided that the best way to deal with the situation was to just flicker at a really high frequency rather than just turning off, which would have honestly been more helpful.
AC electrical devices often adjust their current draw, based on the voltage. As the voltage drops, the current goes up. This increases the current load, as well as producing more heat. Devices often flicker rapidly between just on, and off. The LEDs were experiencing that.
DC is even worse. Microcontrollers REALLY do not like being browned out. I’ve seen it smoke components, as well as easily corrupting stored data.
I’ve spent a very long time trying to form a response that doesn’t let Jill be right but no matter how I slice it, she’s technically correct then. Brownouts cause rolling blackouts. I hate it.
She is right. The key problem is she ran with the assumption that we need to stop using EVs and heat pumps. We actually need the grid to pull their finger out and adapt to what is about to happen.
Well sure but that’s the case for most things. The increased electricity draw from electric based technologies can run the risk of overloading the grid while government chooses a new hole to stick their thumb in. She’s just blaming technology instead of the government like a proper old person.
Gas boiler is quite economic, and uses less gas than the setup of gas power plant + electric boiler, or gas heating plant, because the heat energy won’t travel over outdoor pipes and won’t be converted to electricity and back to heat.
Still less green than electric boiler + nuclear power plant.
It’s a lot better to burn the gas in a power plant, than at home. While it’s less efficient, heating wise compared to direct heating, it allows for transitions. E.g. during the day, solar can carry the load. During spikes, or in the evening, a gas plant spins up and takes the load.
That changes further with heat pumps. Heat pumps do the (naively) impossible, they go past 100% efficiency. They are actually about 350% efficient. A simple heater makes heat, via resistance. A heat pump uses that energy to pull heat in, against the temperature gradient. The inefficiencies of the process just add extra heat.
This lets them match up to gas boilers, even with the inherent inefficiencies of a power plant and transmission. Add in renewables and heat pumps win, hands down.
Even if you don’t add in renewables heat pumps still win. When there at or above 200% efficiency (coefficient of production) they use less gas at the power plant to produce the same amount of heat at your home. And most new models are able to maintain that level of efficiency down to -10c.
I never did like that “real americans”, “true british patriots” sort of line. A little self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory. (Also it insinuates that national identity and authenticity thereof matter in a way that they don’t)
Jill Kirby can go suck the gas right out of the pipe.
The country has been moving towards EVs and Heat Pumps for years. If the grid is at risk then it’s down to the short sightedness of government and the energy firms who have prioritised filling their own pockets rather than investing in the infrastructure.
Evs will absolutely cause a problem but it’s not really a difficult problem to solve because it’s not a lack of power generating capacity that’s the issue, it’s a lack of infrastructure to deliver that energy. We don’t have enough high voltage lines or at least we don’t have enough high voltage lines in the right places to be able to easily put charges in.
But the government have known about this issue for literally decades and have done nothing about it. It’s a 100% solvable problem it just requires spending some money. So obviously it hasn’t been done.
Heat pumps are actually good for the grid though because although they use quite a bit of power, but still a lot less than resistive heating, they don’t have huge energy drawer. They use a lot of power over the day, but they tend to sip it out over the course of the day rather than in one big draw around 5:00 p.m. and that’s much easier to plan for.
There can’t be that must resistive heating on the grid surely.
Also I bet a load of people putting their heat pump on something like 6-7 am and 6-10pm. Going to have to have some control over the grid starting some people heat pumps at 5:55 and others at 6:05 etc.
I replaced a gas boiler with a heat pump and cost went from ~3 AUD /day to less than 1 AUD/day. With the government subsidy it’s a no-brainer financially. Especially if you already have solar.
Nah, we inherited this shit from the English. The American Revolution sprouted in New England, which was settled by Puritans. All of our worse tendencies stem from our bastard English heritage.
Translation to plain English: Jill Kirby is another true believer in Free Market Conservatism in the Liz Truss vein who has suckled at the teat of the incestuous nest of pro-fossil fuckery in Tufton Street that is funded in large part by the various Koch foundations.
Thing Two: you have to love a middle class columnist telling the working class how to be patriotic.
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