A group of experts at this week’s Smartgrid Roundtable event said that smart grids are “critically important” to allow a higher percentage of renewables within the UK’s energy supply.  The event was held in London on November 11.

Duncan Sinclair of Redpoint Energy said that security and supply issues would be impossible to address without the introduction of smart grids and smart meters.  “Smart meters are critically important to integrating renewable energy into the UK fuel mix,” he said.  “We are never going to get away from worries about security of supply and intermittency without smart grids.”

The UK government announced in 2008 that all British homes must have a smart meter installed by the year 2020.  The new meters are able to precisely measure the amount of energy used and allow for variable pricing schemes based upon the time of day.  Smart appliances would allow consumers to program them to turn on or off according to the time of day or to respond automatically to a pricing signal sent from the energy provider.

Homeowners who install solar panels or wind turbines on their property would be able to measure how much energy they are feeding back into the power grid.  This requires the system to account for the masses of people who would take advantage of these feed-in tariffs.

Sinclair explained that smart grid technology benefits energy suppliers by providing an accurate snapshot of the entire power grid.  This allows them to better manage peaks and troughs in the supply and predict when they will occur.  This knowledge is critical for a more secure supply of energy.  Renewable power is intermittent in supply and conventional grid management techniques are incapable of handling it in large quantities.

Smart meters can also be used to determine whether consumers can get by with less energy available by actively monitoring energy use.  This could stave off the need to build more expensive generation capacity and would result in lower energy bills for all UK energy consumers.

“We will see if consumers are willing to live with lower levels of electricity,” said Sinclair.  “Smart meters will provide signals to see if we need to build more back up.”

Eugen Mayer, COO of PowerPlus, said that managing and predicting demand on the supply side needs to be more precise.  “If we generate a lot of electricity with wind there will be times where we are flooded with energy,” he said.  “But there will also be times when we are not.  At the moment we demand whatever is generated; in the future, we will probably generate what we demand.”

Paul Lazarevic, director of sales and marketing at RLtec, says that as wind power gains a larger share of the aggregate energy supply that customers will have to learn how to cope when the supply is low.

“There will be periods where there will not be electricity in your house if we are to decarbonise the economy,” said Lazarevic.  “When the wind doesn’t blow once a week smart meters don’t solve the problem of having no electricity.”

Lazarevic also said that smart meters won’t benefit industries that can’t put off energy consumption in ways that consumers can “like householders turning the washer on later.”

Redpoint Energy
83 Blackfriars Road
London SE1 8HA
http://www.redpointenergy.co.uk

Power+ Limited
The Power House
West Dock Street
Hull HU3 4HH
http://www.powerplustesting.co.uk

RLtec
1st Floor Holborn Gate
330 High Holborn
London WC1V 7QT
http://www.rltec.com

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