Community

With an energy crunch looming and up to ten years wait to get a grid connection for new housing developments in some parts of the country, UK housebuilders are looking into off-grid solutions.

“Housing developers could invest some of the money that they would otherwise spend on securing network capacity on solar panels, batteries and energy asset control systems,” said Jojo Hubbard, boss of City of London energy company Electron. “This would enable new developments to connect faster, use the grid while it was available and contribute flexibility services (or even excess renewable energy) back to it at times of shortages. Payments for these services need to allow them to recoup the additional spend on clean, flexible energy assets.

“Building these local markets for network capacity will be essential for places like west London. We are then in a position where developers of new, fully electrified homes can give back to the grid rather than experiencing it as a block for construction in certain areas. This approach not only saves costs on network reinforcement costs for all energy bill payers, it also gets us to net zero faster,” said Myers.…

New renewable energy projects in Britain are facing a 10-YEAR wait to get their power onto the country’s national grid.

Incompetence at the top levels of National grid PLC and OFGEM, the state regulator, has led tot he bottleneck. As a result promises made by Britain at COP26 cannot be met and net zero targets are at risk due to delays “caused by poor planning and investment in infrastructure,” according to Bloomberg.

The UK recently set out ambitious new goals to more than double existing renewable generation capacity, adding 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, 70GW of solar by 2035 and 24GW of nuclear by 2050.

But developers say they are being told that they will have to wait six to 10 years to connect to the regional distribution networks because of constraints on National Grid’s network.

“The majority of large developers are now seeing construction-ready projects being delayed as a result of long queues and excessive charges to get access to the transmission system,” said Catherine Cleary, specialist engineer at consultancy Roadnight Taylor, which advises companies including British Gas owner Centrica and solar developer Lightsource BP on their grid connections.

“Although there are proposals for new infrastructure, the lengthy timelines for this threaten to derail the net zero targets.”

The issue of who pays for improvements to the electricity distribution network is crucial given that it is privatised, with the FTSE 100 listed National Grid providing the bulk of the central transmission network across Great Britain and supplying the six regional monopolies whose pylons, poles, wires and cables carry electricity to end users.

The monopolies’ investments and how much they charge consumers are regulated via price controls set by watchdog Ofgem, which has been under pressure to get tough after being accused of allowing the companies to make excess profits. The regional distributors earn their revenues from a surcharge on customer bills, with up to a fifth of the typical household energy bill — or roughly £371 a year — going towards the cost of the distribution network.

National Grid says it has historically had 40-50 applications for connections a year but that this has risen to about 400 as renewables suppliers have proliferated. This is in addition to significant volumes of applications coming via the six regional distributors.

Roisin Quinn, director of customer connections at National Grid, said it was working with Ofgem and the industry to address the long queues, including by changing processes so that developers can no longer take network capacity before they have planning permission or have even started construction.

The company is proposing to upgrade the network on a project-by-project basis, building bigger substations and more overhead lines. “We are taking action at pace, along with the wider industry, to speed up the process for customers based in areas with longer waiting times,” she said.

However, the industry is concerned over the …

Gridbeyond is one of a new breed of companies, a grid aggregator offering to save money and energy for companies and communities, by selling the surplus energy they are generating or storing, back on to the grid.

Its all about resilience. In the same way that you would futureproof your apartment if you were going to put it on AirBnb, Gridbeyond futureproofs your energy system, so it is fit for purpose in the wider world of smart energy provision, as well as guaranteeing the energy provision to your own home or office.

Although this does currently require a grid connection, in the future off-grid communities could make use of the same technologies to balance the loads between them and share resources.

Part of the service is the way it stores cheap grid electricity when prices are low and then releases it (possibly the same day) when prices rises, with batteries paid for and housed by their clients.

In old fashioned terms the deal they are offering is arbitrage – taking advantage of market volatility to take a cut.

But its more sophisticated than that.

The Gridbeyond version of the service treats energy as a “Flexible asset” in order to “monetise the flexibility,” CEO Padraig Curran told me. Gridbeyond takes the flexibility clients have (whether in generation, storage or demand), and uses it to obtain the best prices both for buying and selling power on a minute by minute basis with the grid operator and energy market.
“You have huge amounts of flexibility in homes – the trick is to harness it in a cost effective way –we are all becoming more interconnected – this will be the gateway.”

Gridbeyond focuses on industrial processes – water, paper, cement – with larger power generation resource and patchy demand – long intervals of low or no demand, followed by a need for large amounts of power at short notice. Again – the same principles apply in any situation where there is a worthwhile amount of surplus power generated at certain points of the day.

The profits from the Flexibility are used to” fund battery deployments behind the meter,” said Curran

Resilience

“We are permanently monitoring the system – the generation, storage, and any demand or other constraint on supply” he said.

This where the designers can build in resilience so they are never caught out by peaks in prices – they do this by monitoring and controlling –their software allows them to go into any site – “any asset “ as Padraig Curran calls it – meaning any machine, generator or motor –using electronic sensors which communicate back to the key software.

One day the whole grid will work like this – only it wont be a grid any more – it will be a non-hierarchical set of autonomous systems that communicate via the internet and permanently allow energy trading between any two …

It began as a perfectly normal arrangement in communal living, copied by innumerable groups that want to spread the cost of a piece of land amongst several households.

But this particular arrangement between two couples to buy acreage in British Columbia (one of the most favourable places in Canada for off-grid) and live together on it dissolved into an acrimonious court battle involving accusations of uncleanliness and a heated disagreement over chicken butchering.

Following an 11-day trial spread over months, CBS reports, a B.C. Supreme Court judge last week rejected a bid by one of the couples to sue the other for trespass and defamation related to a Facebook posting accusing their former partners of harassment.

Justice Marguerite Church found Callandra Neustater was within her rights to respond to untrue posters spread around Quesnel, B.C., accusing her and husband Jacob of being “police informants” who infiltrated “activist, anarchist, Antifa, anti-pipeline and Indigenous rights groups.”

Instead, Church concluded it was the Neustaters who had been defamed by posters that were either created by or at the direction of Michael McKerracher, who — together with his wife and musical partner Rachel — started the court battle.

An ‘off-the-grid’ alternative lifestyle
The judge’s lengthy ruling tells the story of two couples who purchased 17 hectares of land together in the spring of 2016 in the hopes of starting a new life together in B.C. The Neustaters had been living in Manitoba and the McKerrachers had been living in Saskatchewan, a province they deemed too “conservative” for their “unconventional lifestyle.”

They were both part of a community of “like-minded individuals who promoted and lived an ‘off-the-grid’ alternative lifestyle,” Church wrote.

According to the ruling, the Neustaters met the McKerrachers in 2015 when they travelled together during a western tour by the McKerrachers’ musical act The Grid-Pickers.

“Discussions between the four friends eventually turned to their shared wish to move to British Columbia and they began to discuss their similar interests and the possibility of communal living on jointly owned property,” Church wrote.

They split the cost of a $65,000 property, chose sites for their respective homes and both women became pregnant. Callandra Neustater engaged Rachel McKerracher’s services as a doula.

“For a few months at least, life was good for the two families. Unfortunately, this state of affairs did not last and cracks soon began to appear in their friendship,” the judgment says.

Church said the couples never put their expectations for communal living into writing.

And the two men began arguing.

Michael McKerracher felt “the Neustaters were being controlling by asking him to park his vehicles off the property, not to leave derelict vehicles, and complaining about him having gatherings on his own side and yard site,” the judge wrote.

By contrast, Jacob Neustater felt that “McKerracher wanted things done ‘his way’ and would get upset if the Neustaters disagreed.”

‘If I find …