Winter blackout contingency planning

Getting_greyer

[Deleted User] said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

PM who previously worked for an energy company and had her leadership campaign part-funded by another one announces shocking news that she doesn't want people to use less energy.  Shocking, not.

PM announces that she doesn’t want to spend £15 million to tell people to turn off their lights and turn down the heating - that would be a more accurate summary but perhaps wouldn’t score the political point that you are attempting to.

Political point aside. If it cost 15mil and it resulted in a miniscule % reduction in demand across the population it would still pay for itself in saving the gov paying the EPG.

pensionpawn

TheGardener said:

@EssexHebridean - Yeah - Stornoway bound during a power cut for sure  but I know the storm of 2005 was harder in every way on the deas 

We still have an 'old school' phone in the cupboard we can plug into the old BT socket (I test it a couple of times a year and it still works) so I Can communicate with my elderly Mum. 
Our modern gas hob happily works without its internal electric ignition and one of the kids is a candle freak so there is no shortage of long-nosed lighters in the kitchen drawer - or shortage of candles (if I can stand the scent...)
A decent power bank bought by one of the kids for festival trips will recharge a mobile phone at least 4 times
plenty of torches and camping lamps.

Definitely, no comparison to the 70's - the world really was a different place then - the only real inconvenience was that the TV didn't work (but we still had transistor radios with batteries) 
Today the whole infrastructure of our world is dictated by electricity. We'll manage a couple of hours without the world collapsing completely but still - a lot of people need to have time to get things in order such as medical equipment back-ups 

Not migrated to fibre to the door yet then? We used to keep a similar phone however that went in the skip when we migrated to fibre to the door. We still retain a "wireless" and have plenty of candles courtesy of Ikea. One power cut can almost be fun, two ok, three or more and those under 55 in 2022 will start to kick off. Those under 30 don't know of a world without the internet / Sky TV....

michaels

Last time we had a power cut, to prevent mutiny I put the inverter onto the car battery and used it to power the most important device in the house - the wifi router. 

Online bliss is having the only detectable wifi in the area rather than seeing about 20 competing hot spots all trying to share the same bandwidth.....

I need to get round to putting the boiler on a 13a plug rather than directly wired to a fused spur so we can also run that off the inverter if needed (the pump is built into the boiler so we would then be able to maintain hot water and heating).  Luckily with our EV the traction battery will recharge the 12v so we typically have at least 20kwh of stored electricity.

wittynamegoeshere

Getting_greyer said:

Deleted_User said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

PM who previously worked for an energy company and had her leadership campaign part-funded by another one announces shocking news that she doesn't want people to use less energy.  Shocking, not.

PM announces that she doesn’t want to spend £15 million to tell people to turn off their lights and turn down the heating - that would be a more accurate summary but perhaps wouldn’t score the political point that you are attempting to.

Political point aside. If it cost 15mil and it resulted in a miniscule % reduction in demand across the population it would still pay for itself in saving the gov paying the EPG.

You're assuming that the PM is bothered about whether she wastes or saves the country's money, if this was the case it would be an illogical decision.  Perhaps she isn't illogical though, and the reasoning makes perfect sense to her personally, rather than to the rest of us.

Swipe

michaels said:

Last time we had a power cut, to prevent mutiny I put the inverter onto the car battery and used it to power the most important device in the house - the wifi router. 

Online bliss is having the only detectable wifi in the area rather than seeing about 20 competing hot spots all trying to share the same bandwidth.....

I need to get round to putting the boiler on a 13a plug rather than directly wired to a fused spur so we can also run that off the inverter if needed (the pump is built into the boiler so we would then be able to maintain hot water and heating).  Luckily with our EV the traction battery will recharge the 12v so we typically have at least 20kwh of stored electricity.

So the street cabinet didn't lose power? I assume it would during a scheduled blackout.

Section62

wittynamegoeshere said:

Getting_greyer said:

Deleted_User said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

PM who previously worked for an energy company and had her leadership campaign part-funded by another one announces shocking news that she doesn't want people to use less energy.  Shocking, not.

PM announces that she doesn’t want to spend £15 million to tell people to turn off their lights and turn down the heating - that would be a more accurate summary but perhaps wouldn’t score the political point that you are attempting to.

Political point aside. If it cost 15mil and it resulted in a miniscule % reduction in demand across the population it would still pay for itself in saving the gov paying the EPG.

You're assuming that the PM is bothered about whether she wastes or saves the country's money, if this was the case it would be an illogical decision.  Perhaps she isn't illogical though, and the reasoning makes perfect sense to her personally, rather than to the rest of us.

As I understand it, one of the key factors in the decision was concerns that the people most likely to absorb and act on a "cut your energy use" campaign are older and more vulnerable people.  People who need to keep warm, or die in their homes.

It is easy to believe that DHSC officials would have had an input into the decision making process and pointed out the risk of elderly people needlessly dying 'doing their bit' to save the power networks. Not to mention the cost and additional pressure put on the NHS if a well-meaning but misguided public information campaign leads to an increase in hospital admissions of people suffering from severe hypothermia and other low-temperature induced medical problems (e.g. heart attacks, strokes etc)

Of course thinking about how a decision was arrived at - and whether that decision makes sense in a wider context - takes a bit of effort.  And doesn't really suit those who want to make a purely political point in suggesting such decisions are the sole responsibility of one person, and/or made for personal financial gain of the decision taker.

EssexHebridean

pensionpawn said:

TheGardener said:

@EssexHebridean - Yeah - Stornoway bound during a power cut for sure  but I know the storm of 2005 was harder in every way on the deas 

We still have an 'old school' phone in the cupboard we can plug into the old BT socket (I test it a couple of times a year and it still works) so I Can communicate with my elderly Mum. 
Our modern gas hob happily works without its internal electric ignition and one of the kids is a candle freak so there is no shortage of long-nosed lighters in the kitchen drawer - or shortage of candles (if I can stand the scent...)
A decent power bank bought by one of the kids for festival trips will recharge a mobile phone at least 4 times
plenty of torches and camping lamps.

Definitely, no comparison to the 70's - the world really was a different place then - the only real inconvenience was that the TV didn't work (but we still had transistor radios with batteries) 
Today the whole infrastructure of our world is dictated by electricity. We'll manage a couple of hours without the world collapsing completely but still - a lot of people need to have time to get things in order such as medical equipment back-ups 

Not migrated to fibre to the door yet then? We used to keep a similar phone however that went in the skip when we migrated to fibre to the door. We still retain a "wireless" and have plenty of candles courtesy of Ikea. One power cut can almost be fun, two ok, three or more and those under 55 in 2022 will start to kick off. Those under 30 don't know of a world without the internet / Sky TV....

😂😂 Fibre to the door can’t be got yet in my urban bit of east Anglia - allowing for where I suspect TheGardner is I’m pretty sure that it’s not available to them. In fact there are huge swathes of their side of the U.K.  (if I’m right) which don’t even have ultra fast fibre yet!

Section62

Eldi_Dos said:

sheramber said:

During the three day week we had a street lamp outside our house which wa son a different circuit to us.

When it was off, we had light / power in the house

When we had no power the street lamp was on so we kept the curtains open for light.

We had storage heating so the house stayed warm and cuddling the dog kept us warm.

I think that was a deliberate policy to keep street lights on in areas that where having power cuts if there was enough spare capacity,and to turn street lights off in areas that had power, if need be. I can remember the older members of the family viewed the turning off of street lights as a ominous sign.

Most streetlights are connected directly to the same cables supplying properties on the street - so I think the scope for them to have been able to keep streetlights on when areas were disconnected would have been relatively limited.  And for the same reason, turning the streetlights off when the neighbourhood was powered on would (until the relatively recent development of 'smart' systems) have required an operative visit to each light to disconnect the supply, and subsequently to reconnect it (and reset the timeclock).

There are some areas where the public electricity supply has a "five wire" arrangement with the fifth conductor being for streetlighting.  I'd guess these are the areas where this policy might have been used and worked reasonably well - as the fifth conductor can be switched in and out separately from the normal supply phases.

The alternative is where approximately a streets-worth of lights are connected to a dedicated private cable supplied by a feeder pillar - but that in turn is connected to the street-level distribution cables, so wouldn't be energised if the area was under a planned blackout.

kethry

CurlySue2017 said:

The electricity goes off then so does the router, which means nothing is online, which means pretty much everything stops.

I'm sorry about your Dad, I can well imagine many people are in the same boat - I hope if rolling blackouts do happen that this is planned for.

Had to chip in about the internet though - yes, the router will go off, but actual websites will still be accessible. The large internet companies (e.g. Amazon Web Services), the ones that host websites etc have standbyplans and generators for this kind of situation, not to mention fallback plans located in other countries, so assuming you can still access the net somehow (e.g. through your mobile) then yes, the internet itself will still work. It's only individual access to it that will stop.The only way the internet will stop is if the world as a whole is having problems - and that's a whole other thang to worry about!

Getting_greyer

wittynamegoeshere said:

Getting_greyer said:

Deleted_User said:

wittynamegoeshere said:

PM who previously worked for an energy company and had her leadership campaign part-funded by another one announces shocking news that she doesn't want people to use less energy.  Shocking, not.

PM announces that she doesn’t want to spend £15 million to tell people to turn off their lights and turn down the heating - that would be a more accurate summary but perhaps wouldn’t score the political point that you are attempting to.

Political point aside. If it cost 15mil and it resulted in a miniscule % reduction in demand across the population it would still pay for itself in saving the gov paying the EPG.

You're assuming that the PM is bothered about whether she wastes or saves the country's money, if this was the case it would be an illogical decision.  Perhaps she isn't illogical though, and the reasoning makes perfect sense to her personally, rather than to the rest of us.

No i didnt make any assumptions. What I said is that if 15 mil campaign costs = 15 mil reduction in EPG costs it would have paid for itself.