Dual Fuel Boilers (Electric + NG) to solve heating and curtailment

With this system every time a boiler wants to fire up it send a message to the utility which says either ok use electric or dont use electric depending on how much excess renewables are on the grid. The response would only be something like 0.1 second delay so not even noticeable

Especially in the colder months many people have the heating on constantly especially in colder areas like Scotland where in some homes it might be on for 6-9 months of the year. So a huge amount of winter output can be put through these hybrid boilers and offshore wind output in the winter is ~50% CF

The heating can also be pulsed to allow it to be controlled all the way from zero to 10KW and anything in between or have 10 controllable elements to allow different levels of output. Where electricity line is limited or difficult to add a bigger line the boiler can be set to 3KW max so it can dual fired on high heat applications (eg shower) or use pure electric on lower heat application (radiators).

This idea works well because it is extremely cheap to do
You can buy an electric shower for £50 retail which means the cost to make it is probably closer to £10 and the additional bits for these hybrid boilers would be no more (in fact much less) than what is in an electric shower. Boilers should also be made smart and connected to wifi which almost all homes have (if you dont got wifi it can operate on pure gas mode). The brains of said boilers would be much less than the cheapest smartphones which cost £50 retail but again £10 to manufacture especially since most of this (smartphone) is unnecessary (speaker, microphone, bluetooth, 4g cellular, gps, etc, all unnecessary) and these smarts are also nice for the consumer as they can set the temp via their smartphones and turn the heating on off via their phones and even diagnose problems etc via the smartphones

The cost is going to be somewhere in the £20 range to make these boilers smart and better for consumers

With them in place you can add more and more and more offshore wind power and the more you add the more these stock of hybrid boilers use electricity and less of natural gas


Really what is the downside if you do this?
Consumers pay 1-2% more for a boiler
Even if they never use the electric side they get a boiler they can control with their smartphones

You could also use some software to temp them to use less energy with simple prompts. Do you know you could save 20% by reducing the temp by 1 degree. Accept?

Also a lot of problems can be diagnosed via these smart boilers. Eg I knew one person who had their boiler hot water temp set to I dont know 60 centigrade, but their tank was set to 65 centigrade so the tank was constantly asking for heating but it never got up to temp becuase the boiler was only sending 60 centigrade water. This setup was like this for 5+ years before I fixed it. During that time the pump was running 24/7 at 90 watts and the pipework was emitting lots of lost heat between the boiler and the tank perhaps as much as 500 watts. At Least 25MWh of NG wasted and at least 4 MWh of electricity wasted due to incorrectly setting up the system. Easy fix was just to set the tank to want 60 centigrade and the boiler to output 62 centigrade. Such a customer with a smart boiler could have been notified there is a problem (eg easy software to realize the thing should be on 24/7 for months at a time) and to notify what the problem might be too or to call a plumber. Said person would have saved ~£1,600 if they cough the problem 5 years sooner or had the £20 smart hybrid boiler rather than a dumb boiler

Andy_WSM wrote: »

The local distribution grid won't cope with lots of 12kW heaters all switching on at the same time to soak up excess wind generation. The capacity (as things stand) just isn't there. If it was then electric car charging (which "only" uses 7kWh, some only 3.6kWh, for the majority of current cars) wouldn't be a topic of discussion.

And where the local grid is at capacity when the boiler sends its signal to the utility to ask 'gov electric or gas?' it gets the answer gas back. Where there is capacity in the local grid, it gets a signal back saying 'use electric me lad'

Location of where the boiler is can be determined by GPS (like even the cheapest smartphones have) or the postcode entered on registration when the system is installed

Also 12KW is overkill, most of these boilers will only be connected to the existing 13A connection rather than a new thicker wire installed. But 12KW or 3KW both will be controllable so its not 0 or Max but variable between 0 and Max. A typical house would use closer to 2-3KW for its radiators in the winter anyway so doesn't need much more. For higher demand applicaitons like the shower you might have the gas side provide 8KW of heat and the electric side provide 3KW of electric to combine to 11KW to feed the shower

Also any local grid capacity limits will be only during certain times of the day. Plus the grid connected to the housing stock has a lot more capacity than average usage. Heating wont be a problem at all with maybe a 24h heating cycle the utility telling the boiler to use gas for 2-3 hours the rest of the time there will be capacity

As for the national grid and if it has capacity. The UK grid does have a lot of spare capacity since in the recent past the UK grid was handling about 20% more energy on winter days than we currently do (because energy efficiency has allowed peak demand to go down by about 10GW over the last decade or so)

This is a very very good idea and has no downsides
The only downside is boiler costs go up 2% but you get a better boiler
Even if your boiler lasts 15 years and never ever uses its electric side becuase your local grid is congested or there is never ever excess wind power on the grid...what have you lost? Nothing!

But it means if the nation decides to install a lot more wind, instead of curtailing it these hybrid boilers make use of the energy and save NG