Nick Rosen

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 …

I started prepping for Coronavirus in September 2019, after I heard about Disease X.   A World Health Organisation staffer told me of plans to war-game a major pandemic –  create a dummy Situation Room where various luminaries would form a world government once deaths reach a million.
 
The world ignored them then, but I didn’t ignore them.
 
In November 2019 I bought an acre of land in the West Country at auction, without even seeing the plot.   
After the hammer fell, I did my research. It took about a day to pinpoint the exact location of my remote field, in a hamlet of smallholdings dotted with sheds and horseboxes. At least I have neighbours.
 
Some of those neighbours won’t welcome an outsider, especially now. 

But they will have to learn to accept people like me.  I am part of a megatrend. As successive waves of the pandemic break over Western society, hundreds of thousands of newly-unemployed workers from the big cities may begin to think along similar lines. After all, how long will the state be able to pay everyone even a basic income? The gig economy is set to explode, and many of those part-time jobs can be done from anywhere with a phone and a computer.

Zoom Boom

The move from the suburbs to remote rural locations started a decade ago, as the ratio of house prices to income steadily increased. That migration is turning from a trickle to a flood. This is set to to be the Age of Exurbia, defined by Washington Think Tank the Brookings Institution as places at least an hour from the nearest city, with housing density in the bottom quartile. And the boom in video-conferencing during the lockdown has shown tens of millions there is a way to stay in touch with friends, family and work colleagues. That will be a huge benefit to the environment.

 Academics and demographers pooh-pooh the idea of a really major exodus from the cities, pointing to a lack of broadband and scarcity of medical facilities.  These are serious obstacles, but if you are determined to leave the city behind there are two ways to overcome them.  One is to make do without broadband, live a disconnected life, and ensure that your community includes a doctor, or at least a nurse.
 
This has its attractions, but I chose another way: my newly acquired land was purchased for its location – near one of the greatest concentrations of internet bandwidth in the United Kingdom – Morwenstow, the northernmost parish of Cornwall, and home to GCHQ’s  Composite Signals Organisation Station. In other words, the nerve centre for hundreds of spooks. There are excellent community hospitals in the area.

“If you think the world will end tomorrow, plant a tree today”

 I’d bought my agricultural acre both as an escape route from society, but also to plant a wood. I …

This is a shout-out to our readers to ask – please send us thousands of your off-grid photos – hundreds of minutes of video footage of you and your off-grid life. C’mon down to our YouTube channel – you can even star in it – we are looking for off-grid communities or individuals to become our next YouTube stars.

With the amazing Smartphones most of us now possess, we can all make photography and videography a part of our life. We are all citizen journalists.

lease send us your stills or videos using photo and video apps, via Google docs or Wetransfer.com.

You can email news@off-grid.net for more guidance on what to send and how to send it.

If you do not live off-grid – you can still share videos of yourself talking about why you want to live off-grid – especially at this difficult time, when Coronavirus confines so many to their own homes.

We know from emails we receive from our readers how many of you want to flee the city now, and start a new life of self-sufficiency.

We also understand you want to look great in every picture you share on our social media platforms. You can even hire a professional to edit photos, for example using On Click.
But we can also edit the footage for you and please ret assured that whatever you send us will be used to best effect. We want you to look good – when you look good, then we look good. So don’t be shy – send us your most revealing moments and most interesting off-grid technologies and we will take care of the rest.
And it really is very easy to film and shoot stills on a phone camera these days – the only limitation is he amount of memory and the bandwidth to send it to us being included in your tariff – but will all-inclusive phone plans even this is within the scope of many. And if not, just wait until the next time you go into town and then jump on the bandwidth in a cafe or library.

Photo and video apps are a boon, allowing you to edit with just a few taps on the mobile. Stills editing apps can change the look and feel of the photographs, from cropping unwanted objects to the addition of stickers or background. There are a few advanced photo editing apps which allow you to remove imperfections on the face, such as wrinkles, dark circles, and white spots.

Video editing apps can be used to do a basic edit – try Vidtrim, Quik, and Adobe Premiere Clip.

There are multiple reasons to use photo editing apps:
Add stickers
If you want to capture yourself standing outside your off-grid home, you can do it. There are various ways to add and remove elements that are in the …