
Power surges in Britain caused by millions of people making tea [video] - shrikant
http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml
======
afarrell
I'm a bit surprised that they are using Hydro power to handle the extra
demand, given that natural gas turbines generally are easier to locate close
to urban areas. However, their marginal costs are lower. I'm more surprised
that this is done manually. In the US, or at least in New York State, this is
a market system and scheduling is done by a big 'ol linear program. It takes
the supply curves from power plants, the amount of energy required by each
region, and the constraints imposed by the physical limits of power line
capacity, and solves for the lowest overall cost required to power New York
State.

To be more detailed: For a given region, the algorithm schedules the lowest-
cost sources first and keeps adding higher and higher cost sources until it
reaches necessary generation capacity. Then, everyone is paid the same rate as
the the marginal watt that just got scheduled. As a consequence, sources of
power which cost money to shut down, like nuclear plans, will actually bid
negative into the market to ensure they are scheduled. This is followed by
low-marginal-cost plants like hydro dams. Then coal, which is relatively
cheap. Then natural gas which is more expensive (or at least was before
fracking) but the turbines for which can respond quickly. This actually
happens twice as they run this market once the day before based on predictions
and then run an adjustments market in real time. IT is actually possible to
sell power in the day-ahead market and sell it in the real-time market without
owning any generation capacity and do arbitrage. Another way to do arbitrage
is to build two reservoirs and pump water to the higher one at night when
power is cheap and then generate hydro power during the day when power is
expensive [1]. You can also use flywheels or batteries. There are also markets
for ancillary services like standing by ready to generate electricity or
decrease generation with a few seconds' notice.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim-
Gilboa_Hydroelectric_P...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim-
Gilboa_Hydroelectric_Power_Station) Source for the rest of this: I interned at
the New York ISO four years ago. Read more here:
[http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_ma...](http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_markets/energy_market/index.jsp)

~~~
scrumper
Thing with Britain is that pretty much everywhere is close to an urban area.
The National Grid is truly that: national. Hydro comes online instantly,
faster even than gas. It's perfect for these unique-to-Britain spikes.

The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done
manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict,
but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a
significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For
example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a
nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the
new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly
everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to
make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles
all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different
timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're
talking about.

I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in
demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a
little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer.
The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a
major city on Thanksgiving.

~~~
icegreentea
Not exactly the same - especially since water gets drawn out of reservoirs
(typically) so there's already significant buffer, but here's a plot of water
consumption in Edmonton during Canada's gold medal olympic hockey game back in
2010.

[http://chrisblattman.com/2010/03/08/graph-of-the-day-
canadia...](http://chrisblattman.com/2010/03/08/graph-of-the-day-canadians-
pee-between-periods/)

~~~
robocat
Water can be stored almost losslessly, with cheap fixed costs (e.g. the many
cisterns in a household, e.g. the iconic watertank that appears in US movies).
Transporting water long distances usually has large fixed costs, and has
massive marginal costs if it has to go uphill.

Electricity is expensive to store, both marginal costs (losses) and fixed
costs (plant). Pumping water into hydro-electric lakes is a reasonable
solution at present but: 1. pumping has significant marginal losses, 2.
usually lakes can't be placed near significant urban loads (desireble to
reduce network failure risk, and optimise network loading), 3. hydro-electric
lakes are often hard engineering (earthquake risks, difficult to get good
potential energy storage if flat land), or politically difficult (consent,
water rights), etc.

We need to invent better systems that can _profitably_ sell peak load and buy
off-peak load (or buy constant load). Especially for periods of a day or even
longer. That would also solve a lot of issues with eco-friendly power (solar,
wind). Especially that can absorb huge amounts of load (e.g. overnight).
Especially that can absorb and release load within sub-minute periods. Big
engineering :-)

~~~
mprovost
This is why wind and solar are good partners with hydro. They're more
unreliable due to weather but if you have the wind or sun available to
generate more power than you need, you can use the excess power to pump water
uphill into a hydro lake and store it for later. So even though it's a lossy
operation as you say you're basically getting it for free. And like the video
showed, hydro is very responsive to short term load demands so if the wind
falls off you can quickly start up a hydro plant, as opposed to something like
coal or gas which takes much more effort to start/stop.

Theoretically you can put wind/solar much closer to urban centres but in
reality the NIMBYs don't want them either near cities where they can be seen
or in remote areas which are typically areas of natural beauty.

~~~
robocat
Windmills are already causing major network problems.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-
overload-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-overload-
east-europe-s-grid-risking-blackout-energy.html)

I would guess due to a design flaw in the market rules (or the rules for the
interaction between different national markets).

I think most large windmill turbines are designed to be able to be feathered
to limit electricity production - they need some way to not fail when winds
exceed generator constraints - but maybe designs use wind stalling or other
dynamics to prevent that? Alternatively they could build dumping loads close
to the wind power - e.g. warm some seawater with big resistors!

Edit: I love the quote "Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying
utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can
still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits." LOL.

------
mrb
The demand is increasing by 3 gigawatts in less than 5 minutes, right at the
end of a popular TV show. The operator who oversees the whole grid has a TV to
be able to watch the show, to know exactly when it ends and be prepared. That
is insane.

The demand for the whole country is ~40 GW on average. That's an 8% increase
in 5 min.

~~~
thaumasiotes
actually, what strikes me as insane in that summary is that the end of a
popular TV show might not occur at a fully predictable time. Barring
preemption, I think of TV shows as occuring with clocklike regularity, and
even _with_ preemption, it's more common for the interrupted show to make like
nothing happened and just air the parts that would have been showing then
anyway, than to air over an altered time period. Is british TV so different?
Why does the operator need a TV to know when a show will end?

~~~
scrumper
The best example is sporting events. I mentioned half time in the Cup Final in
another comment: there's a referee-determined amount of injury time added to
each half of the game, then that is subject to the ref (who is, as is required
by the job, blind) bothering to check his watch. It's impossible to point to a
given five minute window when the game will end.

And yes, British TV is pretty different, at least on the main channels. Over-
running programmes will push everything else out to start later, rather than
simply starting five minutes in.

TV shows - even in the USA - start all over the place, they are absolutely not
'clocklike' at all. So bad even TiVo has a hard time getting it right.

~~~
rtkwe
I think that's partially due to the fact that syndication, national providers
selling programs to local affiliates is a larger thing here in the States.
Those programs go out at a specific time and often the local stations are just
relays and can't time shift things.

Contrasted against the system in the UK with the BBC where there's not really
a local affiliate but a national station. In that case it seems much easier to
shift for longer running programs.

~~~
jdietrich
Both the BBC and ITV are regional, with a core national schedule but lots of
opt-outs. Most news broadcasts will be followed by a regional news programme.
BBC Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regularly opt-out of the main
schedule to show locally-produced programmes.

~~~
rtkwe
Ok, didn't know the exact setup. I thought even the regional were run by a BBC
branch.

------
patrickyeon
This also happens in Canada, but synchronized to hockey games (predictably).
[http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushe...](http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushed_at_once_Edmonton_water_gold_medal_hockey_game/)

~~~
greenyoda
In the U.S. we have this water demand spike at half-time during the Super
Bowl.

~~~
critium
To the sounds of several million toilets flushing!

~~~
chris_wot
Wembley Stadium has 2,618 toilets. Think about what happens during halftime...

------
pixie_
It begs the question why can't the operator watch a computer that does the
operator's job for him. Is split second power allocation really done better by
a human? Note I'm not suggesting computers are perfect operators, just less
error prone.

~~~
TamDenholm
This is exactly what i was thinking, even though the finish time of Eastenders
might not be what the BBC says it is, its not like it would be hard to write a
program to listen for the "Dun, dun dundundunduuun" and turn up the power.

~~~
politician
An explicit signaling solution seems more appropriate here. Suppose the BBC
were to embed a frame containing a time-remaining flag at various points in
the broadcast. Then the power guys could write some software to watch the
stream for these frames, decode them, and estimate the spike.

If necessary, legislate the presence of the frame.

~~~
jacquesm
What could possibly go wrong?

That's why we don't let politicians design technical systems. They're bound to
come up with solutions that sound good but that will not work in practice.

Some problems with your approach:

    
    
      - partial loss of signal -> false positive -> power surge
    
      - loss of signal -> false negative -> grid overload
    
      - how do you signal the need for a little bit more power?
    

And so on.

The British solution is typical: it's simple, and it 'just works', the speed
with which hydro comes online it is just not enough to be reactive but even a
little bit of forewarning and they'll be fine. Heck if the TV fails he can
call home to mum, or some other place.

Solution of last resort: a slight brown out due to lack of information, but as
long as this system has been in place you'd think if that were a statistically
frequent thing that it would have happened by now.

Compare it with the auto-traffic-info system present in most car radios.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System>

The alternative frequencies system works along the lines you suggest (though
technically it's not a 'frame' but an entire channel with its own carrier
wave). This fails so frequently that I usually disable it. Either you get
switched to some totally unrelated station (without traffic info to boot) and
then never switched back or you're listening to a CD or so and then you'll
suddenly be in the midst of some radio broadcast and again, you're never
switched back.

Easy to propose, using an unreliable medium such as a TV or radio channel
apparently very hard to get 100% right.

And if you're going to change major parameters in the electricity generation
capacity of a nationwide grid I assume you'd put the bar for reliability a bit
higher than I do for my car radio.

~~~
andyking
This system is fairly poor in the UK. It has an ostensibly useful feature
whereby local radio stations transmit a flag to say they're currently
broadcasting traffic information. This then instructs car radios to interrupt
what the listener can currently hear (eg. a CD, a national broadcast) and play
the traffic bulletin from the local station. Sounds useful.

In practice, FM radio signals travel so haphazardly that in most areas, you're
likely to be interrupted several times an hour with travel news for towns and
cities 40, 50, 60 miles away. I regularly get the bulletins for places as far
afield as Shropshire, Humberside, Merseyside and Lincolnshire. If, while
driving, the signal becomes too weak for the 'traffic off' flag to be
received, the radio will simply stay tuned to the FM frequency until the
listener manually cancels it.

In addition to this, illegal 'pirate' radio stations have started to take
advantage of this feature - some of these transmitters have the traffic flag
set to 'on' constantly, with the obvious effect of switching listeners' radios
to the illegal station regularly.

Most people have it turned off!

------
Cogito
I don't know enough about the English power market to draw comparisons, but
I'll outline a little bit about how the Australian NEM (National Energy
Market) works and how it deals with situations like this. My understanding is
derived primarily from an old house mate who did his electrical engineering
honours around the NEM.

A while back the various disparate energy grids in Australia were more-or-less
unified into one big grid (well, a few small grids with intercouples), the NEM
was established, and the newly formed company NEMCO tasked to govern it.

The NEM is a bidding market, where various energy providers (and interestingly
consumers, more on this later) provide bids detailing how much energy they are
willing to provide and at what cost. These bids are placed, I believe, at
least one day in advance though they can be revised after being placed.

If a providers bid is successful, its output gets adjusted automatically by
the NEM to fulfil the quota allocated to it (note: "NEM" is used to describe
both the market and the computer system that manages it, as far as I can
tell). The providers will be paid whatever the current 'spot-price' is,
regardless of the original bid price.

The spot-price is determined by, essentially, greedily consuming the cheapest
energy possible until demand is met. Demand is met when the frequency lies
within an acceptable bracket (around 50Hz). So a coal power station with high
base-load capacity will place low bids for the majority of its capacity, to
ensure that it gets picked first when demand is being met. It costs a lot of
money to turn a station like that off, so they price their bids accordingly.
Gas turbine engines have extremely low start and stop costs but their
operating costs are significantly higher. These turbines will price themselves
so that they get turned on only when demand is high and the spot-price has
increased accordingly.

During some heatwaves in the summer the spot-price can increase to thousands
of dollars per megawatt/hour and it is extremely profitable to have a diesel
generator hooked up to the grid to take advantage of precisely these
situations.

I mentioned before that some consumers will place bids. The realities of power
generation mean that a station shutting down can be a long and expensive
process. They need to ensure that _someone_ is buying their electricity so
that that doesn't happen. Typically this comes in the form of a brokered
agreement with a large consumer, such as an aluminium smelter. The smelter
agrees to buy a large amount of energy at a certain price (the details are a
bit fuzzy to me) and the station ensures that they never drop below minimum
load. The thing is, there is a point where the difference between the spot-
price on the market and the brokered purchase price is larger than the value
of the aluminium that can be smelted with that energy. When this happens, the
smelter shuts down its smelting operations and sells the energy back to the
market instead.

Now its not so simple as the greedy algorithm I outlined before, for precisely
the same reasons as brokered deals happen - physical and political
constraints. It's an incredibly complex job to schedule power station ramp-ups
and ramp-downs while still balancing the load, but for the most part it's
handled by the NEM. It takes into account renewable energy quotas (what my
house mates thesis was on), maintenance shut-downs, water supply (for hydro
stations) and much more.

One thing in particular that I found interesting was the cost of transporting
the energy. There might be tariffs on intercouples between states, but the
main cost is actually the distance the energy has to travel. You can't simply
turn a coal power station up when a town in the middle of the desert has a
power spike, as the attenuation between those two points (well, the closest
station that has excess capacity as a result of the increase) means the demand
isn't met. Instead, a diesel generator near the town might need to be turned
on, which can be very expensive. The grid has a number of way to mitigate
issues like this, but it's still very interesting.

The point is, a well written system makes this market work efficiently, but
the domain of the problem is still _huge_. The (mostly) free market takes care
of many of the load balancing issues, however human intervention seems
unavoidable because there are simply so many things that can go wrong.

[Edit]

NEMCO is now called the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and their
website is at [0]. It has lots of good stuff to look at for the interested. In
particular [1] has lots of nice details about the history and structure of the
Australian Energy Markets.

[0] <http://www.aemo.com.au/>

[1] <http://www.aemo.com.au/About-the-Industry/Energy-Markets>

~~~
chris_wot
This is very interesting. I can add to this that the NSW and Victorian
governments passed some legislation that all retailers of electricity must
offer a percentage of power used be fed into the grid through renewable
sources.

Some people go for 100% renewables - this means that if they consume 3Mw power
then 3Mw power will be guaranteed to be generated from renewable sources.
Would love to know how they calculate this.

The kicker is that they pay for the privilege of using renewable energy, yet
they still have to pay a carbon price on their power.

~~~
jacques_chester
My understanding is that the Renewable Energy Target is actually set by the
Commonwealth. Though since it's not really something directly under any S.51
heading I imagine they do it by paying the States and then the States pass the
laws to make it work. [1]

I too find it weird that the RET stayed after the introduction of the carbon
tax. The entire _point_ of putting a price on emissions is to allow the market
to sort out the most efficient way to abate them.

Buuuut of course the RET was started by Howard _et al_ to prop up sugar cane
farmers and now it's propping up Gillard's mob in the Parliament. So for now
it's unkillable.

[1] On the other hand, when has the concept of limited heads of power ever
stopped the High Court from giving the Commonwealth what it wants? I guess
they could shove it under 51(i) (interstate commerce) or 51(xx) (the
corporations power).

------
EEGuy
Stepping down from aluminum smelter load levels, consider the comparatively
low power demands (orders of magnitude less) of modern lighting and
electronics. There's some interesting geekiness to be found in their power
demand under varying line voltage.

Voltage-regulated "inverter technology" electronics can, ironically, behave
less "linearly" under adverse supply voltage conditions than resistive loads
such as incandescent lighting and electric kettles.

Electronically-ballasted fluorescent lighting, CFLs, computer power supplies,
VFD motor drives, "inverter technology" microwave ovens all electronically
regulate their current draw _inversely_ against voltage supply changes.
Voltage goes down, current draw goes up, power demand remains ~relatively~
constant.

So when a brownout (voltage sag, _not_ an outage) comes along, to some extent,
these "well regulated" devices hide it from the user. You might not see a
"brownout": The electronically ballasted fluorescent lights _don't_ dim so
much -- or at all --, your laptop computer keeps running fine if the sag
doesn't drop too much, and any DC-powered fans won't necessarily slow down so
much or at all. But maybe you heard a universal motor somewhere slowed down.
Or maybe the lit-up display area on your old CRT monitor (is anyone still
using those anymore?) shrinks 10% then comes back. You hear your computer's
desk-side UPS click in (if it has a relay, cheap ones do) then back out but
don't see the lights dim. I've seen and heard this and found it rather
jarring.

The term "brownout" may become an anachronism (perhaps it has already), not
because brownouts don't happen anymore, but because they don't dim the room
lights anymore.

To see how much variation a small "non-dimmable" CFL will tolerate, I just put
one on a variable transformer and lowered the line voltage gradually from
normal (120 Volts) downward. Here's what happened: o It lost very little
brightness until about 60-some Volts o Below that threshold, it just turned
itself off

As a device user, this is what I'd expect of a "well-regulated" device that
runs on mains (grid) power.

But I don't imagine such "well regulated" loads make grid dynamics marginally
easier to control under the severe conditions which lead to voltage sags.
Probably not much worse though, considering all the heavier loads a grid must
support.

~~~
robocat
I wonder if this is offset by industrial loads that are integrated into the
network to drop their loads within milliseconds or short timeframes? Large
server farms that do offline processing can instantly turn off large loads
without problem e.g. Youtube background video processing.

India has perverse loads too: "Microtek, an Indian company that specializes in
selling power backup inverters, claims to have 100 million satisfied
customers.". I have read of the same thing happening on water networks, where
individual households connect pumps to the the public water supply to suck
water when pressure drops too low (supplier can then only restrict rate rather
than control pressure, and customers at end of line go without!).

Many Inverter loads have a bigger problem in that they often only suck current
at the peak and nadir of each voltage swing (Volts), leading to an ugly non-
sinusoidal current waveform (Amps) with odd or even harmonics. Networks add
large expensive HV equipment to reduce harmonics. Networks also charge large
industrial users more if they have bad current waveforms (either harmonics,
noise, or power factor).

------
caf
The opposite effect happens once a year in Australia, when factories across
the country down tools for 10 minutes to watch a horse race, resulting in a
large drop in aggregate demand over a short time period.

~~~
jacques_chester
Thank you for avoiding the cliché.

------
nandemo
Does that mean that Brits use electric kettles, or they use regular kettles
but stoves are mostly electric (instead of using gas)?

~~~
rmc
They would always use electric kettles. The idea of putting (basically) a pot
on a stove to boil water sounds like still going outside to an outhouse to go
to the toilet.

When renting a house for a holiday in USA once, my family went out to buy an
electric kettle to make tea & coffee, and they weren't as common in shops as
we thought. That was a weird eye-opener.

~~~
toyg
In Italy, very few people would own an electric kettle, or even a classic one.

I've travelled a fair bit and I've never, ever seen as many kettles as in
Britain.

~~~
eru
They are common in Germany as well.

------
arankine
Back in high school, i visited the JET nuclear fusion project in Oxfordshire,
they told us that they have to plan fusion experiments so they don't coincide
with the end or commercial break of a soap, due to the tokamak requiring (i
can't remember the exact figure) ~1 - 5% of the national grid's output.

~~~
timthorn
Yes, and even then they've stored massive amounts of energy in a couple of
very large concrete flywheels to supplement the NG's output.

------
rurounijones
if you can find it the BBC documentary "the secret life of the national grid"
(3 episodes) is a fascinating look into the history of the UK National
Electricity Grid

EDIT: You can find it on youtube if you do a search.

------
aj700
You can monitor the UK National Grid inputs and transfers, sales, demand etc.
in almost real time here <http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php>

You need flash, I've never got this page to work in Chrome, but it works in
Firefox

~~~
tomd
I wrote a slightly frivolous one-page app which scrapes National Grid
frequency data:

<http://www.caniturniton.com/>

Someone used its API (/api/json) to make a load-sensitive kettle:

<http://elsmorian.com/Projects/CarbonKettle>

------
afandian
Unique British problem caused by tea. What must you Americans think of us? (is
it true that Americans don't have enough power through the mains to boil a
kettle?)

~~~
scaphandre
Is that tongue-in-cheek? Of course they can boil a kettle.

It does take ages, though.

Conventional kettles seemed to take perhaps twice as long to boil in CA than
in UK. Boiling water at 230V,13A in the UK is going to be much faster than
120V,15A in the US.

~~~
wglb
Um, no.

Heating rate is a function of wattage, not voltage.

EDIT: my error. I neglected to notice the amps shown and just picked up on the
voltage.

~~~
tacticus
W = V * I

W1 = 230V * 13A = 2990

W2 = 120V * 15A = 1800

slight bit more power in the 220-240v at 10-13ish amp system than 120 @ 15

~~~
jsight
Don't most stoves in the US use 220?

EDIT: oops, just realized that these are likely electric kettles. I was
thinking of the stovetop variety.

~~~
tacticus
Yep these are separate plugin versions.

the kettle i just bought on the weekend draws 2300W

------
peterwwillis
If the power grid in the US drops to 57HZ, we're all boned.

Fun fact: Texas is the only state in the union with it's own power grid
independent of other states. It is literally the only state that could
successfully secede from the union.

~~~
sethrin
Sorry, you mean Alaska and Hawaii have some sort of connection to the rest of
the grid, and Texas does not? Or do you mean that Alaska and Hawaii are not
states in the union?

Maybe you mean 'most of Texas' and 'only state in the contiguous US'.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection>

The part of your comment relating secession merits no response.

~~~
peterwwillis
Sorry, I didn't clarify.

Hawaii's energy needs are 90% based on imported oil. If they seceded, they'd
go dark.

While Alaska certainly has the ability to make money off its oil, most of its
heating, power and other needs is actually provided by diesel fuel. Add to
that the fact that most of the jobs are either government or military related
and other industries in the state rely heavily on government subsidies, the
state would probably find itself in a real predicament if it cut off contact
with its pimp.

------
vineel
I thought some clocks used the frequency of the power grid to keep time. How
are they reliable if it keeps fluctuating so much?

~~~
mynameishere
What? How is that not insane when a 2 dollar watch can use quartz with near-
perfect accuracy?

~~~
lttlrck
Plenty of electro-mechanical heating timers work in this way.

------
DigitalJack
What did the power draw have to do with the frequency?

~~~
robocat
The main buffer for immediate sub-second changes in load is the rotating
inertia of electricity generators (e.g. spinning turbines).

When the total power load of the network exceeds the power generation, the
immediate load is taken from generators and they slow down. Alternatively if
the total load drops, the turbines speed up as they have more mechanical power
pushed into them than is being absorbed by the network.

You might think it would be easier to droop the Voltage (lower the load), but
for a variety of reasons it works out much better to let the frequency drop
(e.g. system frequency can be reliably measured over sub-second periods,
frequency is the easily measured everywhere on the network independent of
phase, simple control systems before there were electronics).

The whole network relies on this for control purposes. If a network goes out
of synchronisation, very very bad things happen - designing for big
electricity is true engineering :) e.g. hundreds of millions of people go
without power for many hours e.g. design failures in substations and
commercial loads can explode due to ginormous power changes!!!

~~~
DigitalJack
Excellent response, thanks!

------
henrikgs
The volume slider on the BBC player goes to 11. Brilliant.

------
kaliblack
The thing that stands out to me is how inefficient kettles are in terms of
power usage. Is it a simple case of more power equals shorter time to boil? Is
there a more efficient way to turn electricity to heat?

~~~
batiudrami
Of all the types of energy, it's easiest to turn other types of energy (such
as electricity) into heat. That's why, when converting amongst other kinds of
energy (such as light, or motion), a side effect is often heat (and things
getting hot which don't need to be is a sign of an inefficient process).

Essentially the kettle just converts electricity to heat (very efficient)
which heats the element inside the kettle which is transferred to the water
surrounding it via conduction (also very efficient). There's almost no wasted
energy, and you know that because the area around the kettle does not get hot.

Kettles do use a lot of energy because water requires a lot of energy to heat
up - in fact it's among the highest of all substances (the measure of this is
called the heat capacity or specific heat - the amount of energy to raise an
amount of a substance by one degree Celcius/1 Kelvin.

If you want to be more energy efficient at boiling water, put only the amount
of water you need in the kettle, rather than boiling extra, but obviously this
is not a solution when scaling electricity infrastructure.

edit: I should note that Kettles are not completely efficient - there is still
some energy loss (for instance, through resistance in the wiring in the
kettle, and heat conducted to the kettle itself or radiated to the surrounding
air).

~~~
lmm
Could one make a heat pump kettle that would be "more than 100% efficient", by
moving head from the surrounding air into the water rather than just resistive
heating? I remember seeing that approach recommended for heating houses.

------
rmc
There are some interesting consequences of this. I heard about a "Earth Hour"
or something, a campaign for people to turn off their lights (or something)
for a hour (or minute) to use less power.

However unless the National Grid can plan for how many people will do it (nigh
on impossible), they'll probably wind up wasting power, and more people can be
used preparing for everyone to turn things back on, resulting in Earth
Hour/Minute actually use more power than if they'd done nothing.

~~~
Swannie
Yes. This goes around every year Earth Hour comes up. It's a 1 hour shut down.
If people actually did this, then yes, the coal power would stay on. Some
would be stored (pumped hydro), but most will be burned off.

National Grid do have very good prediction, as per this (old) video.

------
olympus
I'm not sure I understand why the spike happens. Is there some etiquette that
says you must wait until the T.V. show is finished before you may start making
tea (why not switch the kettle on during a commercial break)? Also, is tea in
the evening really that popular? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I'm not a
tea drinker and I live in the U.S.

~~~
pidg
There aren't commercial breaks on the BBC, it's funded by an annual license
fee, so programmes generally run without interruption.

And yes, tea is that popular. In my office, each person will typically drink
3-4 mugs of tea during the day. Many people continue with at least two mugs
when they get home.

~~~
olympus
Thanks for that. Now I need to find out if they are cutting Top Gear and Dr.
Who short on BBC America to make room for the commercials...

~~~
waiwai933
I don't know about Top Gear, but Doctor Who is cut on reruns. It is broadcast
in its entirety, albeit interrupted by commercials, on first showings (which
means it runs long by about 15 minutes).

------
thrownaway2424
Nevermind the grid, that guy in the video has not just one but several
bitchin' keyboards.

------
JosephRedfern
Very interesting. I live just a few miles from the Dinorwig hydro plant that
is mentioned and have been on a tour. It's and incredible feat of engineering
- if ever you get the chance to go there (or somewhere similar), I'd recommend
it.

~~~
bluepaper
Absolutely, I live quite near by to and highly recommend it to anyone
interested, I've been a few times now, and would quite like to go again. For
those who are interested: <http://www.fhc.co.uk/> There's Ffestinog further
south too, but there isn't a tour around that like the one at Dinorwig.

------
icambron
The fundamental issue here is that it's hard to store electricity, so that
demand has to be met in realtime. This kind of problem should fade away as
cheap grid-scale batteries become available in the next decade.

------
josscrowcroft
This is hilarious, had me searching for the post date to make sure it wasn't a
late-picked-up April Fool's joke.

------
spikels
Reminds me of the apparently fake story that large numbers of people
simultaneously flushing their toilets during breaks in the Superbowl damaging
sewerage systems.

I wonder if some kind of evil flash mob could bring down the grid by having
everyone turn on all their power hungry appliances at the exact same time.

~~~
J_Darnley
If you want to make a flash mob big enough to do that you would need to post
the information publicly. Then I think there's a good chance of word getting
back to National Grid who could then plan for it. The only thing they wouldn't
know then is the size of the demand.

------
kokey
I don't know why they say it's unique to Britain. I've visited a hydro station
in South Africa a few times where they've shown me that surge, and South
Africans have fewer television channels to choose from.

~~~
andrewmccall
I think it's the sheer size of the surge in demand that's unique. It's
1.5-1.75 million kettles going on at almost exactly the same time.

With 25 million homes in the UK that's 6% of them suddenly wanting another
1000w of electricity.

~~~
leoc
Most UK households have upgraded to 3000W electric kettles by now, I'd guess.

------
dhruvbird
EC2 for power!!

~~~
jacques_chester
And the circle of analogies is complete.

Cloud computing: it's just like your utility!

Utilities: just like cloud computing!

------
dakimov
For me it just screams for the question what if that guy will not keep up or
just will go to the bathroom? Power outage on the national scale? Frankly that
story just blew my mind, all that seems so ridiculous in its hilarious
epicness, but very thought provoking. And of course what I did first is
checked was not it an April's Fool Day joke. Also the main property of
stereotypes is that they often come out to be true. Great post.

~~~
eru
> Power outage on the national scale?

Just brownout. The hydro will come online a few seconds later.

------
sippndipp
Jeesh I'm so happy that I'm a rails engineer. How can I follow him on twitter?

------
trainthis
One gobby bloke in my flat would take the lift and run out for his bits and
bobs -- that spanner would come back after a fortnight with a hold-all and
straight away put the kettle on, then have an ice lolly.

