Electric mountain is primarily designed to handle the shortist term electrical demands ie putting kettles on (massive demand spike) during tv breaks for the most popular TV programmes. Fortunately the video recorder and subsequent personal recording technology and internet streaming on-demand helps to lesson the demand on Electric Mountain which is why we may never see another one built in the UK. However our demand for technology is driving up the need for more Nuclear and to a lessor extent coal fired power stations, but the ARM cpu is helping to play its part in reducing energy requirements as will parallel processing to mitigate the need for super fast AMD64 cpu's.
Base line demands are met (in order of scaling up or down to meet demand) is nuclear, then coal, gas, hydro including electric mountain. Electric mountain pumps the water back up when surplus electricity is available during the night.
During the week in Feb 2018 when the Beast from the East hit the UK, the realtime gas price on the energy market went off the scale. As more evidence and awareness stacks up that we are going into what is dubbed the Eddy Minimum (a grand solar minimum last seen some 500years ago), so people will take more steps to have a certain level of redundancy built into their homes (where possible LPG/OIL tanks on their property) in order to help mitigate extreme weather events.
Currently if everyone were to live a US lifestyle we would need 4 planet Earths, a UK lifestyle 2.5 planet Earths and so on.
"the video recorder and subsequent personal recording technology and internet streaming on-demand helps to lesson the demand"
Demand may be getting more stable, but supply is going in the other direction! There is a need for energy storage as the UK grid moves to more renewable and intermittent energy sources, predominantly wind.
Pumped hydro stations like Dinorwig can help lessen the need for fossil-fueled thermal power plants to provide spinning reserve / frequency maintenance. So can batteries.
Whether we will see any more pumped hydro built in the UK probably comes down to cost and environmental concerns, when considered relative to other storage technologies like batteries and electric vehicles with V2G.
> during tv breaks for the most popular TV programmes.
Maybe staggering the schedules of TV programs to even this out would be a great idea. After all, now that most people get their tv signal via digital cable rather than over the air, this should be a lot easier to implement. Even +-5 minutes might smooth out those spikes quite a bit.
Electric mountain is primarily designed to handle the shortist term electrical demands ie putting kettles on (massive demand spike) during tv breaks for the most popular TV programmes. Fortunately the video recorder and subsequent personal recording technology and internet streaming on-demand helps to lesson the demand on Electric Mountain which is why we may never see another one built in the UK. However our demand for technology is driving up the need for more Nuclear and to a lessor extent coal fired power stations, but the ARM cpu is helping to play its part in reducing energy requirements as will parallel processing to mitigate the need for super fast AMD64 cpu's.
Base line demands are met (in order of scaling up or down to meet demand) is nuclear, then coal, gas, hydro including electric mountain. Electric mountain pumps the water back up when surplus electricity is available during the night.
During the week in Feb 2018 when the Beast from the East hit the UK, the realtime gas price on the energy market went off the scale. As more evidence and awareness stacks up that we are going into what is dubbed the Eddy Minimum (a grand solar minimum last seen some 500years ago), so people will take more steps to have a certain level of redundancy built into their homes (where possible LPG/OIL tanks on their property) in order to help mitigate extreme weather events.
Currently if everyone were to live a US lifestyle we would need 4 planet Earths, a UK lifestyle 2.5 planet Earths and so on.