The Aussies Get Into Home Batteries
As you might imagine, Australia with its sunshine and lots of remote communities could be a big market for battery technology like Tesla’s Powerwall. But this article in the Australian Financial Review shows why the country will be a big market.
It says that for example in Queensland, a third of the houses have solar panels, which must only increase the demand for batteries.
But it also says that the way the Australians charge for electricity is different to the United States and this makes batteries much more useful. I think that in the UK, we follow the Australian model. Except for the sun of course!
The article has some interesting details on how the price of the devices will go, especially as it says that Panasonic who are one of the Big 3 battery makers will be entering the market soon.
I all think it goes to show that each market is different and I suspect that the UK market will be different again, as most of us don’t live in houses that are too friendly to solar panels.
But my house is with its flat roof, and I am watching the price of solar panels, because I reckon in the next few years, I’ll be able to fit a very affordable system, that will take me substantially off-grid, with a battery in the garage.
Solar panels, battery technology and small innovative energy companies are going to give the Big 6 energy companies, one hell of a kicking.
British And French Engineers Can Work Together
In the Sunday Times today, they are talking about a £4billion project to import electricity into the UK from Iceland, It is called Icelink and it would appear to have the backing of both the UK and Iceland governments. There’s more about it in this article in Utility Week.
So it got me thinking about undersea electricity connections around the world. There is a list of them here. And there is forty-four of them
Perhaps the best known is the connection between Kent and France, which is called the HVDC Cross Channel. It is actually the second one and it has been running for nearly thirty years. A section in Wikipedia describes its significance.
Since the commissioning of the 2,000 MW DC link in the 1980s, the bulk of power flow through the link has been from France to Britain. However, France imports energy as needed during the summer to meet demand, or when there is low availability of nuclear or hydroelectric power.
As of 2005 imports of electricity from France have historically accounted for about 5% of electricity available in the UK. Imports through the interconnector have generally been around the highest possible level, given the capacity of the link. In 2006, 97.5% of the energy transfers have been made from France to UK, supplying the equivalent of 3 million English homes. The link availability is around 98%, which is among the best rates in the world. The continued size and duration of this flow is open to some doubt, given the growth in demand in continental Europe for clean electricity, and increasing electricity demand within France.
So it would appear it’s been successful and proves that we can work with the French on an engineering project.
It strikes me that we need to connect all of our power systems together in Western Europe. The UK is being connected to Ireland, Iceland and Norway and the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany are getting in on the act.
What you won’t find from reading about the cables, but you will in some newspaper articles, is that Norway will have the ability to store electricity in a pumped storage system in the future.
So when the wind is blowing and we have too much electricity, the Norwegians will pump water from a low to a high lake and when we want it back, the water will be released through a turbine. It’s like putting your KWh in a bank!
The Anonymous Widower 