On Christmas, the normal rules of providing electricity are a little different. Every day there is a peak demand for electricity which is met by switching on power stations at the right time.
In this blog, I broke that our turkey was, in fact, powered by a record percentage of low carbon electricity.
On Christmas, the normal rules of providing electricity are a little different. Every day there is a peak demand for electricity which is met by switching on power stations at the right time.
In winter, this peak demand occurs in the evening when we come home from work. On Christmas Day, the peak occurs at midday as we switch on our ovens and cook our turkey dinner.
The chart below shows the electricity generation for each hour on Christmas Day. The pickup of electricity around 11am is visible and it lasts until around 2pm.
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This boost was met by some gas plants and energy storage.
- 1GW of energy storage switched on at midday. You will notice that no storage was on before 7am because our pumped hydro stations were charging up.
- Gas met the bulk of the pickup. At 8am it was providing around 5GW, but quickly ramped up to 8.5GW by 1pm before falling down to 3GW at 5pm.
Wind provided the most electricity on Christmas day: 32% of it versus 27% of our electricity from nuclear and 17% from gas. However, it was the flexibility of gas and energy storage which allowed us to bake our turkeys.
In 2017, the early indications are that more energy storage will be available to National Grid to meet our peak electricity demands- it will be interesting to see how much gas that displaces on Christmas Day 2017.