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We love trees and we love wind turbines. So we’ve created some tech that combines the two in order to bring invisible renewable energy to a tree near you. Image https://unsplash.com/@mahkeo on https://unsplash.com/ I’m not talking about sticking a wind turbine poking out of the top of a tree - that would be ridiculous. Inspired by the flexibility of electric wallpaper and the graceful movement of tidal energy generators we’ve created a material that can be wrapped around the limbs of a tree. Our kitchen has a view on quite a few mature trees - we’ve got beech, silver birch, black poplar, ash and cherry trees. We’ve had strong wind a few times over winter so sitting here on days I’ve worked from home I’ve watched the trees sway back and forth and realised there’s energy to be harvested which may also reduce the likelihood of trees being blown down. The material we’ve created has two microscopic generation layers (proprietary molecular substance that we’re patenting so I can’t share details here yet) and these layers can move against each other in any direction. As they move a miniscule current is generated (similar to pizoelectric spark generators). The material also has two fine copper mesh layers (either side of the generation layers) across the whole sheet too which means the current of each molecular interaction can be captured. The copper mesh means the material can be cut and shaped - long thin strips or wider sections - and connectors attached anywhere along the sides in a similar way to the electric wallpaper I've written about. You simply cut the pieces needed and wrap them round the major limbs and trunk of the tree. There needs to be a bit of thought and planning here as the objective is wrap along lengths of branch that have a decent sway in the wind as that’s where the movement creates the generation. Having wrapped them then the connectors are applied and thin wires (the energy is all low voltage DC just the same as solar panels) attached to connect back to a main tree-generator point. The material can be printed with a finishing textured surface meaning if you get the wrap right it’s virtually invisible - particularly once there’s leaves on the trees. Energy is generated when there’s movement. The draw of electricity has to be carefully modulated - if you were to try to put too heavy a load on a wind generator you could actually make it stall. You’ll have seen this in reverse if you take a battery powered toy car with a motor - applying a greater grip to the wheel you can stop it rotating so the same happens in reverse. For the tree generator we can apply the same principal - if we try to draw too much electricity then that pushes back on the interaction between the two generator layers which means the material appears to get stiffer and hence that can steady, or dampen, the movement of the tree in excessive wind - potentially (although we’ve not had a strong enough wind yet) enough to stop the tree blowing down. So there you go - invisible renewable energy in your garden or street. Energy that literally grows on trees. Sign up now and we’ll be in touch when the product is ready for you to grow your own renewable energy.

Image https://unsplash.com/@andywatkins on https://unsplash.com Yesterday Whitby residents were given the choice of staying with Natural Gas instead of being forced to take part in a Hydrogen home heating & cooking trial as a result of a tremendous amount of pressure by residents on the local council, government, and Cadent. It’s worth witnessing the effort in the video recording of the council’s engagement session earlier in February 2023 to get to this point. Burning Hydrogen mostly just emits water vapour (more below) whereas burning natural gas (which is 90% Methane, so from now on I’ll refer to it as Methane) emits Carbon Dioxide. It’s also created by electrolysis so is as green as the electricity it’s produced from so Hydrogen is claimed to be far better for the environment. But that’s about as good as it gets. There are plans to mix up to 20% into the Methane network with the long term aim eventually for 100% Hydrogen for heating our homes and cooking our meals. And that’s where a bunch of issues occur. First, where does the Hydrogen come from and is it efficient? Hydrogen doesn’t naturally occur so has to be produced by electrolysis; pass electricity through water and you get bubbles of Hydrogen released. That gets captured, compressed, transported (more below) then decompressed and burnt. The result is about 50% efficient; you lose half the energy through that process, so if a wind turbine generates 1kWh of electricity we’ll get 0.5kWh of usable heat when it’s burnt. Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHP) have an efficiency between 250% and 450% so for example that 1kWh of wind generated electricity results in 2.5kWh to 4.5kWh equivalent of heat in our homes rather than 0.5kWh from a Hydrogen boiler. If we allow for some losses in electricity transmission and a lowish average heat pump efficiency and take 300% efficiency, the maths is easy - heating with an ASHP is 6 times as efficient as burning Hydrogen, or we can also say ASHP heating requires 1/6th the electricity needed for producing and burning Hydrogen. Read that again - we require 1/6th of the extra electricity generation to heat our homes with heat pumps versus Hydrogen when we completely transition off Methane. Transitioning from Methane to electrified heat over the next 10 to 20 years does mean a large electricity generation increase - so it is a big figure. But if all you see is a big electricity generation increase without a reference point then it’s too easy to get blinded by the size of the number but not the comparison. For example at a recent event I spoke at a senior Ofgem official, talking about Hydrogen, exclaimed to me “think of all the electricity needed to power all those heat pumps if we come off [Methane] gas” to which my reply was of course “yes and you’ll need 6 times that if they’re on Hydrogen instead”. Second, how do you transport it? Hydrogen molecules are ⅛ the size of Methane so they’re going to squeeze and leak through pipework materials, joints, seals and valves that were only designed for Methane. Hydrogen also has a greenhouse gas warming effect as much as 11 times worse than CO2 so the slightest leak has a much greater impact than the CO2 emitted from burning Methane. That’s a lot of gas network upgrading and leak risk mitigation to sort out. On Twitter I shared my experience of asking a Cadent gas engineer about upgrading our street to Hydrogen. Looking at his app that showed the local pipelines he could see the gas pipe down our street was metal so would require a new plastic pipe pushed down inside the existing metal pipe, then a hole dug outside each property to then push and connect a plastic pipe to each house. Then a new meter installed. Our house (1960’s) has metal pipework from our gas meter to our living room fire so that would need replacing too which means opening up the ceiling and walls. That’s a lot of work, a lot of disruption and very costly. It’s interesting to note that the Whitby Hydrogen trial is now going to involve a completely new gas grid being installed in parallel to the existing Methane pipework as too many residents have objected to being forced to take Hydrogen. The trial is now much more likely to fail as a dual rollout of Hydrogen and Methane is an even sillier idea. Third, energy density is a problem. The energy density of a Kg of Hydrogen is 2.5x that of a Kg of Methane - that’s because those very small molecules are packed more densely. If you have the kit for receiving and managing highly compressed Hydrogen then the energy density by weight is an advantage. There’s a very small number of Hydrogen cars around and they have high compression tanks on board so there's enough energy to get any distance from a Hydrogen powered car. And in fact by weight Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density of petrol and diesel. But our homes are supplied by pipes at much lower pressure so the volume-density matters instead. By volume it has only ⅓ the energy density of Methane so that means 3 times the flow rate through the gas system to the boiler to get the same heating energy. That means higher pressure to force through that Hydrogen 3 times as fast through all the gas pipes to your home. Will the pipes take it, what flow issues will there be, will the pipes whistle, a leak will become very obvious and very dangerous very quickly. Fourth, Hydrogen is much more flammable than Methane and has NOx emissions. Pure Hydrogen or Methane is hard to burn so has to be mixed with Oxygen from the air around us. Methane is fussy and burns properly with a mixture of 7% to 20% Oxygen - hence opening the window if you’ve got a gas leak will dilute the Methane enough that it’s much less at risk of catching light. Hydrogen isn’t as fussy and will burn with anywhere from 4% to 75% Oxygen mix. A gas boiler is therefore designed to create the best mix of gas and air when it’s burnt and you’d have thought the broader mix for Hydrogen is an advantage but really it means it’s got a greater chance of going boom if there’s a leak and that boom will be bigger than with Methane. That means careful design of the combustion chamber and tightly controlling the flow of Hydrogen and air mix. That boom is also going to be more impressive because of the ‘flame speed’ - this is how fast the flame travels through air. Hydrogen’s flame speed is 10 times faster than Methane so that bang is going to be bigger and faster. I mentioned above that Hydrogen mostly emits water vapour but there are also nitrogen oxide emissions too. Hydrogen burns at a higher temperature which means the Nitrogen naturally present in air can result in higher nitrogen oxide emissions than when burning Methane. This can be mitigated by design of the combustion chamber and air mix to keep the temperature lower. The health and safety report into trialling 100% Hydrogen says “ The consequences of the largest domestic hydrogen leak and subsequent explosion scenario are predicted to be more severe than those of the largest domestic natural gas explosion by the consequences model ”. This is to be mitigated with two Excess Flow Valves to automatically close the supply and the meter to be installed outside the property - as a homeowner I’d want those to be out on the street and not in the normal external meter cabinet on the front or side of the house (our gas meter, until we had it removed, was in our utility room - so more change to be Hydrogen compatible). There’s also a requirement for a permanent vent in each room there’s a gas appliance; for us that would’ve been the utility room (gas boiler), kitchen (gas hob) and living room (fireplace). The vent needs to be a minimum of 10,000mm2 in size, permanently open and no less than 500mm from the ceiling (just above head height), so that’s a 10cm x 10cm hole that I could easily put my fist through in each of those rooms. A total hole size of 30,000mm2 (half a sheet of A4) is quite a substantial amount of heat loss I’d not fancy in my house! In summary if we transition to Hydrogen for heating: We’ll build 6 times as much extra electricity generation, Risk having to install a whole parallel Methane grid, Have bigger explosions, Have to re-pipe our home supply and replace & relocate our gas meters, Have more leaks and those leaks will have an 11 times greater greenhouse gas warming impact than CO2, Have greater NOx emissions than burning Methane, Have several prominent ventilation holes high on the wall totalling A5 size.

Yes: If you buy a new home in a few years time the chances are it will be built to the forthcoming Future Homes Standard 2025 and should be much more energy efficient, all electric and have the latest energy tech included. Photo by Krzysztof Hepner on Unsplash UK homes are draughty and poorly insulated. We even install windows with leaks included (aka ‘trickle vents’). Ventilation is of course required or we’ll just asphyxiate in homes built to PassivHaus (or Passive House - but it sounds better in German) standards which is why Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) products are a good idea (more on this below). If you didn’t know it, your internal doors are supposed to have a 10mm gap at the bottom for ventilation - that’s a feature not a bug! Mine don’t and I don’t fancy cutting them off though. FHS-25 In 2019 the UK government outlined the requirements for new build standards - referred to as the Future Home Standard 2025 (FHS25) - with the objective of new homes’ carbon emissions reduced by at least 75% compared to 2013 building regulations through better insulation, all-electric systems and higher air tightness (technically known as Parts L, energy consumption, and F, ventilation, of the UK building regulations). At the same time an interim update to Part L was published and came into force in 2022 (31% less carbon emissions compared to 2013). 75% emissions reduction compared to the 2013 baseline refers to both the end of gas boilers and the increased energy efficiency due to insulation and air-tightness and hence lower carbon emissions if the grid itself were still at 2013 levels of carbon emissions. In late 2022 I, along with 170 other industry experts, contributed to the Future Homes Hub FHS25 input to the government consultation happening this year (2023). Look hard enough and you’ll find me wearing a sling a week after I broke my collarbone mountain biking. FHS25 won’t be finalised till 2024 but in 2019 the expectation was set as: All electric including heating by heat pumps. Gas ban in all newbuild from 2025. Zero carbon ready (meaning as these are all-electric homes then zero emissions once the grid is zero emissions without any additional changes to the home). Higher insulation (reduction in the U-Value of floors, walls, doors/window, roofs). Triple glazing. Greater air-tightness (air permeability below 5m3 / h.m2) but no mention of MVHRs; instead relying on existing specifications for kitchen and bathroom extractor fans. Oddly no mention of solar panels or home battery storage even though solar is considered for 2021 spec newbuild. To specify heat pumps, high air-tightness and triple glazing but to omit solar generation and MVHR might have been a reflection of the expectation of energy costs decreasing as renewables increased as the energy crisis wasn’t forecastable. An example of the impact of the unexpected. The analysis of the energy working group showed that this version of FHS25 would increase energy bills by £190 compared to the 2021 Part L version as that includes solar on all newbuild. With the overarching objective to reduce carbon emissions by at least 75% and in fact be net-zero ready once the grid is fully decarbonised a set of 5 different Contender Specifications (CS1 to 5 in the table image) were defined and analysed for the effectiveness and feasibility to deploy at scale - essentially the more tech and the higher the spec the harder the homes are to build and test to the point the extra decimal point of extra efficiency isn’t justified by the extra cost and time. Specification 1 is really just homes being built today without gas - so not a ‘Future Home Standard’ at all. Similarly 2 is pretty weak by combining waste heat recovery but at least mandates solar installation. Specification 3 is a decent target whilst versions 4 & 5 probably exceed what’s needed based on the design requirement to be net-zero in the future although I like the inclusion of triple-glazing. For example we’re already supporting zero-bill homes when homes are designed with the maximum solar install without having to max out the insulation levels or triple-glazing. The working groups found that specification 3 reduced carbon emissions by 95% compared to 2013 homes; far more than the government’s target of 75%. Whilst a heat pump provides an efficiency of 300% to 400%, specification 3 reduces the heat demand itself by half compared to a 2021 home so the heating kWh consumption is around ⅙ of a 2021 build spec. I’d love to hear if you have an opinion on any of these specifications. In the rest of this article I refer only to my preferred spec, 3, as this has the right combination of tech without going over the top. From the Future Homes Hub led work, these homes are likely to cost between 10% and 19% (there's a fair amount of disagreement amongst the builders that participated) more to build (compared to a 2021 spec home), can be built at scale, may slightly reduce the number of homes built on a large site (increased wall thickness), or mean more semi’s and terraced builds. Versions 4 & 5 have a greater impact causing lots more build-scalability issues and space requirements. The process monitoring of build quality means increased skills will be required - air permeability has to be measured during the build and up-skilling needed for the air-tightness and MVHR installation. All feasible and proven in apartment blocks but still a change for the housebuilder industry. That cost is partly offset by savings from not installing any gas infrastructure and potentially a lower spec electric grid infrastructure. For the first time there could also be a homebuilding standard that addresses the differences between detached, semi, mid-terraced, apartment types of homes instead of assuming all archetypes have identical energy efficiency - i.e. the performance of a home varies considerably which needs to be taken into account in the design spec. There’s three main aspects to the #3 specification: Insulation Air-tightness All-electric U What? Ok, it’s a given: Insulation makes a home more energy efficient, but here’s the science. The energy required to heat a home is actually calculated from the heat lost through the floor, walls, windows, roofs, etc. The calculation depends on the materials (glass, brick, insulation, concrete, wood, etc), thickness of those materials, area of the material (a wall 3m by 1.8m for example) and the designed difference in temperature (e.g. 21 inside and -5 outside). That heat loss calculation determines the size of radiators (by water temperature) to meet that heat loss. The calculation combines all the different materials per room (floor, walls, etc) into one heat-loss requirement. Once repeated for the whole home you have the whole house heating requirement. k comes before R Each material (brick, wood, glass, etc) has a different ability to resist heat transfer through the material - for the same thickness a sheet of wood is about 5 times better at resisting heat than brick. This is the R-value of a material and the higher the R the more resistance against losing heat (i.e. higher values are a good thing). To measure resistance we need to start with thermal conductivity of a material (known as k - note it’s lowercase) which is the measurement of energy in Watts (similar to electricity measured as Watts of energy) that can flow through a metre of material for each degree of temperature difference often based on the Kelvin (K) scale rather than centigrade or fahrenheit; hence we get k measured as W/mK (Watts of energy per metre of material per degree of difference in temperature between the two sides). Brick material (meaning a whole cubic metre of bricks, not an individual brick) has a thermal conductivity of k = 0.77 W/mK (although this varies by brick material and density) - meaning 0.77 Watts of energy can pass through a metre of brick-material for each degree of difference between each side. But we don’t build brick walls a metre thick; rather a brick wall (just the visible outer part of a cavity wall) is around 10cm, or 0.1m. The R value (resistance) of a brick wall is therefore 0.1 / 0.77 = 0.13. In units this is 0.1m / 0.77 W/mK which can be rewritten as 0.13 m2.K/W. And back to U Although I’ve covered R values, building materials are supplied with a documented Heat Transfer Coefficient, U, which is the reciprocal of R (i.e. 1/R) plus the resistance of the interface (there’s an extra resistance such as that between the air and the wall material, or where two wall materials bridge) and any convection and radiation losses. All building materials therefore have declared U values which must conform to various British Standards - BRE and CIBSE are good sources of info - and buildings must be built to overall U value requirements for floor, walls, roofs. The higher the R value the better, or, conversely, the lower the U value the better given it’s the reciprocal. The U value measurement is therefore W/m2.K - Watts of energy that can transfer through the material(s) per square metre of wall/floor/roof per degree of difference between inside and outside temperatures. Or in other words the higher the Watts transferred through the wall per m2 area of wall per degree of temperature then obviously the higher the heating need. The 2021 regulations for new build are: Wall: 0.18 W/m2.K (0.35 from 2013) Roof: 0.11 W/m2.K (0.25 from 2013) Floor: 0.13 W/m2.K (0.25 from 2013) Window: 1.2 W/m2.K (2.2 from 2013) Door: 1.0 W/m2.K (2.2 from 2013) And for FHS25 version 3 (my preference) the targets are: Wall: 0.15 W/m2.K Roof: 0.11 W/m2.K Floor: 0.11 W/m2.K What does air permeability mean? If you have a sealed box tightly shut then you’ve got zero air flow. Air permeability is the measurement of how air flows (well, leaks) from the property such as gaps between floorboards, round window/door seals, joins in building materials, pipework and electrical fittings, loft hatches, etc (but not including controlled ventilation such as trickle vents). The measurement is the cubic metres of air flow per hour per square metre of floor area at 50Pa (Pascals - meaning air pressure). Our homes are draughty - properties built from 2013 should have an airflow less than 15m3/h.m2 so older homes will likely have more loss than that. Part L 2021 requires only 5m3/h.m2. The FHS25 version 3 expectation is 3m3/h.m2 at 50Pa (atmospheric pressure). That means for a home with a floor area of 100m2: 36,000m3 per day for a home built in 2013 12,000 m3 per day for a home built in 2022 7,200 m3 per day for a home built in 2025 (likely FHS-25 level) That’s an 80% reduction from 2013 to 2025. Air flow is measured by directing a large fan through the front door (carefully sealed in place) and using measurement equipment to detect the flow loss. It’s likely that the FHS-25 standard will require this to be measured during build and on completion and signed-off for each house. To achieve such a significant reduction in flow some form of impermeable wrap is installed between the inner and outer walls, floors, ceiling/roof and all windows, doors, electrical points, pipework, etc with all joints firmly taped. Literally it aims to create as airtight a bubble, sandwiched within the property fabric, as possible. Creating this bubble is hard but it makes a significant difference to the energy efficiency. Tricky areas are the interface between the floor and walls, round doors and windows and in particular around the loft hatch. The loft hatch is still likely to be the leakiest point. It’s surprising that we still have lofts rather than make use of that space and make it habitable in all new build - may that’s for the next generation of Future Home Standard. How does an MVHR work? Now we’ve almost hermetically sealed ourselves in the built-in-house-bubble we’re going to need to change the air with some form of ventilation system. But as soon as you start moving air out you’re taking a lot of heat too so MVHR systems are designed to keep that heat whilst also ventilating the property - hence the term Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery. The MVHR unit extracts air via vents in each room (but particularly bathrooms and kitchen areas) and passes this through a heat-exchanger to warm the flow of fresh incoming air so you have ventilation but with much less loss of heat. Unfortunately MVHR systems are really hard to retrofit though as the home needs really good airtightness and there’s lots of ductwork to install. Hence including them in newbuild is a really good idea. The FHS25 version 3 expectation is to include an MVHR in all new build. When the working groups compared version 2 and 3 MVHRs accounted for half the energy saving. How does WWHR work? As with the MVHR that recovers heat from ventilation it’s obvious there’s wasted heat from hot water - washing, showers, baths, etc. Unfortunately WWHR technology is still in its infancy when we consider it only applies to showers and only then has an efficiency of 55%. Ideally we need solutions that can recover heat from all hot water waste, store that energy and make it available for later. Current WWHR systems extract heat from the shower drainpipe to pre-warm the incoming cold water to the shower so only start to have an effect on the shower after a minute or so and obviously only whilst having a shower. Even so the FHS25 version 3 expectation is to include an WWHR in all new build as that increases the hot water utilisation. Electrifying FHS-25 is likely to specify: Air Source Heat Pump, district heating or ground source heat pump. MVHR - see earlier WWHR - see earlier too Solar plus battery The combined spec of insulation, air permeability and electrification will see energy bills around £360 less per year (end terrace example - the full study has the saving for each archetype) based on electricity rates in October 2022 compared to a home built to 2021 version. And this is before any benefit from smart tariffs and flexibility participation. There’s no expectation of a home EV charger although in likelihood if a home has a driveway this would be included too. EV chargers are already mandated to be online and have default profiles not to charge in the peak evening period. As with the BEIS IOT Security project we’re likely to see more online connectivity of heating and solar-battery systems in order for them to be ready to take part in the growing flexibility markets. Ventilation and waste water heat recovery is unlikely to become online as there’s very little benefit to being online. Give me more? Specifications 4 & 5 go to and past the PassivHaus extreme. Less than 2,000 homes have been certified as meeting PassivHaus in the UK and only 2,000 are built a year across Europe. And that’s because it’s hard - much harder. Walls have cavities around 230mm, doors & windows are all triple glazed and the air permeability is down to 1m3/h.m2. Specification 5 does away with the need for heating altogether although an auxiliary heating unit is included with the MVHR for times the home is empty for several days. Specification 5 ultimately exports more energy so results in a negative energy bill. Interestingly the cost increase is only 17% from a 2021 home (compared to 10 to 19% increase for specification 3) due to not installing the heating system. These two specifications are unlikely to make it into FHS-25 as the build process, build control, testing and commissioning are probably far too hard for the large scale builders to cope with - as commented in the Future Homes Hub report. However the alternative is much greater numbers of factory-built homes rather than the traditional on-site build up. There is a concern that super-sealed homes mean more homogeneity of design (bay windows, dormer windows, risk creating insulation and air permeability problems) but the many smaller architects and builders are adept at building great ranges of designs and this is probably more en economic efficiency issue for large builders developing sites of hundreds of cookie-cutter homes (I’m not a fan; and the need for scale isn’t an excuse). Aesthetic and highly variable design across an estate is essential. What’SAP Energy efficiency is measured according to the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) which is maintained by the Buildings Research Establishment (BRE). The result is a score out of 100 - the higher the score the better - based on all the construction detail I’ve written about above (thermal performance, air permeability, etc). From the Future Homes Hub report 40% of us know our home’s Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) is ‘very important’ but it’s not obvious that as well as the red/amber/green rating and A to G scale EPC certificates also show this SAP score. Sadly our own house is a D and scores only 66 but that’s prior to loft insulation and our air source heat pump install and removal of gas supply. Every home needs an EPC when it’s sold or rented and they’re all publicly available - always worth looking your own up. If you own a house it might help figure out what work you could do to improve its efficiency. If you rent then you can check it’s still valid; they expire after ten years and the rental can’t be renewed if it’s out of date or the rating is an F or G (and since 2022 a D in Scotland). In a couple of year’s time the minimum rises to C which is great news for renters. The SAP is based on Part L of the Building Regulations and therefore needs to be updated in line with FHS-25. Currently we’re on SAP version 10.2 (well almost - there’s still issues even though it’s been in force since June 22) and the next version will be 11 which will measure properties built to FHS-25. There’s concern that the issues with 10.2 will roll forward into 11 causing a delay to FHS-25 coming into force - there’s a bit of a chick-and-egg here as FHS-25 needs to be locked in so that SAP11 can be completed and the assessment tools made available. Retrofit me What are the chances of retrofitting my house to FHS-25? Fixing loft insulation is usually very easy and has a great impact on energy efficiency. Changing the loft hatch (uninsulated hatches impact the U value of the ceiling by as much as 9%) is a little trickier but still quite possible to do. Next on the list is windows and doors - more disruptive, more costly but if you’ve got single-glazed then very worth doing. Installing an air source heat pump, benefiting the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, means the cost is getting close to replacing an ageing gas boiler if it’s coming to the end of it’s life. And installing solar and battery although more expensive than the ASHP (assuming BUS grant) gives the satisfaction of generating your own energy and will instantly reduce energy bills. But improving the floor, wall, roof thermal resistance to the FHS25 standard, getting really high levels of air tightness, installing an MVHR with all the ductwork and a WWHR under the shower is all much harder and much more disruptive. There are retrofit insulation materials available but they’re costly and you’re effectively having to redecorate either the whole of the outside or all internal side of external walls. A final thought The action on the Future Home Standard 2025 is now with DLUHC who will issue a consultation very soon (the Future Homes Hub workshops and report are an input to this). That should result in a firm definition of FHS-25 by the end of this year and allow SAP11 to be completed. That will be followed with some sort of transitional period in 2025 before being mandated for all new build and extensions.

Security is often top of mind when making hardware - no one wants their data stolen, device used as part of a bot-net or their controls taken over. All reputable hardware manufacturers I speak to take security seriously and ensure their devices and services are meeting security requirements, update firmware frequently and obviously take responsibility seriously under the UK DPA (UK equivalent of EU GDPR). We've just completed a feasibility study into a new secure hardware device which I've also written about here. Our smart tariffs (Agile, Go, Go Faster, Tesla, Cosy, Intelligent Octopus) all apply control - mostly via third party systems integrated to our tariff API or, in the case of IO, by sending signals directly to cars and chargers a lot of which you can view on our Works With page. We’ve been doing this successfully for more than 4 years but when it comes to security you can’t sit still so it’s exciting to be leading the research into an alternative security solution. In 2018 Dixons Carphone suffered a breach affecting 14 million customers and were fined £500,000 by the ICO, the maximum amount prior to GDPR coming into force (reduced to £250,000 on appeal). Similarly Tescos, Equifax, Lloyds, Wonga and others have experienced serious breaches. A UK DPA breach carries a fine of ‘£17.5 million or 4% of the total annual worldwide turnover in the preceding financial year, whichever is higher’. In 2018 British Airways faced an ICO fine of £183.4m (later reduced to £20m) for a loss of 500,000 customer records - the first under the UK’s DPA. Dixons Carphone suffered a 3% drop in share value and BA 1.4%. Ofgem have powers to fine energy sector licenced parties for breaching licence conditions up to 10% of turnover. These examples focus on the impact on consumers of personal data being exploited but in the energy industry there’s also a risk to the electricity grid. If a nefarious actor were able to access a large number of EVs or chargers (or other high consumption appliances such as home storage) and instruct these to do something (charge or discharge for example) then enough simultaneous changes in demand on local parts of the grid or even nationally could affect grid frequency and voltage. National Grid ESO manages the grid second by second using a range of inputs to ensure generation meets demand - weather, sporting events, etc. At half-time in the England v Italy 2020 Euro finals a surge in demand of 2GW was expected. The grid was ready to meet the equivalent of 1.1 million kettles all being turned on at the same time but the issue is when a surprise event occurs. If the grid weren't ready we would have seen the voltage dip as happened in January this year affecting a few hundred customers. Generally drawing more energy without enough matched generation (1.1m kettles boiling, or thousands of cars starting to charge simultaneously) pulls down the voltage (like reduced water pressure in a pipe if everyone turns on at the same time). Domestic solar works in reverse - inverters sense the grid voltage and 'push back' at a slightly higher voltage; that's one reason a DNO may turn down requests for larger domestic solar systems in a local area. In 2019 a blackout impacted over 1m people and train services due to the grid frequency going out of bounds when lightning struck a transmission line causing a gas generator and offshore wind farm to disconnect from the grid. The impact was 2GW loss of generation - the same scale as the 1.1 million kettles worth of demand during the Euro 2020 final. The grid is designed to disconnect local areas to preserve frequency and voltage nationally which is what happened. A kettle requires around 2kW to 3kW; charging a car at home is up to 7kW so an equivalent 300,000 EVs starting to charge (or discharge - pushing voltage too high) in a local area could have a similar impact and cause a blackout. Hence the research in to the security of energy systems. The security of connectivity and control of home appliances (cars, solar/battery systems, heat pumps, thermostats, etc) is therefore something we're researching with BEIS. BEIS selected five projects in autumn 2022 to evaluate the feasibility (phase 1) of secure control, and data reporting, of domestic systems via the DCC SMS which we've just finished. Phase 2 (to actually create a trial of something) is due to start April 2023. A key part of the project was designing a device to achieve something called Commercial Product Assurance (CPA). CPA is run by the NCSC who also oversee the security of the DCC SMS and know a thing or two about internet security. The requirements span everything from hardware tamper detection to fuzzing on the radio interface. Over the past few years we've built up experience creating our own devices that connect to the smart meter (via Zigbee) and the DCC SMS network (e.g. the Octopus Home Mini) so it's been very valuable to work with security experts Rufilla and NCC Group to design a CPA version of one of our recent devices - more to come on the particular devices in a future article. Night storage heater control using ALCS (Auxiliary Load Control Switch) has been around for decades and predates smart meters (in fact the earliest version used Radio4 long wave radio signals). Given ALCS is already in use our design therefore advances the type of control by using the Stand Alone Proportional Controller (SAPC) in a generic context - meaning we've designed it to apply control to all sorts of home systems. The design also encompasses sensor data from a range of off-the-shelf smart home devices to demonstrate greater commercial feasibility than a single embedded sensor. This flexible design gave us more security challenges when designing for CPA but gives us a lot of options in the future if we proceed. We won’t know until April 2023 if we will proceed to develop the solution and run the trial over 22 months so watch this space as we’ll be seeking trial participants mid-2023 if we’re successful.

75% of electric car drivers charge their cars at home but that's only possible if you have a driveway or garage. Street charging is becoming much more important as the growth of EV sales accelerates. We're not going to see many examples of bolting chargers to walls and trailing pavement cables although there are a few examples of cable-channels being run across the pavement. I can't help feel dealing with the dirt build up and peeling up a mucky cable is going to be too pleasant in winter though. Lamp post chargers are a great solution - they're already there and the sockets can be really discrete. As I walk across central London until I looked for them I'd not noticed just how many lamp posts in residential areas have sockets hidden on them. That's good enough but of course lamp posts are too far apart to cope with the growth of EV sales and we'd hardly want long lengths of cables trailing along the pavement let alone imagining coiling a 20+ foot cable back into your car! Enter the charging posts. Where space permits clusters of charging posts are marching in. These are fairly substantial pieces of street furniture due to supporting more than one socket, RFID controls and screens and needing to be quite sturdy to protect from those with below average parking skills. Usually there's a cabinet nearby housing metering, DNO connection and cloud service IT equipment too. Getting the distance from the edge of the pavement right is hard - too far away results in cable tripping hazards; too close and you can run into issues opening car doors. In this example it's unusual for the street cabinet to be close to the pavement edge too; most likely due to the railings and planning permission. Small clusters such as these two examples also put a constraint on parking. Councils are reluctant to designate EV charging bays as there's a balance to strike between non EV and EV drivers wanting to park. This is where Trojan Energy have been able to solve a whole set of issues in one go - very slim charge posts (and only there when in use), as tight to the pavement edge as possible and rows of 15 sockets at a time dampening right down any competition for spaces. When not in use the Trojan Energy charge points are flat, flush, 22kW sockets - essentially the street equivalent of office power point floor boxes - which can therefore be as tight as possible to the edge of the pavement. When not in use you can walk, cycle or even drive over them. Their background is the oil and gas industry so they know a thing or two about designing for tough conditions such as dirt and water. There's a clever locking and connection method as the post/lance is inserted into the socket. And if the socket is damaged it can be switched out for a new one without digging up the street again. In use a sleek post (they call it a lance) is inserted into the socket. Being close to the pavement edge means the cable distances are shorter minimising tripping hazards. They're also installed about 15 feet apart in rows of around 15 so there's no need for special parking bays as well as keeping those cable runs as short as possible. Trojan also sought the advice of Disability Rights UK and the RNIB to design the post with minimum accessibility issues. All the charging technology, metering and IT comms are contained in a street cabinet which is usually installed up against a wall out of the way. Under an InnovateUK and Office for Zero Emissions (OZEV) funded project Element Energy, Trojan Energy, Octopus Energy, UKPN, Leeds Uni and Camden and Brent councils collaborated to deliver a trial of the Trojan solution under the Subsurface Technology for Electric Pathways (STEP) consortium. The first of these are up and working now for a few hundred EV drivers in Camden (60 sockets) and Brent (90) with plans for many more to be installed across London. During the trial the technology has been tested and proven and Trojan are actively expanding across the UK. The STEP project was extended under SmartSTEP to also experiment with proportional control of charging using modified L+G SMETS2 meters - specifically proportional ALCS. Smart Meters aren't usually used with street chargers let alone any form of proportional control so this was probably the first time this technology had been used. Increased EV charging puts strain on the grid, particularly during the peak period 4.00pm to 8.00pm so a proportional control means we can start to balance the load. Typically home and residential street charging can be stretched out over several hours unlike supercharger locations so lends itself well to proportional control. We're able to slow down the charging speed when there's a local constraint but the constraint is advisory than mandated and can be overridden by the EV owner. This is similar to the recent home smart charging policy that came into effect 30/6/22 and requires home installed chargers to be defaulted not to charge during the peak period. Whilst technically we proved it works commercially it's more challenging as it results in an MPAN per charge point, tariff per charge point, daily standing charge per charge point and a smart meter per charge point significantly driving up the costs for install and management. Continuing to innovate even with strings of 15 charge points parking congestion in busy London suburbs is still an issue so Trojan have invented a service called the De-ICEr which uses camera technology to alert drivers when a space near a Trojan socket becomes available. This is a great way to avoid councils having to designate EV charging bays. Trojan's technology has great potential and solves a bunch of issues with street EV charging. They've got more to come I've not written about (e.g. look up DoorStep) and it's a great bonus to see expertise from the oil and gas industry being invested in to drive the EV revolution.

At events I've spoken recently at I've started to refer to heat pumps as an energy generator so want to explain why. If it feels wrong to call it a generator it’s because we use them to heat our homes and hot water and it’s consuming electricity so surely it’s not a generator of energy. Solar panels and wind turbines generate energy - these are easier to comprehend because we see and feel sunlight and wind and can understand how energy comes from those sources and some clever technology converts that to electricity that we can consume any way we want to as well as reducing our purchase of electricity from the grid. However electricity generation is really the conversion of energy from one form (oil, gas, sunlight, wind) into another, electricity, as you can’t create energy out of thin air; PV panels, wind turbines and burning stuff is just the clever technology of converting a form of energy into electricity. Electricity is a very versatile form of energy - heating, lighting, driving, cooking, powering all our gadgets, etc. The output of a heat pump though is heat which we use pretty much only for heating and hot water so it’s much less versatile which probably contributes to the impression it's not generated but it has still generated that output - so hence it’s a form of energy generation. But that isn’t the whole of my definition. A heat pump is using electricity (think of that as its fuel) to extract heat from the air and if you compared its output to that of an electric heater you find the heat pump produces 3 to 5 times the output because of the magic of extracting heat from the air. In fact the fuel, if you like, is both the electricity and the air around us. And this is what I mean when I say a heat pump is a generator; not the conversion of electricity to heat but that for each kWh of electricity consumed it generates 3 to 5 times as much energy output. For the home that means consuming 1/3rd to 1/5th electricity if the heating and hot water were purely electric. If gas and electricity were to cost the same per kWh then you can instantly see how much better it is - let alone the environmental benefit of not burning stuff. In fact I’d go so far as saying it really is generating energy out of thin air.

This was the third Fully Charged Live I’ve attended and the second I’ve spoken at. I was invited to talk about energy disruption and what’s coming next so chose to focus on storage. Storage is going to become important because our energy generation is becoming more intermittent and geographically highly distributed which means we’ll either need appliances to be far more dynamic reacting to that or storage soaking up the rises and falls, or most likely a mix of both. On average around 40% of our generation is from renewable sources and on good days surpasses 60%. But being weather dependent means that generation is highly variable - if you watch the live output of a solar system as clouds go over the output will swing more than 50% and quite rapidly. Wind and solar generation is also spread out across the country which just adds to the challenge. This combined intermittency and distributed generation is very different from the output of a few large scale coal, gas and nuclear power stations providing a steady flat output that we’re historically used to. Hence the role of storage to assist the grid. Hot water tanks and night storage heaters are forms of storage that have been around for decades and hence also Eco7 tariffs as one method to encourage using energy overnight. This started from the days when coal formed a very high portion of our electricity generation and as overnight consumption can be as much as 40% below the peak period the grid often had surplus energy available overnight. So the core idea and tech of storage helping the grid has been around for ages. A hot water tank is one-way as it stores energy which can’t be shared back to the grid. A home solar system can send excess energy to the grid and combined with a home battery system can be used to both soak up that excess (grid or home solar) to use later or even export to the grid when needed. Similarly electric cars are evolving from one-way to being able to supply energy back to our homes and the grid too. As more of these systems go online then either a time-of-use (ToU) tariff or other industry signal (something called a flexibility market) can control the charge/discharge cycles to support the grid instead of a very static Eco7 system. Each of these are different mediums of storage; electric cars and home batteries are an electrical store, a hot water tank holds hot water or systems such as Tepeo and Sunamp can store heat. The Electric Mountain at Dinorwig pumps a lake up and down the mountain to store and release energy at a very large scale. Other futuristic ideas under test are cranes lifting and dropping massive concrete bricks or gigantic flywheels spun up to extreme speeds to store and release energy. The holy grail is looking for long-term storage that will span the seasons. Compressed air in old mines or shipping containers for example could achieve this - more economical as the medium, air, is free compared to the lithium-ion in a battery or the need for exceedingly high insulation for long term heat storage. In the future we could see other storage mediums too. Domestic storage should play a large part in supporting the grid due to two economic benefits: Participation in the future domestic flexibility markets - i.e. you’ll get paid (or have a beneficial tariff) for helping balance the grid. Type and efficiency of energy production of the system - i.e. electricity, hot water or heat for your home. Grid-scale storage is already used for balancing the grid but the domestic investment for these two main benefits may result in domestic storage reaching a higher total capacity to balance the grid. The type of energy provided to the home has more benefit than just the electricity, hot water and heat produced - a solar home battery system is soaking up your own energy which is then free to use later (in terms of marginal cost to produce) or a heat pump with it’s multiplier effect (more energy is produced than the grid kWh it consumes) means more efficient production of hot water and heating. And it's possible for a heat pump to charge energy storage devices - either a hot water tank or something like a Sunamp with phase change material. Even your home is a thermal store albeit very temporary compared to an electrical battery or a hot water tank. It’s unfortunate that so many hot water tanks were removed due to the popularity of gas combi-boilers. A heat pump is actually an energy generator as it produces 3 to 5 times the amount of energy that it consumes (referred to as the coefficient of performance) which is magical. This isn’t breaking the laws of physics though; that energy has to come from somewhere which is either the air or the ground. The airflow exiting the heat pump is several degrees cooler demonstrating energy has been removed from the air. Similarly the ground around a ground array becomes cooler - in the winter you’ll often get frost on the heat exchanger of an air source heat pump or frozen ground above a horizontal ground array. The sun warms the air and the ground so the energy actually originates from sunlight. My message at Fully Charged Live was therefore that we should be paying a lot more attention to domestic storage. There's going to be a financial benefit by making storage available to the grid and there's a lot of tech coming in this space. Each type of storage is relevant to the generation source (grid v solar v heat pump, etc) and consumption and we shouldn't just think in terms of an electric battery. It's the combined benefit of how and where energy is generated, how it's stored, how you consume it and the potential to do that with the domestic flexibility market that's exciting. Always look carefully at the type of storage you set up in any home renewable energy projects!

In 2021 we saw a range of long term plans and consultation papers published by BEIS. Where do we start The best place to start is the ‘Transitioning to a net zero energy system’ (1) paper. Getting to Net Zero as fast as we can is obvious; if it can be done earlier than 2050 then that would be fantastic. This ministerial foreword sentence sums up the answer nicely: “A smarter, more flexible system will utilise technologies such as energy storage and flexible demand to integrate high volumes of low carbon power, heat and transport and reach a carbon neutral future.” And the Ofgem foreword expands that a little: “As we change the way we fuel our cars and heat our homes, demand for electricity will increase from millions of new electric vehicles and heat pumps. Being more flexible in when we use electricity will help avoid the need to build new generating and grid capacity to meet this demand, resulting in significant savings on energy bills.” In other words, we’re going to use more electricity (as much as 2x by 2050) due to EVs and heat pumps, it’ll come from green sources, which will be far more distributed and intermittent than the old style of large scale fossil fuel generators, customers will have things that intelligently use energy at the best time of day and the grid infrastructure will be able to cleverly cope with all that. Hence the frequent phrase ‘smart and flexible’. That’s quite a fundamental change from today and it’s going to be achieved by “building 40GW of offshore wind by 2030, ending sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2030, and deploying 600,000 electric heat pumps per year by 2028”. That should result in £10Bn less spend per year by 2050 (around 14% of investment with 80% of that being reduced generation investment and the rest on network saving) with a cumulative saving between 2020 and 2050 between £30Bn and £70Bn (2012 prices, discounted). But at the same time as reducing costs it means 24,000 new jobs too - 10,000 as a result of the UK domestic ‘smart systems and flexibility’ market worth £1.3Bn in 2050 (domestic DSR) and 14,000 on the equivalent international export market worth £2.7Bn by then. The export part sounds undervalued but the core idea is the UK being the silicon valley for energy which is really exciting for us. A Smart Flexible Energy System The answer is a Smart Flexible Energy System which “reduces consumer energy bills by reducing the amount of generation and network assets that need to be built to meet peak demand.” Something “Smart” can react and the “Flexible” bit means energy can be moved by location or time of use. That’s great - smooth out the peaks; something we’ve been experimenting with since 2018. Conceptually the idea is really simple to picture here - take any asset/system/product that can have its consumption shifted in time and use some algorithmic cleverness to do that; i.e. a balancing problem. Look a bit deeper and what’s being balanced depends on the grid constraints and that now becomes a hyper-local issue - we don’t have a homogeneously capable grid nor an even spread of assets (homes, tech) that can be smarten'd, nor a smooth spread of renewable energy generation. That’s a multi-dimensional challenge. Our homes are in towns and cities and our proximity to local renewable generation is poor - witness how frequently there's excess renewable generation in Scotland resulting in curtailment. The there’s the commercial side of how energy is moved around and sold which involves organisations such as BEIS & Ofgem, the ENA, Elexon, the ESO, the National Grid, the regional DNOs/DSOs (and maybe the FSO - another consultation). Flexibility Providers & Aggregators (and potentially a new Domestic Flexibility Provider type of utility in the future) and the Energy Suppliers/retailers. The result is competing ideas where the control resides, how business models work and how consumers engage with the industry. Now it looks like a seriously complex problem. The key is probably access to data - the more data such as 1-second EV charging data, digital twin data (profiles of assets) and standardisation of data (e.g. OCPP for EV charging, or PAS1878 for smart control) - the better a flexible system can function. This is probably the key takeaway from the 'Energy Digitalisation Strategy' (2). Been there; working already Our Agile tariff was the first step and we’ve proven it works as customers have achieved a saving by time-shifting their energy consumption. But taking it to the logical extreme (i.e. all consumers on Agile) you’d have daily oscillation - yesterday’s cheap half-hour, by having high consumption, becomes tomorrow’s peak half-hour and vice versa. The ESO already sees the impact of thousands of EV chargers lighting up at 00.30 on our Go tariff so Go Faster was one of the ways we experimented with smoothing EV chargers out as we rationed out which Go Faster slots were available. If just a handful of thousands of EV chargers were ‘seen’ (manifested by a frequency blip) then the growth in EVs and ASHPs is clearly going to have an impact. Hence ‘smart’ and ‘flexible’ is where we’re going. There’s a sentence in there “Flexibility allows for generation and demand to be shifted to avoid curtailment” that needs a bit more focus - if we look back at the pair of bank holiday Mondays in May 2020 the grid ‘curtailed’ (like any industry, obscure words like ‘curtailment’ are used - why can’t we just say ‘turned off’) wind generation which hit the national headlines. There’s very little more in the papers that discusses how to cease curtailment as it’s just crazy to both incentivise investment and pay for it to be disconnected - I’d love to see a commitment to never curtail any renewable generation - there are demonstrators of Large-scale Long-duration Electricity Storage (LLES) planned although not for at least 5 years. Back to business models though; wind generators are paid to turn off via the flexibility market and due to the subsidies wind receives they’re able to bid a lower price to be turned off so you end up with a perverse scenario of not decreasing carbon emissions as much as we could do on strong wind days - today the £1.5Bn wholesale flexibility market is 80% dominated by fossil fuel generators flexing. In the near future we’ll see EV charging (domestic and public) participating in the flexibility markets as new EV charger installs are now mandated to be smart. For example we're working on connecting Powerloop (V2G) participating in the National Grid ESO's Balancing Mechanism very soon - probably a first. I mentioned above that your locality is significant in this complex problem - there’s a sentence that gives some indication this will get looked at: “continued development of local flexibility markets, or a more fundamental shift to regional or locational pricing”. I see this as vital given what I’ve talked about above so tariffs such as Fan Club that we’ve launched demonstrate ideas, although mindful of the postcode lottery. The UK is already divided into the regional GSPs with rates varying a couple of pence and I often see Scottish customers querying why their rates are similar to the rest of the UK whilst frequently hitting zero grams of CO2 emission per kWh generated according to the Carbon Intensity website. Writing this at the end of 2021 we’re seeing this exaggerated as wholesale gas prices are driving up the wholesale cost of electricity - if you’re in Scotland why does this matter? Should we be worried about the Postcode-lottery effect? Why are are we also ‘curtailing’ cheap (in fact free in terms of production cost) wind energy whilst paying excessively high gas generation costs? Insurance, house prices, train travel, beer, meals out all have much greater geographical price variation. Not to mention the frequent trade-off of an idyllic rural home knowing you’ll probably have poor mobile coverage and internet bandwidth issues - often a reluctant acceptance for the benefit of that rural lifestyle. It’s called a Home Energy Management System and we’re in 1878 (and 1879) Smart tech in homes includes electric heating & hot water (i.e. Heat Pumps mostly), EV charging and discharging (V2G, V2H, V2E, V2L or V2X - meaning Vehicle to Grid/Home/Everything/Load anything else which is just another way of saying the discharge is controlled and sometimes matched to demand), solar systems with home battery storage and in the future more connected home appliances such as dishwashers, washing machines and clothes dryers. Collectively these are expected to provide 13GW flexibility from domestic properties in 2030. We’re also likely to have 15m EVs on our roads in 2030 which also contribute to the smart & flexible need. These are significant figures so the technology and method is going to be important. Trials such as SmartSTEP experiment with Smart Meters using Proportional ALCS (Auxiliary Load Control Switch - a feature of smart meters) but the BSI PAS 1878 standard (8) doesn’t mandate the smart meter as the route (yet). PAS 1878 is likely to become talked about a lot over the next few years: “The British Standards Institution has now published two standards (PAS 1878 and 1879), developed by industry, which set a technical framework for small-scale DSR, guided by the principles of interoperability, data privacy, grid stability and cyber security, and which is compatible with the GB Smart Metering system.” Whilst the 'Transitioning to a net zero energy system' (1) paper expects “home energy management services that are cyber secure, interoperable across devices, and utilise time of use tariffs”, it also says “Government will aim to consult in 2022 on an appropriate regulatory approach for organisations performing this ‘load controlling’ role.” As usual: be warned, there’s more, not less, regulation looming. Really it’s too early to start applying regulation to such a new technology and consumer experience and this just isn’t necessary but this could point to a new Utility to the home - a Domestic Flexibility Provider of some sort as by 2030 consumers "will be in charge and able to choose how dynamic their participation should be". The expectation is homes will have smart meters, smart appliances and energy storage - to quote: “Smart and advanced meters which record usage in half-hourly periods, to help measure demand more precisely and enable cost-reflective tariffs and services. Smart appliances, for example heat pumps, heating controls, air conditioning, electric vehicle chargers and white goods that can operate flexibly. Energy storage, so that buildings have a source of heat during periods when they do not draw electricity from the grid, or to store electricity from onsite renewables. Storage can take several forms, including the heat stored in the fabric of the building, hot water storage, phase change materials (also known as heat batteries) and electric batteries. This storage can be in individual homes, across multiple buildings (e.g. serving a block of flats) or at city scale in large heat networks.“ Coming back to PAS 1878 the Electric Vehicle Smart Charging paper (5) requires PAS1878 in phase 2 so the scene is set for PAS1878 to happen and even before then the first phase is that EV chargers: Must be smart Must meet cyber security standards Mustn’t be designed to prevent compatibility with energy suppliers Must require the user to set up a charge schedule on first use and mustn’t default to the peak period Must have randomisation built in (default of 10 minutes and configurable to 30 minutes) Must meter the energy (doesn’t state anything about billing) Worryingly “the smart metering system remains the lead option for delivering smart charging…” but at least “Government is continuing to explore alternative or complimentary solutions”. Applying the control via the smart meter is obviously very tempting given the massive investment and ubiquity of nationwide coverage (well nearly - 98% or so, and I have a long list of customers that have coverage issues). But the smart meter rollout is several years behind completion, still has significant issues (witness the beta nature of our tariffs and issues we face with half-hour data collection and meter connectivity holding back tariff innovation) and evolving a government IT system will be incredibly costly and complex versus letting commercial innovation take root. The only argument is the security oversight. It’d better be secure Smart Meters must pass CPA which is a process overseen by the NCSC given that a rogue actor being able to remotely turn off electricity supply of a large number of properties is a significant risk to grid stability. Similarly with the expected increase in smart flexible appliances the risk extends to the security of those devices. As we’ve written regularly about Smart Meters are technically complex and challenging and I’d like any smart flexible control to be independent of the meter infrastructure even though it sounds tempting to run it via the meter. Fortunately PAS1878 indicates the smart meter infrastructure as just one possible method and the government paper requires a ‘secure by design’ approach and it’s expected there will be a ‘minimum baseline’ for cyber security. The Electric Vehicle Smart Charging paper (5) for example relies on the EN 303 645 cyber security standard. Domestic Demand-Side-Response (DSR) Flexibility Provider Industrial flexibility has existed for many years but with the need for greatly increased flexibility to match the intermittency of renewable generation comes a new monetary flow for the domestic consumer - potentially a new type of home Utility provider, the domestic DSR flexibility service provider which might be an EV chargepoint provider, smart appliance manufacturer, energy supplier or a completely new entrant. Such a consumer may get rewarded (£s) for their assets (meaning solar-battery system, EV charger, electric heating system, etc) being available to the new domestic flexibility markets. Alternatively lower flat rate tariffs may be offered if the assets are controlled. Either way the consumer with assets that can be flexed will be financially better off. By 2030 it’s expected that consumers “will be in charge and able to choose how dynamic their participation should be” which hints at a choice of flexibility utility provider just like choice of energy supplier. Along with such a new utility would be regulatory oversight, connectivity and management standards, privacy responsibility and cyber security demands. Either rates could be set centrally (like the original FIT scheme), or a reduction in a smart tariff or a market-led tariff scheme or something entirely new. It’s also likely to be very local meaning different availability and rates at a town or borough level and certainly well below GSP area scale. The Electric Vehicle Smart Charging paper (5) for example refers to both DSR providers and DSR smart tariffs. There’s also a requirement for the energy import/export to be measured (But only to 10% accuracy) and available to DSR providers once a second. It’s easy to see how PAS1878 can be defined as the standard way to manage and control across all smart appliances for the domestic flex market. Get me a Heat Pump By 2028 the UK will be installing 600,000 heat pumps a year (up from 35,000 today) and by the mid 2030’s it’ll be 1.7m per year to combat the 30% of UK emissions from heating & hot water. From April 2022 a government grant (the Boiler Upgrade Scheme) of £5,000 will make a heat pump install the same cost as replacing a gas boiler and at parity without the grant by around 2030. By 2035, unless hydrogen goes ahead, no new gas boilers will be installed (except there’s a really dodgy caveat in the Heat and Buildings strategy “...once costs of low-carbon alternatives have come down”. Why that’s 5 years longer than EVs isn’t clear but at least we have a date. The Hydrogen “Strategic Decision” to decide ‘no’ isn’t due until 2026 - plenty of time for EV growth to show a quick end is possible. Assuming a decent Seasonal Coefficient of Performance (SCOP) of a heat pump (say 3.5-ish) we’re past parity with the cost of gas, but to be more realistic and to correctly reflect the need to electrify heating, levies (such as REGOs) will move from electricity to gas “over this decade”. Everything’s connected here - the plan is that by 2030 the cost of installing a heat pump will be at parity of a gas boiler and that the running costs will also be at parity. I’ll be driving in my EV There’s approximately 373,000 EVs on UK roads now (end 2021) which is expected to reach 15,000,000 by 2030 when new petrol and diesel vehicles will no longer be available. Similar to heating our homes, that targets the 24% emissions from transport today. But in the same way heat pumps will increase energy consumption, electricity demand due to EVs will increase by 30TWh and 65 to 100TWh by 2050 resulting in 10% of all energy demand. Once V2X is happening at scale (by 2030) drivers may realise a financial benefit of £438/year for supporting the ‘smart flexibele grid’ and by 2050 when 48% of vehicles are expected to do so that will amount 30GW of flexibility. Every 30 minutes Before smart meters assumptions were made about a homes’ typical consumption which is referred to as the “Profile Class” (PC) and PC-1 specifically refers to domestic homes. PC-1 is an average curve of electricity use over 24 hours and over each day & week of the year. Wholesale domestic energy is purchased based on this average ‘profile’ for the 12 month contract (or part of the term - witness the issues of failed energy suppliers that crashed their hedging strategies or simply didn’t have one in the second half of 2021) and by being standardised across all energy suppliers sets the base for energy retail. That profile assumes everyone consumes the same amount of energy during the peak period so if a property consumes less during that period (EV charged overnight, solar-battery used, etc) then the total wholesale cost for that property is less. The only way to know that is more timely measurement - half-hour being the UK chosen period. And half-hour settlement means buying the energy per each half-hour for each customer and that is referred to as Profile Class 0. Half-hour settlement has been in use for industrial supply for many years (using Advanced Meters, not SMETS) and from October 2025 we’ll change to half-hourly for domestic settlement. Once we get to that point everything else around smart tariffs, flexibility, smart appliances, etc all starts to fit together. A smart tariff can reflect the actual cost of wholesale energy and/or the participation in the flexibility market. Where’s the financial gain? I mentioned that the consumer will financially gain either if they have a smart asset that can be paid to flex or if they’re offered a lower tariff because the asset is flexed. Under both conditions the flexibility provider places the asset in a flexibility market and so expects to make a margin on the cost of flexing that asset. But under a profile class 0 half-hour settlement world like we’ve done with Agile Octopus the price/cost signal can be visible to the homeowner the tariff could cancel out the flexibility market. The purpose of a flexibility market is to avoid the cost of grid investment; if the investment would be £10m in a local area and a flex value is set at an annual £4m that’s a £6m saving in year 1 but in year 3 has become more expensive (total cost). Or if an energy supplier offers a tariff such as Agile Octopus and assets are flexed by that tariff should the energy supplier take a portion of that flex value or does the flexibility market no longer exist? There’s a danger too that a portfolio of assets under control becomes leverage in making a flex market - kind of holding the FSO/ESO/DSO to ransom. How the market for flexibility works becomes critical here - consider a micro level of 50 properties on a street and one tries to achieve a higher flex return; they’ll be outcompeted by the other 49 if the demand for flexibility in that area is low and say 25 properties flexing is enough. Alternatively if the flex demand is high and more than 49 properties worth of flexing is needed then the return will be bid up. There’s a danger the government papers are too top-down centralised control; something like saying ‘we need a smart flexible energy system so we don’t invest in the grid to meet high peaks if we can smooth everything out so we’re going to mandate all devices are smart and will be sent control signals over the massively expensive smart meter infrastructure because we’ve already spent a lot of money on it’. Engaging customers by promoting smart flexible assets and markets is more powerful than a top down control. With our R&D Labs system we’ve experimented on this already by allowing a solar/battery system owner to set their own lower threshold of the Agile import price at which to charge their battery from the grid (e.g. I’ll take 50% charge when below 15p/kWh) and correspondingly their higher threshold on Agile export to export to the grid (e.g. I’ll export when the rate is above 20p/kWh). A customer setting a lower import threshold or a higher export threshold is less flexible by choice. Customers are able to choose the level of flexibility they want to engage in. The same can be applied to heating which we’ve experimented with too - a heating system can be run with a wider temperature range that reacts better to price signals. Let’s interconnect The interconnect capacity with the continent is set to increase (27GW of 57GW by 2050) which is expected to both improve flexibility and make the UK a net exporter of renewable energy. But there’s a danger in relying on a large interconnect to balance the system; certainly flexibility is easier if there’s more choice (i.e. bargaining different sources) but the continent is probably also more constrained at the same time as the UK - the one hour time difference won’t make much difference and weather may not vary enough across the continent unless we're relying on French nuclear to balance the UK renewables. If that interconnect growth gives greater access to off-shore wind that’s not attached directly to the UK then this makes sense - however the plan is for 40GW of UK Offshore wind by 2030 already. Perhaps the leading argument is to use the interconnects to avoid the need for wind curtailment when we reach 40GW and 57GW - that sounds unlikely to avoid when we’re regularly seeing curtailment already - and even in the future to be a net exporter even if currently we’re a net importer. That’s a significant point given we’ll double electricity demand and eliminate half of today’s generation capacity (i.e. all gas generation) and highlights the massive change that’s happening over the next few decades. Renewable Energy on your Doorstep There’s massive investment in local wind, solar or hydro schemes with the intention for local communities and investors set to financially benefit from grid constraints at a local level. This is enough to incentivise renewable generation but it makes little difference to local consumption. This includes allowing communities to invest in a scheme (financial return via dividends, etc) but those that would benefit most from lower cost local energy (e.g. near or in fuel poverty) don’t have the means to invest. What’s missing is any suitable method to reduce local consumption in the way we’ve launched with the Fan Club. My analogy is the railway network (or London tube network) - it would be absurd to pay a fee to go anywhere rather than a zone 1 ticket and yet that’s exactly the case with electricity generation (ignoring my April 1st solution). Local energy purchasing is a missed opportunity in all these papers and demonstrates the top-down centralised approach to grid management rather than consumer engagement methods. NZIP and more There’s a list of new government investment and grants too; the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (£450m), the Home Upgrade Grant (£950m), the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (£800m) and the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (£1Bn). The NZIP in particular spans smart systems, flexibility and energy storage meaning everything from generation (including Nuclear), balancing, storage, homes (generally), bioenergy, hydrogen, GGR & CCUS as well as industrial. New Build No homeowner is going to be forced to replace their gas boiler although with a lifetime of 15 years the end of new gas boilers in 2035 takes us to 2050. However it’s expected that the new Future Buildings Standard (7) will come into force in 2025 and mandate no gas in new build from that date. That standard also requires new homes to be “Net Zero Ready” from 2025 too. If only the government and developers hit the targets, this is a significant contribution to achieving net zero by 2050. I’m involved in several new build schemes with Octopus Real Estate and Homes England called the Green Homes Alliance where we’re looking at how the development finance is cheaper for homes that are built to EPC B+ and above. The easy wins are triple-glazing, insulation, solar & battery install but we’re already seeing that the SAP standards and EPC methodology don’t reward things like smart technology, smart tariffs, domestic flexibility, etc. PAS 1878 & 1879 begin that path and the Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) is being updated. Use of the Future Buildings Standard ahead of waiting for 2025 will help. Similarly social housing providers are exploring new build standards and technology ahead of enforcement dates too. What’s the Future? The grid is a network to which we’re all connected including highly distributed renewable generation, highly distributed smart-consumption (and storage) technology, and it all needs balancing. These papers focus a lot on generation, distribution, consumption and therefore conclude that smart flexibility is the silver bullet that glues it all together. That’s the macro system level view which is more or less an extrapolation of today’s trends prodded along with government money. But just 10 years ago arguing for all EVs on our roads, all heat pumps in our homes, no gas heating in new build, etc, wasn’t even worth the effort; for example the World Energy Council 2011 report for 2050 spends more time extrapolating population growth and transport and discounts the success of electric vehicles. Go back only 25 years and mobile phones were only for stock dealers in London. So what do we think is implausible energy technology change today that could be mainstream in 2030, 2040 and 2050 as it’s guaranteed not to be what we think it will be now in 2021. Will we replace house roofs with solar tiles. Will we convert properties to DC. Will we no longer own vehicles and no longer drive them ourselves. Will our windows also be solar panels. Will our homes be off-grid. Will we (finally) have ‘smart homes’. Or will it be something totally different that we can't imagine. Any of these are technically feasible and many prototypes and DIY demonstrators exist today. A Future Scenarios methodology helps but realistically technology change happens in shocks when some new business creates something that scales that everyone else dismissed. I wrote part of this back in late 2021 but the Ukraine war is one such shock causing massive change very rapidly. Think Ford cars, or PCs or mobile phones (and even then look at the rise and falls of Nokia then Blackberry). Where will Tesla be in the next 30 years. These government papers are all extrapolative trends so my bet is they’re all completely wrong. Two of my personal hopes are making homes off-grid and going all DC and I’ll explain why. Take a look around you at all the things plugged in - laptop, TV, broadband, smart thermostats, mobiles, voice assistants, LED lights, and anything else which has a circuit board in it will all be running on DC. Electric cars, solar panels, home batteries are all on DC. It’s become popular to replace sockets with versions that have USB outlets too as USB power supplies take up too much space, block other sockets, etc. Ethernet already supports up to 100Watts DC supply. We’re surrounded by DC power devices in our homes so with dozens of AC:DC transformers there’s a fair bit of inefficiency. It could be quite feasible to have DC versions either using USB-C, Ethernet or some yet to be invented connection with the added benefit of connectivity included. That makes it sound simple but currently voltages vary - EVs at 400v to 800v, solar at 50v and above, USB-C devices 5v, 9v, 12v - so harmonisation and ability to support at least one high and one low voltage is needed. Secondly our energy consuming technology will get increasingly efficient - we’ve already seen lighting plummet by 90% for example. Home insulation makes a massive difference to heating costs - a passive house virtually needs no heating at all. Heat pump COP will improve significantly. And solar will become simply replacement roof tiles and windows. If we no longer own (self-driving by subscription) cars in 2050 we won’t charge them at home. We may have domestic level long-term storage solutions. Add that up together and it’s possible for a home to be off-grid. Couple being off-grid and it’s easier to see how an off-grid home can also be all-DC.

Our experience of charging an EV isn't perfect but it's probably typical and that's something we're working hard to improve with new offers such as Intelligent Octopus. I'm on one of our Go Faster tariffs so I charge the car during the cheap period. However I've also set the car to reach only 80% to keep the battery in condition and I've got a smart charger that takes the Go Faster tariff via our API and decides when to charge. As a result the car app complains it's not receiving a charge and the smart charger app complains it can't reach full charge or that the charging rate is slow even there's no issue - it's just a clash between each service and a lack of any standard way to communicate between the car, charger and tariff. Our tariff API was published in 2018, has barely changed in four years and is very stable so in some respects is becoming a defacto standard and relied on by many chargers and other apps and services. Intelligent Octopus takes this a step further by connecting to either the charger or car API (in some cases via an intermediary broker service) to provide more insight and control within the Octopus app. Public charging has vastly improved in the past couple of years. We still have issues with some of the older networks that haven't invested in improving the experience (three times I've had to call one network) but those that are investing are providing a great service and expanding fast. We've of course signed up to Electric Juice which makes the process even smoother.

I started nCube in 2013 as a smart home platform. From the beginning the focus was always on energy management based around a smart home hub. As I wrote on the original About Us page (still available on the Wayback Machine*) I'd previously hacked together a method to turn everything on/off in my bedroom with an old tape deck motor, micro switch and transformer when I was a teenager. What we created was a Raspberry Pi based hub with a HAT and USB dongles so we could talk to a whole range of home devices across WiFi, Z-Wave, Bluetooth and in a later version we were working on Zigbee too. That meant we connected to well over 100 devices such as smart thermostats (even Nest before they killed off their API access), TRVs, smart plugs (Z-Wave brands and well known products such as Wemo), lights (also Z-Wave but Philips Hue too via their bridge and LIFX wifi versions), all sorts of sensors (bit of expansion into security), sonos smart speakers, plant monitors, etc. We probably over-stretched ourselves covering such a wide range of devices in the end. The nCube app (iOS and Android as well as mobile web) gave control of all these devices from one place. A few things influenced my choice of demo devices in these screenshots - this was the time when we had a tropical fish tank, our youngest was still a baby and I did try to look after an Orchid. On top of that the system was also connected to IFTTT and Alexa too. Our last iteration of the hub was to move to a custom main board instead of the Raspberry Pi (hence also inclusion of Zigbee) with a plan to create a set of stacking modules connected with pogo-pins (commonly used for magnetic touch-connectors) so you could simply lift them on and off. The base formed the main hub, then a storage unit, then a mobile connectivity unit instead of relying on home broadband and finally at the top a smart speaker. As a proof of concept for exhibiting at CES in Las Vegas we dismantled an Alexa Dot and glued it inside and it actually worked. Below is a photo of the first prototype - the base had a real functioning circuit board, the two middle layers were empty and the top had the hacked Alexa inside. None of the nCube tech (hardware of software) is in action at Octopus but continues to influence what we can do in the EnTech space. * best not to try and visit the nCube URLs anymore - we didn't acquire the URLs when I joined Octopus so the site has since been taken over and throws security errors.

We moved house a year ago (April 2021) and one of the things I was keen to do was move off our gas combi boiler to an Air Source Heat Pump which we did early January 2022. Ours is an EcoForest EcoAir 3-12 Pro providing heat for a 1960s detached 4-bedroom house with poor insulation and a dodgy conservatory. We installed a 250 litre hot water tank and around half the radiators were upgraded too. Due to the rear of the house being all low windows and doors the ASHP needed to go part way up the garden 7.5m away from neighbouring bedroom windows. Our neighbour on the other side of the fence say they can just about hear the hum if they stand outside and listen for it and the neighbour on our other side (around 15 meters away) asked if it had been commissioned yet. No one can hear it from indoors. I'd already installed a Tado for the combi-boiler so we used that again for the ASHP. Some say you should run a heat pump as a continuous 'background' heating but we're very used to 15 to 16 degrees at night and between 19 and 20 during the day time and often slightly warmer in the evening. With the heating schedule set in the Tado app the system has worked well for the past three months. I've set the schedule to start to warm up 30 minutes earlier than we had with the combi boiler knowing there's a longer warm up time and we've not really noticed any difference. The only difference we do notice is returning home if we've been out for the day and manually turned it right down - the combi boiler was great at rapidly heating but that's about the only 'benefit' I've missed. Our Tado thermostat turns the circulation pump on/off when calling for heat rather than instructing the heat pump control panel itself. Therefore once the heat pump buffer tank temperature is low the heat pump starts up. We're not using the Tado to determine when the hot water tank is heated although we may update the wiring to do so. Instead currently the hot water tank has higher priority than heating meaning after showers in the morning (or evening) the system will re-heat the tank. In the morning that can sometimes mean the home cools a little whilst it's heating water but we've only noticed because I've been intently monitoring how it works. As modern hot water tanks are very well insulated then there's very little loss if it were heated overnight and consumed the next day - we have an electric vehicle so we're on one of the Go Faster tariffs which would be ideal for hot water production. We quite like being back on a hot water tank. Personally I always hated hearing the combi-boiler fire up every time a hot water tap was turned on; you could feel the wasted gas warming everything up - and worse if you turn a tap on and off causing the combi to power up and down. A constant reminder of burning stuff. We were fortunate in having space in the utility room for the hot water tank as the loft pipework was removed years ago and the airing cupboard repurposed as storage. Hot water tanks are bulky ugly things though and look worse with the maze of pipework wrapped round them. I'll write about Sunamp and other alternatives in a future update as the squareness and size of a kitchen cabinet size (or combi-boiler size) seems to make these devices far easier to re-install than a hot water tank. The ASHP is set to 45 degrees for heating and 55 for the hot water so I've been watching the Coefficient of Performance (COP) value when heating and producing hot water. Our home had very poor loft insulation and the conservatory roof is very out of date tubular plastic sheets offering about as much insulation as cling film but even days below freezing hasn't caused us any heating issues. The COP value is the magic of a heat pump; for each kWh of electricity consumed you get the equivalent of 2.8 to 5.0 times as much heating or hot water. For comparison a kettle is less than 1.0 (heat escapes from the kettle as it heats) and a gas boiler is well below 1.0. The COP doesn't include the energy consumption of the circulation pump nor the frost-cycle so you have to allow for that in any electricity consumption calculation. Frost-cycle: when the weather is below 5 degrees the rear slowly builds up a layer of frost and every few hours the heat pump pushes warm water through the heat exchanger to melt the ice resulting in a trickle of water from the base and some steam towards the end. Our radiators were seriously out of date so worth changing. Larger radiators may sometimes be needed as the flow temperature is lower so you need a larger surface area to emit the same amount of heat. A decent survey is essential which involves measuring the room, windows and insulation to calculate the energy needed and therefore the correct radiator size. A couple of ours were incorrectly sized due to an extension added without upgrading the radiators so our house is now more consistently warm throughout than before. Nice bonus. We were worried that larger radiators meant them taking up more wall space but this isn't always the case. Radiators come as types referred to as 11, 21, 22 or 33 and rather than saying eleven, twenty-one, it's more common to say one-one, two-one, etc. The first digit is the number of panels and the second digit indicates the fins. We had a couple of very old radiators that were just a 1 - i.e. a panel and no fins. So a 'three-three' has three panels and there's a set of fins attached to each panel. You can see where I'm going here - taking out a 11 and replacing it with a 22 (2 panels and 2 fins) increases the surface area emitting heat by just increasing the thickness (i.e. protrusion from the wall) not the width and height. We have one 22 replaced with a 33 radiator that's installed on the side of a kitchen peninsular in the conservatory which is around 15cm depth but doesn't protrude too excessively into the room. Between 3/11/21 and 21/1/22 we consumed 7,069kWh of gas and 946kWh of electricity; that's around 350kWh electricity per month. With the gas supply removed late Jan (no gas cooking) our electricity has jumped to 3,176kWh up to the 21st March; so we now average 1,400kWh electricity per month in a fairly comparable pair of winter months. I.e. in the winter we're using 4 times the amount of electricity with the heat pump than previously. Basing off the daytime rate (i.e. without breaking down the off peak use) for Go, Go Faster & Intelligent Octopus tariffs at around 35p/kWh then we're breaking even when the gas rate is above 8.75p/kWh (35p/4). Gas is currently around 13p/kWh. And of course we're now off-gas which also means no gas daily standing charge. In summary, so far so good.