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Greg Jackson
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Founder octopus.energy Customer issues: email greg at octopus.energy for best response Blog at octopus.energy/blog
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After a terrible flood, you don't say it's too expensive to build new flood defences.
Britain’s vulnerability to gas cost all of us £40bn in the last energy crisis and we're facing another. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme costs just 1% of that - and is key to getting off gas.
Britain’s vulnerability to gas cost all of us £40bn in the last energy crisis and we're facing another. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme costs just 1% of that - and is key to getting off gas.
“Malevolent leaders” thousands of miles away with a grip on our energy bills. Perfect Halloween material, if only it were made up.
Tomorrow’s Budget decides the future of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS), the government grant that knocks thousands off the cost of a heat pump. The BUS is one of the best-value industrial policies Britain has, and the clearest way to loosen that grip.
In the @theipaper this morning, @g__j pointed to China’s boom in EV’s. In 2010, the government there gave people a hefty discount on electric cars and built the chargers to match. Early adopters drove costs down, and China now leads the world in EVs and batteries.
The BUS is doing the same for heating. Before it, around 200,000 UK homes had a heat pump. Now it’s over 600,000. Heat pumps used to be for posh renovations. Now they’re going into ordinary homes, and data from every Octopus heat pump shows heating bills 20 to 40% lower than gas. That’s the BUS delivering exactly what it promised, making smarter, cleaner, (and generally better) energy tech cheaper for everyone.
Every heat pump fitted makes the next one cheaper. And every home off gas is one less Putin can squeeze. The scariest thing this week would be stopping now.View quoted post on X
Getting gas locally is good short term, but it won’t cut bills. Heat pumps can.
Hundreds and thousands will save on bills this winter with their heat pump (on avg, £230 a year on Cosy Octopus vs a gas boiler).
Hundreds and thousands will save on bills this winter with their heat pump (on avg, £230 a year on Cosy Octopus vs a gas boiler).
2:05
You can't run a system with millions of variable consumption and generation and storage devices the way you ran it when you had 150 fossil fuel generators and a handful of nukes.
It's not the new technology (wind, solar, batteries, EVs) that's the issue - it's the total failure to change the way we manage the system.
This is why locational wholesale market (which is automatically dramatically more flexible) was so powerful - and is increasingly used in the OECD. We need decentralised signals so the system self-optimises.
Octopus already processes 300,000 data points a second to do this for the many GW we control - but the brute force of the main system management just doesn't have this granularity.
It is increasingly urgent to reform our electricity system. These control room issues, the £50m spent balancing the system in a single day, the £3bn a year on curtailment, the prospect of £7-9bn a year of curtailment by 2029/2030.
It's all avoidable but not with the tools of yesterday
It's not the new technology (wind, solar, batteries, EVs) that's the issue - it's the total failure to change the way we manage the system.
This is why locational wholesale market (which is automatically dramatically more flexible) was so powerful - and is increasingly used in the OECD. We need decentralised signals so the system self-optimises.
Octopus already processes 300,000 data points a second to do this for the many GW we control - but the brute force of the main system management just doesn't have this granularity.
It is increasingly urgent to reform our electricity system. These control room issues, the £50m spent balancing the system in a single day, the £3bn a year on curtailment, the prospect of £7-9bn a year of curtailment by 2029/2030.
It's all avoidable but not with the tools of yesterday
It’s official: a legal investigation has found engineers in Britain’s electricity grid control room are stressed because renewables make it so hard to keep the lights on. And when they raise concerns, managers won’t listen - they only want “good news”View quoted post on X
thetimes.com/article/413d54…
37% of new trucks sold in China are now electric. They’re not little vans - they’re 49 tons. Unaffected by diesel prices. Simply not held back by the fossil fuel lobby.
This is an extraordinary development. Only a few years ago, the car makers were saying it would not be impossible in the near future to make electric trucks. We must never underestimate the extent to which vested interest is putting the brakes on the Climate revolutionView quoted post on X
