Oh what the absolute fuck.
If you actually go to the power company’s own damn website (i.e. the primary source), it’s actually some sort of (ill-advised IMO) sales promotion thing, not the dire warning implying brownouts or whatever that all the headlines are spinning it to be. British media should be fucking ashamed of itself.
Whilst not quite the daily mail or telegraph levels of egregiousness, the independent is another paper owned by an ultra wealthy.
A good amount of the wealthy’s wealth is often in oil
It’s in their interest to promote anti environmentalism
It’s therefore in all of our interests to ignore such papers on these issues
When I searched to find the primary source I ran across articles by The Guardian etc. too. It might be a news wire service thing 'cause they’re all reporting it the same.
If you’re with Octopus they’re running an opt-in energy saving session tomorrow from 6-8pm where they credit you if you use less electricity than you normally do at that time.
For those on their Agile tariff that tracks the real time wholesale price and alters every 30 minutes they’ll no doubt whack up the rates for 6pm-8pm, possibly up to the max 99p/kWh, to try to reduce demand.
I’m on Octopus Agile on a smart tariff. We got an email today inviting us to participate in an energy saving session, which is where they state a time period typically an hour where they give you credits for using less electricity than you usually use, from 6pm-8pm tomorrow during the eclipse. I’m quite happy to get paid to use less.
This is just dumb, the (partial) eclipse starts at 18:17 London time…what amount of solar power are you even producing that late in the day? If that were a real problem, I can’t imagine what large clouds can do to you at noon. https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/map/2026-august-12?n=uk%2Flondon
It’s still bright and sunny here in the UK at 6pm, sunset where I live isn’t until 40 minutes after the end of the eclipse.
An eclipse of this magnitude reduces solar generation far more than clouds do.
Human perception of brightness is logarithmic, so it doesn’t seem that much dimmer at 6pm than midday, but in terms of how much energy is actually arriving as light, there’s a big difference.
The total eclipse in Canada two years ago was so cool. It got dark and cold quickly.
Look at the energy mix at 6pm: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/live/fifteen_minutes 100% loss of solar at 6pm is comparable to loss of 20% due to clouds at peak production.
1800 is usually during peak demand though.
But residual solar production. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/live/fifteen_minutes it is ludicrous to ask people to save at peak demand when it is up to the grid managers to tweak the energy mixes ahead of time.
I don’t think ludicrous is the right word to describe voluntary load shedding. If it were mandatory, sure. Asking consumers to lower their usage (if they can) for one hour on one specific day is fairly reasonable.
I’ll do exactly as I’m used to, because at that time our solar panels will have our battery fully charged and will last until morning.
But apart from that, the electricity spot price is actually expected to be pretty low here (Denmark) during the solar eclipse Wednesday, The spot price is projected to be 40% higher Tuesday afternoon and evening. Probably because there is more wind Wednesday.
