Transcript: Episode 7 - Home is where the smart is
Andrew Dykes
Welcome back to the Megawatt Hour, a podcast boxset series brought to you by Energy Voice in paid partnership with BDO.
In this series we are examining how energy storage technologies are reshaping, reinforcing and recharging energy markets.
I’m Andrew Dykes, content editor at Energy Voice where we are leading the global energy conversation.
So far over the course of our series we’ve looked a lot at the big picture - grid-scale batteries, the need for seasonal storage and the policy and investment landscape underpinning major developments across the country.
This episode we’re drilling right down to the small-scale to focus on where we're most likely to interact with energy storage in our daily lives - in our homes.
As home energy systems become increasingly smarter, storage is set to play a greater role in how we use and consume energy - and hopefully will not only help us use greater amounts of renewables, but may even save us some money - something that is all the more important in the current energy climate.
Joining me from BDO this episode is my co-host and director of financial model assurance services Andy Hucknall. Focusing mainly on renewable energy, he is a core member of BDO’s cross-stream renewable energy team and has over 30 years’ experience of auditing, financial modelling and model audit, including work in renewable energy, transport, social and digital infrastructure, acquisitions and refinancing.
And we’re delighted to welcome Emilie Romain, a co-founder and operations director at Ecobubl.
Established in 2020 in Warminster, Ecobubl designs and supplies renewable energy solutions ranging from heat pump systems to solar pv and battery storage. Their mission is to put Solar PV on every roof in the southwest and remove as many fossil fuel heating systems as possible, replacing them with heat pumps or other low-carbon technologies.
Emilie also presents and hosts ecobubl’s youtube channel and has appeared on the low-carbon transport and tech series Fully Charged.
Thank you both for joining.
So Andy, we've talked a lot in the series so far about energy storage on the grid, we've had batteries, flywheels, seasonal storage, we've talked about dynamic containment and frequency and all these things. Why would I want to bother with any of that in my house?
Andy Hucknall
Absolutely. It's a good question. I think it goes beyond storage and I can think of two principal reasons. Most people will be looking at storage - decarbonisation, however, we think of that, whether it's sort of reducing emissions in the generation, even energy security.
And I think the other thing which people nowadays will be looking at is: can I save some money by putting energy storage or other technology in our home?
Andrew Dykes
Absolutely. And we've got Emilie here to explain all the myriad ways in which that might be possible. Emily, could you maybe tell us a bit about what ecobubl is and what you do?
Emilie Romain
We are quite a new business like you've mentioned we started off in 2020 in lockdown. Ecobubl's main goal is to decarbonise as much as we can in the local area, basically. We do specialise in solar PV and heat pumps, especially the the Daikin heat pumps. We are a Daikin Sustainable Home Centre, which means that customers can come in and they can have a look at all the heat pumps up and running.
So if they want to know how noisy they are, how they work, how big they are, what equipment's going to be actually in the house, because a lot of people forget about the amount of equipment that is involved in installing a heat pump. It's not just like your combi boiler where you have one white box in the way in the kitchen somewhere.
You may have one white box plus a buffer tank, expansion vessels, a cylinder may be coming into play. There's a lot more equipment than they’re used to, so we have that all set up so they can get a better idea of what equipment is needed
And with solar again we do have that up and running in the showroom as well to show the customers sizes, inverters, battery sizes.
We also have the the cloud system which give energy use so we can show them the generation of things that that are our unit currently takes and what our units running at and what we're using. But yeah, most of our most of our aim is to help the local community as well as get the word out sort of nationwide about the importance of decarbonization, really.
Andrew Dykes
Great. And there's two aspects to this as well. So there's the generation side of things. So the solar PV and then the the storage side of things and kind of lots of stuff that sits in between. Could you maybe give us a rundown of of how that might work in in a model home, for example?
Emilie Romain
First off is to try and understand what their need actually is. If they're high electrical users, then we want to have see how much we can actually fit in terms of solar? What can we fit on their property and what the DNO will actually allow us to fit, because that's another question we have to ask is if they're in a particularly old area, the lines to the home may be quite old and they won't be able to cope with amount we want to stick on the home, so that's another factor to think about.
But usually we're looking at what they're using, what they could generate and what they could store. If they're not using too much, they may not need a battery. In those cases, they may be just better off maybe storing it in some kind of heat storage like a smart cylinder or something instead of a battery.
Emilie Romain
But yeah, the main thing looking for is what the customer needs and work out from there what would be best suited for them. In terms of heating as well - a full heat loss calculation needs to be done to see what size heat pump is required. Yeah, they are very, very different things to look at really.
Andrew Dykes
It's all about need, isn't it? Right. Obviously you kind of work with customers saying that they come to you and they have none of these low carbon tech whatsoever, this is the first thing I think a lot of people at the moment are thinking about stuff like heat pumps, but obviously it depends a lot on kind of housing stock as you say, it depends, on their need. How do you how do you go about assessing that?.
Emilie Romain
There's a couple things and in terms of what the customer comes in to look for, in our case they would go on our website, they would go through the inquiry form. From there, we can ask them a few bits and bobs about what they're looking for. Then we give them a phone call, get more information from them about what they're looking for. Are they looking for the the whole bag or you want your heat pump, you want your solar, you want your battery storage you want your EV charger?
Find what they want and then it's a a home visit. We go round and assess their property to see what we can actually physically do to their house.
In some cases, heat pumps are a no go, they could be in quite an old house, very draughty and leaky and they might have single glazed windows or a single skinned building - not particularly brilliant for a heat pump, but that might be perfect for solar in that case.
So sometimes it's a weigh up between a heat pump and solar and sometimes the solar wins. Sometimes they all win, which is brilliant, because they're making up the whole package then.
But yeah, every homeowner is very different and I think the main thing to look for is, is that personal touch of going to their house and physically seeing what they need and get the best thing for the customer.
Andrew Dykes
You mentioned heat there. So I mean we've talked a lot about storage for electricity or at least converting it to electricity some way and using it on the grid, you know in homes heat is kind of the main thing that people think about wanting or needing kind of on demand. Is it useful to think about heating as another form of storage in terms of how people use it?
Emilie Romain
Absolutely. So there's a couple of things on the market, but one of the things that I'm quite excited about is the Mixergy cylinders. They're great. So if you can't really afford to get onto the floor renewable wagon at the moment, you can't afford your heat pump, your solar is a bit too much out the budget at the moment. A great one to get onto the renewable ladder would be a Mixergy tank.
They can store heat at at low peak rates at night time, they can charge themselves up, they can charge themselves up to a certain amount. If you don't need to use the entire tank, what's the point of heating the entire tank? You're wasting money, it's more carbon you have to use in terms of energy use. You know, if you only need 30% then heat 30%.
It's a great way of getting onto that renewable ladder. And also it's very integratable as well. So if you do decide in the future right now it's time for the solar, that's great. Now solar can heat my cylinder as well as give me electric.
And in the future , now it's time for the heat pump. That's brilliant - whack a plate heat exchanger on the front of that, and now your heat pump can use it as well.
That's one of the things I quite like in terms of storage for heat with that particular cylinder, I quite like but there are the ones on the market, like the Sunamp heat battery that stores heat that could be integrated into solar and some heat pumps as well - high temperature heat pumps that can be integrated in.
Andrew Dykes
And it's worth saying as well, and I'm old enough to remember the the older hot water tanks and various hot water heating options that I think people you know ditched in favour of combi boilers. These are definitely the next generation, right? This isn't old tech repackaged.
Emilie Romain
No, no. They are very clever. They are very clever. They do look like a cylinder, but they do have some fancy things in the front of them, far more efficient as well in terms of where the immersion is, a lot of the old tanks would have the immersion at the top of the tank, so you'd only really get maybe 20% hot water on the immersion anyways.
Whereas the new tanks tend to have most times more than one immersion and in some cases, or in the in the case of the Mixergy cylinder it's got a pump at the bottom which pulls it up and sprays it across the immersion at the top, so it actually heats top to bottom, making it more efficient that way so you can pull the heat off instead of waiting for the whole thing to heat.
Andrew Dykes
We've talked a bit about gas use as well in the UK because so many homes use gas. Andy, you mentioned earlier in discussions about the UK is a little bit disadvantaged compared to some other markets that have like district heating, where we are really looking a lot of individual solutions, aren't we
Andy Hucknall
Absolutely. A lot of countries and particularly the Nordics and Eastern Europe and district heating is is available for the housing stock there. It all depends on the efficiency of the heating and the distribution losses. But yeah, even now we're seeing new tenders for this hitting, for example, France, it's developing, developing strongly.
There are other solutions, and I believe that BEIS is looking at district heating retrofitting in the UK and obviously within new developments you've got the potential to generate electricity in a less carbon intensive way, perhaps of biomass or other solutions.
Andrew Dykes
Yeah, there's there's one near me that I think is going to use waste heat from a waste to energy plant as well. So again a kind of big integrated system and there's a lot more efficiencies at scale, but as we've discussed, there's a lot of old houses that will not be suitable to join these kind of new networks. So I think that's where solutions like ecobubl’s come in.
One question we had, which is potentially a very low tech question, but heat pumps, is it better to run your heating all the time or switching on and off as needed. There seems to be an ongoing question around homes and heat and I'm really interested in your take Emilie.
Emilie Romain
I think my opinion, if it's a heat pump then really I think it should be kind of long and low with a setback temperature. A lot of people end up trying to use it like an old boiler turning it off and on. But if you're going to do that, you will end up using a lot of a lot of energy because the ramp up time alone can take a bit.
But once it's ramped up, it's quite good. It stabilises itself and it will tick long quite nicely not using very much electricity. But if you're going to keep turning off and on, that ramp is going to keep pulling the energy and it's going to cost you quite a lot to run so in heat pump.
I think have it on low and long works perfectly fine. Put a set back temperature at night time like 1617 degrees and that should work fine. Then you know peak times, ramp up again if you need to in certain areas to 20-21 if that's more comfortable.
Andrew Dykes
You heard it here first! I also saw you did a video with Robert Llewllyn as well, and he had installed a heating system. So it's a boiler that heats up overnight, kind of based on cheaper electricity, lower tariffs? And then you have pretty hot water available on demand throughout the day.
Emilie Romain
Yeah. So he's got the Tepio for the for the heating, and he's got a Mixergy cylinder - I think one of the first generation cylinders for his hot water, so that they work independently. They unfortunately don't make a combi Zeb at the moment, but they are looking at it.
Zeb is the name of the boiler he had installed by Tepio. Yes, in those cases, they're more geared up towards smaller homes that are well insulated. They don't generally need to replace any radiators, they tend to want to use the same radiators, no extra installation.
It's literally just whacking on the flow and return that you original boiler had, which is part of the selling point for that cause it's very little, it's not as invasive as installing a heat pump where you need to pull up the floorboards and carpet resize almost all the radiators. In some cases it's a lot less invasive.
The downfall is if the night time tariff ever goes, if your low energy tariff ever goes, they could be in a bit of a pickle, cause it could be expensive to charge, but otherwise I think they're pretty cool.
Andrew Dykes
Yeah, I think it's it really interested me because it’s that niche, like you say, and I've had people also think about boiler as well and again, maybe even the idea of the hot water tank. It's charging up at night and it's ready when you need it. Rather than this, I think people think heat pumps are a little bit of magic still, and they're not quite sure as to whether they can trust them.
I think that kind of fills a slot for the for the people who aren't quite willing to make that jump.
Emilie Romain
I think a lot of them still think they are big noisy air conditioning units at the back of ASDA or something, but they're nothing like that at all.
Andrew Dykes
We've talked briefly about it, but why are consumers coming to you to talk about storage and what are the kind of things they're worried about and what are those conversations like?
Emilie Romain
Mostly they are coming to us for storage because in a lot of cases our customers actually already have solar and they're coming for storage because they're not on the feed-in tariff, so they missed out on that for whatever reason - didn’t get installed in time would be the main reason!
They're looking to save their energy and use it for themselves instead of it just going off and them not being paid for it because there isn't a feed in tariff anymore for them. A lot of them are using it for that.
So they're using all the excess to charge their battery up, using that in the afternoon or evening when the sun goes down, and then putting a good night tariff on it to charge up at night time to the morning before the solar starts generating. They've got some energy there at at reduced rate.
It's all about future proofing their homes, I think, and saving them a bit of money and being better for the environment as well in terms of keeping some that energy for yourself to use and not having to buy anything from the grid. They can just reuse what they've already generated.
There are some schemes available for solar at the moment, but it's not the feed-in tariff, it's not as good a tariff as it used to be. That's the the smart export guarantee, quite a few of the I think it's a big six and a few other ones are actually offering that the moment - so you can call them up and see if you can get some money for any excess solar generation.
Andrew Dykes
You mentioned solar and EVs there. I mean, a lot of the people that you're speaking to already pretty plugged into this decarbonization journey. Or do you have people that really, you know, they have no idea, but they know they want to be future proofed?
I mean, what what's the kind of split?
Emilie Romain
Like I say, a lot of our customers now know what they want. But there is the occasional one who has no idea and they rock up into store and go: “What can I fit my house?” How long is a piece of string? What do you want?
You have to go through with them what things are, what they do and are they going to be beneficial for them? Like I said, again, you know, they might want a heat pump, love the idea, and then you rock up to the house and then you realise they live in a converted church. You're like, oh, this is a bit different, this probably won't be OK - but then they’ve got a massive roof and they can whack solar on it and use other renewable technologies instead.
It's a good split, but it is mostly now people know what they want as a terms of people just rocking up going you know, tell me what I need. I think people becoming more aware of what's out there and how to get it done.
Andrew Dykes
Obviously in the last 18 months, everyone I think has seen their energy bills rise, in some cases precipitously; has that spurred a lot of people to come and speak to you that maybe, you know, they were considering it before and now it really does seem to be a good investment or certainly one they want to make?
Emilie Romain
I think in terms of solar, it has definitely. Solar installations for us went right up. On the back end of that heat pumps actually went down because people are worried about the cost of running a heat pump, so they actually went down with the cost of living crisis and electric going up.
But they're actually starting a steady comeback again now. I think people are becoming more aware that if they're designed properly and then installed well, there isn’t going to be too much difference especially for having solar added on as well - that can counteract the amount of electricity they are using - be that the heat pump will most be running in the winter when the sun isnt doing that much but if you take consideration what you save in summer time, you might have to spend a bit more in the winter, but all in all, you've saved yourself some money.
Andrew Dykes
And we've talked a lot about using all these together. You know, I saw on your website there there's a 2.6 kWh battery you have as well, which I mean is that's it's obviously sizable and what you could run a few appliances off it, but it's not kind of you know industrial scale
Emilie Romain
Yeah, we sold one of those.
Andrew Dykes
Is there a case for, you know, me? I I live in a two-bed tenement flat, Victorian built. But you know, would there be a case for me on a on a smart enough tariff to be able to put one of these smaller batteries in? Does that make economic and you know, rational sense?
Emilie Romain
Yeah, it can do that. Generally the the 2.6 batteries are a kind of what I like to call like a bolt-on battery for when you need just that little bit extra, you'd whack it on alongside a battery or.
But for flats and stuff, it's a fair point, actually. It's quite it's quite a compact and it's about the same size as the inverter actually. So yeah, in flats and things. If you just want to have it as a storage system. Actually it would be too bad.
Andrew Dykes
That's good to know. I might need to make some enquiries after this.
Emilie Romain
And you could take it with you so.
Andrew Dykes
It's just about portable.
Andrew Dykes
But yeah, I mean, most of the time that we've, we've thought about these, you know it's the the sort of Tesla Powerwall, which is kind of, you know, a big wall sized unit.
Emilie Romain
Huge, yes. Heavy.
Andrew Dykes
Yeah, but I guess it's important to say that there are these increasingly more flexible solutions kind of being brought to market, right? And are you seeing maybe not the smallest ones, but you are seeing kind of demand for those pickup as well?
Emilie Romain
Yeah. The larger batteries definitely. The 9.5kWh Givenergy. They're very popular at the moment. That's the Gen 2 batteries. And the Tesla is again very popular because they're have a 5 kW inverter. It's a direct switch over in terms of if you get a power cut, you wouldn't know because it just switches itself straight over. With other ones you have a manual switch over, so you do have to go over and flip that switch.
But Tesla has become very popular and also a bit easier to get hold of now, which is brilliant because at one point we had a two year wait for a Tesla.
Andrew Dykes
Wow, that's good.
We are going to be right back after a quick break.
###
Andy Hucknall
Emily, we're hearing about lots of solutions for the homeowner. How much work is involved for the actual homeowners to get all of this installed in terms of talking to electricity suppliers, DNO, other parties, councils. Do you handle all that or is it something the homeowner deals with a lot?
Emilie Romain
For the majority we handle everything. The only thing we don't handle is any planning permission that might be needed for, say, a solar array that might be in a field or something, a large scale one. We don't handle that, but we do handle all discussions with the DNO, and any admin work from that, MCS paperwork and everything we do all that for the customer.
All they have to really is show an interest in what they'd like. We'd give them the design. “This is what you could have. Are you happy? Yes, I'm happy.”
And then from there we go ahead with all the DNO applications. Sometimes the DNO want a little bit more from us than just an application, they might want to come and do a check in which case there is a charge attached to that, With a lot of the energy providers, the people who own the line like SSE or National Grid - sometimes we want us to do a load check or inspection, so we have to go over and show them what we've done and that can have a cost for the customer sometimes.
But we do handle the appointments with the DNO so the customers don't have to do very much really apart from sit back and let us do our work and at the end we give them all the rest of paperwork like MCS certificates, electrical certificates, also any certificates that that are for the building regs as well.
Andy Hucknall
I heard you mentioned there about putting solar panels on the ground in people, so I guess paddocks and extended gardens - for those of us who are city dwellers, I guess it's going on the roof. What are the sort of considerations you need to think about the roof - maybe direction and strength?
Emilie Romain
So obviously there's orientation of the roof. North would be pretty rubbish to put it on if I'm honest, but I probably would recommend south as the side that’s always got the most sun, but you know East and West you can still put them on those.
In terms of structure, if it's an older roof, there can be some issues. You may need to get structures there out to make sure that it's safe, especially if it's a non-standard construction. But we do have a look at the roof to make sure it's in good nick.
In some cases we do have to get severe out to double check that to make sure if it's a roof, that we’re I'm unfamiliar with, we do get professionals out to look at that and get reports done.
Andrew Dykes
You mentioned a hypothetical customer living in an old church, but I think that does speak to a wider point around the UK's housing, which is pretty varied. We don't have kind of a lot of, say, very specific grades of house in, in the whole areas. We have everything from Victorian to you know brand new builds. Are there some common problems? Are there a lot of technical issues that you see in in kind of working with this variety of stock?
Emilie Romain
I think the common problem we come across in terms of heat pumps is like the electricity supply and the the house itself in terms of insulation. A lot of the time the houses can be poorly insulated; they have you know single skinned walls, concrete floors and the loft might have some old newspaper up there to keep it warm or something. You just let them know what they need to put up there. Those are common problems we can come across the heat pumps.
With the solar it’s if they've got massive trees or something. You don't really want to cut any trees down but at the same time if it's a lot of trees making shading on the roof that then leads us on to optimisers. Some customers may need optimisers, so they can actually use their solar properly, otherwise it it would be worth putting up there cause as soon as a few panels get shaded, the whole row might end up turning off and then not generating anything - so having the optimizers on there gets over that problem.
Andrew Dykes
So is that like an extra unit that kind of regulates the flow and make sure it's consistent?
Emilie Romain
Yeah. Like how I like to explain it is like fairy lights. So if you know the old fairy lights you used to get for the Christmas tree, if one bulb went, then the row went. Whereas if you put a little optimizer on each one of those. If one bulb went that doesn't matter, it would skip that one and go to the next one. And that's pretty much what the optimizers are doing.
Andrew Dykes
Got you. In terms of kind of placing these within houses as well and think you know again, we have these completely varied constructions and people have done extensions and knocked through walls and everything else. Is there a solution that will work for everyone's footprint, If you like, in terms of finding something that they'll end up happy with? Or is there a lot of kind of knocking down walls and adding in extra bits and flues and all these other things.
Emilie Romain
Every house is different. I think every household is able to have some kind of renewable tech in it. I don’t think there's a single house that couldnt put anything on it, surely there'd be something you can do somewhere.
But in terms of if you could whack a heat pump in somewhere, that's a huge upheaval. There will be some knocking around the house. You probably want to leave the house for at least a week if it's a retrofit, there’s going to be a lot of dust, a lot of noise, a lot of pipes being cut and replaced.
With solar on the other hand, that's a very easy installation; whack scaffolding around your house that will probably take about two to three days to get an installation installed with a battery - that's easy peasy stuff.
A heat pump is the thing where you got to start smashing things up a little bit
Andrew Dykes
And once you're in, once all those things are in and the system is working, what kind of life expectancy and warranties do you see on the market at the moment?
Emilie Romain
I think a lot of the solar panels now are actually offering a 25-year warranty, which is really good. Batteries and inverters can vary depending on the brand you go for. With the heat pumps I think Daikin are offering a 5-year warranty. I think LG offer a seven-year warranty - again, they're all different depending what manufacturers you're using.
But I think generally you'll probably get the same of a heat pump in terms of lifespan as you would out of a a modern-day combi boiler. I don't think there's any real difference in you know how long they will live for as long as they're serviced regularly, sized appropriately, they shouldn't be overworking and run out too quickly.
Andrew Dykes
That's good to hear. And talking about kind of knocking bits of your house around and being at the house for a week, the people who are carrying this out. Are you finding there are enough skills that you need and people aware of the solutions that you offer to kind of make sure that this is a viable revolution in smart homes as it were?
Emilie Romain
It's definitely not enough renewable installers out there, that has come to light quite quickly. As we started our journey that with Ecobubl back in 2020, we couldn't find hardly anyone to really work with and there wasn't a lot of renewable installers at all.
We do as a business now train level 1, level 2 heat pumps through Daikin. We also do training for the Mixergy cylinders as well, just to try and get more people on board and switch over from new gas and and oil over to the renewable side.
But it is hard to get them off the gas. They're used to it. It's easy. They can do a boiler install in the same day just as a like-for-like swap over. It's a lot easier than doing a swap over from a boiler, gas boiler, oil boiler to a heat pump, it's a lot more difficult. It's a lot more electric work involved.
And it's a lot more work beforehand involved in terms of the heat loss, the radiator sizing, there's a lot lot more involved in that which can sometimes frighten them a little bit.
There is, there is a big shortfall on that and it is something we do need to think about as a nation, I think, getting more people involved and doing it in colleges. Not a lot of colleges actually offer renewables at all, they're still offering gas. Considering we’re meant to be trying to wean ourselves off, it seems silly they're still trying to teach that.
Andrew Dykes
What's it gonna take to overcome these problems? You have a training centre as part of what Ecobubl offers, right? So you have people in to kind of learn how to use the equipment. Is that right?
Emilie Romain
Yeah. So all of our units upstairs are fully functioning. So we do offer it for training. So when they the guys come over, you know we we pull it all apart basically and put it back together again.
Emilie Romain
So they can see and we do fault finding as well. You know, just so they can get their hands on themselves. I think practical learning is sometimes more beneficial than just reading out of the textbook - seeing the unit in in person, seeing what needs to be done is a lot better. Personally for myself, I know I'm more of a practical learner than I am a theory learner.
I think we need more centres around the place for people to go and have a look at functioning renewables, be that heat pumps, solar batteries, whatever it is, just to get the word out there a bit more.
Also pushing it through colleges as well. I think Exeter now starting to do one in their I think it's a College in Exeter, I think I don't think it's university, it's a College in Exeter. They're starting a renewables programme , I believe, but we just need more people to get on board to start training their future generation of engineers.
Andrew Dykes
And once you've done these sessions are people more comfortable and willing and does that snowball, or do you think they're still kind of going to be slightly hesitant? I ask because I see, I think there's a rumour around EV's that a lot car sales people are still hesitant to actually sell them and actually commit. They perhaps worry about recommending one to a potential purchaser, and I wonder whether you see the same with heating engineers.
Emilie Romain
We do with heat engineers yeah. A lot of it's like: “Oh, don't whack a heat pump there you’ll have a cold house if you do. Waste of bloody money” Mainly cause they don’t know what they're doing!
Once they do know what they're doing, they're actually quite alright. They go: “Oh, that's fine. That's just the same as that. It's not too different.”
There's just a bit more electrical work in it that you need to think about.
I think and also I think for homeowners as well, we spent so long getting rid of all these cylinders and whacking combi boilers in that thought of having a cylinder back of the house scares homeowners a little bit as well, so they also can be a little bit reluctant just because they think: “I got rid of this - I'm using that cupboard now for my shoes!”
Andrew Dykes
We talked out there about the the front end, but at the back end on energy suppliers and integration with who actually kind of provides the rest of your energy - are they on board with this and are there ones that are leading the way maybe?
Emilie Romain
So there are some suppliers that are leading the way. Octopus Energy now install heat pumps, I think EV chargers as well, they do great tariffs - all renewables as well, I really like them. OVO again are big on renewables, they're another one I quite like.
Quite a few renewable people coming out now, and I do like the way it's going. I think people are now looking away from the big six so much. And if they are looking at the big six, they're looking at what renewable options do they offer me as a consumer.
They want to do their bit and sometimes if they can, put in renewable tech themselves. They're thinking about, you know, how can I reduce my carbon footprint? Maybe my energy supplier could be more thoughtful, and they'll offer me something that way.
Andy Hucknall
Well, you mentioned EVs there. So obviously be more and more people are getting electric vehicles and we're here to talk of smart cities and other.
Andy Hucknall
Smart terminology, but vehicle to grid is as a storage method. Is that an option for people?
Emilie Romain
I think it can be an option. I think it's still quite early. I think it's learned this infancy a little bit.
Emilie Romain
Not many cars have the capability of doing. I've got electric car. No, my car can't doing. Unfortunately, if it could that be amazing, but it can't.
But you know Volkswagen have, I think they're pretty good at making the the new vehicle vehicle to grids. And I do think actually it could be a great way.
Of helping the the National Grid as well in terms of when energy is used and and and pulled and taken away all through the same thing that which is just give you different examples of the same thing. Sorry.
Yeah, but in terms of, you know, putting them on the grid I think car to grid or vehicle to grid would be a great way of reducing that a little bit as well.
If your car's fully charged, your house needs it and it's a peak time. Why not use what you've already got? That that'd be a great way of doing it. It's long sleeve enough in there to get, you know. the next station to charge up? That'd be fine. I think it's a great way to go personally.
Andy Hucknall
Absolutely. Obviously people need to think about their batteries and we do hear about the life expectancy of batteries based on a number of charges and recharges. So I guess there's a calculation to be done: how much savings you make compared to how much you use up your battery over time.
Emilie Romain
From the battery, lots of things come into factor. You know whether being one of them, if, if you're if it's a home battery, it's installed outside, that's not so great. They do actually stop working at a certain point outside if it gets too cold and the inverter and the battery just won't work.
They deplete quite quickly. It’s the same with car batteries if it's cold outside. I don't know why I end up using more mileage or more percentage charge on my car if it's cold outside, then if it's a nice mild day I can go quite a few miles further.
Batteries as a whole, if you look after them, they're fine. But in terms of lifespan I think they do vary.
Andrew Dykes
I think it is one tool in the toolbox rather than the silver bullet. I think you know. The early adopters of that kind of V2G technology, I think where you know the idea, you would never need a battery in your house or any other technologies.
You could just plug it in and drive it off again. I think the the realities of how we use all these things are kind of bringing that to bear a little bit - but I think there there is definitely a role for it in terms of that, like you said, the overall grid flexibility.
Emilie Romain
I think so. Especially in places like apartments and stuff - you could have a a whole apartment block with its car car park for it, I'm guessing some do. If they all had that, then you know that'd be brilliant for them. They can save money; if they have solar, then they could charge it all for free if they stay on the roof and then at night time, they could then use their vehicles then charge the block of flats.
Andrew Dykes
Yeah. I mean, we're into we're into district battery integration with a new frontier definitely.
Emilie Romain
Yes, like it's yeah. Yeah, like a district battery integration system. That would be amazing when it so they can just charge it on the roof, like with the solar panels coming all down, charging the cars. Later on the cars are charging the building. That'd be cool.
Andrew Dykes
Anyone listening? Take note.
So one thing we we're kind of touching on all these moving parts, how do I as the consumer keep track of all this? I've got energy coming in from my rooftop solar, I've got my car charging, I want to run the hot water at the same time. Is it a really difficult process to be managing all of that together, Emilie?
Emilie Romain
It can be if you have lots of different manufacturers, I guess, because none of them really talk together. So if you had, you know, one manufacturer of heat pump, another manufacturer of your battery and then you had a different manufacturer for your car charger, you'd have to have several different apps to see what each was doing, what was being used and how well it was performing.
A lot of the manufacturers now, one of them being MyEnergi, they're actually coming together to make kind of a whole home setup. So they have their own batteries now, they've got their own solar diverters, they've also got their own car chargers and they can all talk together. So that's a great one. If you can get onto the same brand then you can have just the one app and see what everything is doing.
But unfortunately at the moment if you've got lots of different things, you may have to have maybe 6 apps like I do for my car chargers at the moment.
Andrew
OK, the the value proposition there has a little bit of work to be done then, but are we heading towards that? I think I think back to like the old days of 10 different programmes to do various different bits of workflow even at work and now kind of things are all being integrated into like Word or Excel you know, are they? Are we heading in that direction for our homes?
Emilie Romain
I think absolutely we are heading that direction for our homes I think we're going to be a big app home.
Andrew Dykes
One app to rule them all.
Emilie Romain
Yeah, I'm hoping it's gonna be some kind of big Boss app, and then that does everything. That'd be nice. I hope it's called Big Boss app as well That'd be great!
Andrew Dykes
Great again, take notes everyone, we’re just spitting out ideas here.
We're looking at the future of how we're all going to be consuming energy in in our homes. You mentioned feed-in tariffs - a lot of this revolves around smarter use of electricity based on the current models; charging when things are cheaper at night and discharging in the day or peak times to save money.
As we all begin to do that, does that come into conflict with a lot of these value propositions and is the end of the day it going to be more about flexibility than necessarily cost?
Emilie Romain
I think so. I think if we all end up jumping on the bandwagon of using cheaper tariffs at night time, they just won't be cheaper anymore because everyone be using them. There won't be a lull which should be cheaper electric because everyone's gonna be buying it - it's supply and demand, isn't it?
I think in the future, if more people end up getting renewables such as solar, battery storage, vehicle to grids, I think it could change . I think maybe we might see a reduction in the amount of cheap tariffs we have and a smarter way of basically storing our own energy and reusing it when we need it.
Andrew Dykes
So is that a a long-term investment cost in the energy efficiency and the smarter things around your home that will ultimately pay back by being able to store energy and kind of use it rather than pay these maybe higher costs at the very peak times?
Emilie Romain
That's how I personally see it. I think eventually that might go and yeah, you'll be using your car, you'll be using your home battery to offset that instead.
I mean, Andy do we see kind of any companies in the market looking at these kind of things in any forecast you’re aware of?
Andy Hucknall
I’m not aware of that but I'm sure there is. But what we do is we do have the technology in many homes with smart meters. It doesn't have to be simply economy 7, if that's the right terminology and is still around
I'm personally with one of the not-big-six energy supplies you mentioned earlier and I do get messages saying if you reduce your demand between 5:30 and 6:00 tonight, we'll give you bonus points worth 1/4 of pence for every kWh saved - and they come back and say “A million customers have done this and we've saved lots of lots of carbon.”
Now I think that's more about balancing because that's a peak time during the cold months. But I see no reason why the energy suppliers can't be more smart and yeah deliver what we talked about. In the future potentially you'll get an e-mail and say if you run your washing machine now, we won't charge you for your electricity.
Emilie Romain
And I think that that will come, especially for renewables as well. If it's a windy day, you're going to have loads and loads and loads of electric to use up, aren't you, if those turbines are going. Whack your washing machine on.
Andrew Dykes
Or fill up your battery? And run it later when you need it anyway!
The flip side of not having the "cheaper tariffs” at night might be that we have a much flatter tariff kind of the rest of the time, right that I'm sure there still will be kind of this five and six peak when everyone comes home puts the tea on.
But the rest of the day we might be able to flatten out a lot of those peaks and troughs into a way that makes economic and kind of more sustainable sense as well.
Obviously we've talked about growing demand at the moment. We have a bit of a supply chain crisis going on in quite a few industries at the moment and there's a big demand for batteries at the big scale. Do you see that affecting supplies at the small scale?
Emilie Romain
We have done especially last year there was a a big supply issue with heat pumps and batteries and that was due to a microchip shortage I think. A lot of technology companies were hit by that and the renewable renewables industry was one of those.
Now, however, we can get hold of heat pumps next day if we need them, batteries again. The majority of the time, we can get those within a week of ordering, so that's good.
The longest wait we have now is actually with the DNO I think because renewables have become so popular that they've just got a lot of work on, they've fallen behind through COVID as well. So if you put an application in our current area we have SSE as our DNO provider and at the moment that's a 12-16 week wait just to hear back to see if we can install something.
That's a that's a long wait for that at the moment waiting on the DNO. And I think they've changed their forms a few times as well, we sent a few in and they got pinged back.
Andrew Dykes
Is there a bit of admin and capacity issue there then that needs addressed? That is something that's come up quite a lot is this policy or the capacities of these major electricity providers to keep up with some of the the changes in demand. They're obviously keen that the fact they have these avenues for you to apply, but they maybe need to do a little bit more investment or work on making sure that enough people can access these services.
Emilie Romain
Yeah, exactly. And they are getting better. And I think you know nationwide, I think once the lines have been upgraded a bit more would be a lot easier to go through.
I think they're a bit concerned with the fact that some of the lines that we've got, you know, going to our properties at the moment can be quite old and just aren't capable of supplying that extra electrical supply or having anything pushed back through it through solar. They're just not capable of doing that at the moment.
Too much on the line. They gotta put some bigger lines in I guess!
Andrew Dykes
I mean again that this is this thing where we see we've put off a lot of investment in this grid capacity We're talking about offshore wind and being able to again store at these massive scale batteries but it's interesting that it affects right down to, not being able to charge my EV at the level that I want, or I might not be able to feed back my solar into the grid because the local grid isn't quite in the state that we need it.
Emilie Romain
Yeah, you'll be capped at what you can put through. So I think they, they, they let you put up to 3.6 kilowatts before you have to apply for the DNO. A lot of people clearly want more than that, so most of our DNA applications are because they want more than what we're allowed to put through without permission, because people want to get as much as they can really to save on their energy bills and to reduce their reliance on the grid and lower their carbon footprint.
Andrew Dykes
There's presumably also a cost in the sense that by the time you've got someone on your roof sticking a couple of panels on, you might as well max out that asset rather than adding to it over the years, right?
Emilie Romain
You've paid someone to be up there you're up already - smash as much as you can. (Within reason, obviously.)
Andrew Dykes
You mentioned planning applications and things like that as well. At the Council level and at the local planner level, do you see a willingness to adopt or do you see a lot of conservation areas pushing back on whether they're allowed panels and things like that?
Do we have a bit of update on those laws as well?
Emilie Romain
Some things you do, yeah, I've seen them been rejected because you know, there's a house in a particular area and they wanted to have solar panels put on, but the only roof they're allowed to put them on was the north-facing roof, which would have been absolutely ridiculous.
So we didn't want to put them there because they’re obviously not going produce much and it may be a waste of money. But they wouldn't let us put on the other roofs because it could be seen from the road or something, they think they're unsightly.
I don't personally think they're unsightly, but I can understand on some houses they do look slightly out of place.
But I do think some attitudes need to change. I just think people are, I don't know, people are used to one way and then when you know something new comes along.
Everyone's going to change I guess and we'll get there eventually. But there is a bit of pushback from Council sometimes with the renewables. But then other councils are straight up on it they want to put loads of solar in places.
Andrew Dykes
Well, well, that's it, right? I mean there's again this much wider system argument, which is that if we can kind of shore up this side of things - I'm not saying your Council taxes will go down I don't know anyone would necessarily claim that - but certainly savingscan be made and we can all be a bit more efficient, definitely.
Emilie Romain
Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew Dykes
So I mean, let's kind of bring our discussions to close, but I did want to finish on one question that kind of hopefully ties all this together.
Which is: we're having all this smart equipment together. Homes may have batteries, they may have heat pumps, they may have solar all working together; in the future, do you expect the average household will be this “prosumer” - this person who creates energy and gives it back to the grid and consumes it themselves, or will we just be adopting much more smarter technologies and using everything for our own devices.
Emilie Romain
It's a hard one, isn't it? If you look at the UK housing stock, I would say it'd be your second option there because it's just the way the houses are, they can't do everything. But new builds definitely I think they could be prosumers because you know they'll be built to do that.
It's a difficult question. I'd like to say we would be like that, that we could all sustain ourselves and sustain others with any excess that we have. It's hard to tell really. I'd like to say we would be pretty, that'd be fun.
Andrew Dykes
I think it would be good for Ecobubl.
Emilie Romain
Definitely it definitely be good for me – and good for any energy company out there right now or renewables industry company .
I think that would be a lovely way to go. I think if we could all look after ourselves and our neighbour in terms of the energy we use. Even things like water harvesting and stuff that's become very popular lately. Rainwater harvesting just for toilets and things, because that's a big cost is just your water and lots of people forget about that.
You know It's all little things. I think working together we can all help each other, our neighbours and live the good life is what I'd like to see in the future.
Andrew Dykes
Wonderful. Andy, are you convinced? Are you going to be running out to get your heat pump and battery installed tomorrow.
Andy Hucknall
I think you'll find there's a lot of people convinced and a lot of people not convinced. I guess the idea would be to increase the number of people convinced.
Some people are really pro renewables and decarbonisation, I think they'll be actively doing it and I think other people will be more focused on upfront costs.
Emilie Romain
That is very true.
Andrew Dykes
Horses for courses in every aspect.
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode. A fascinating look at the more consumer facing side of energy storage.
Thanks to our Andy and out guest Emilie, and thanks also to you for listening - you can let us know your thoughts through our social media channels or by emailing outloud@energyvoice.com
Look out for more podcasts from Energy Voice Out Loud and new episodes of the Megawatt Hour coming your way very soon.
I’ve been Andrew Dykes, and thanks for listening.