NRG

As a bleeding heart lefty-liberal snowflake, how I use energy matters to me. More specifically where the energy I use comes from matters to me.

Like most people in the UK I use electricity from the grid to power things in my home. I have a gas powered combi boiler for the hot water and central heating and I drive a car. We're a two car household by necessity.

Bottom line is I want to reduce my carbon footprint as far as I can (without selling all my possessions and going to live in the woods). I suspect a lot of people thing the same way, so what can we do?

The easy wins are efficiency gains. The loft of our house was insulated, about 30 years ago, with approx 20cm depth of fibreglass. That's better than nothing but not by much, so a small amount of money spent on some nice wool insulation has improved things. Worth noting that although it's more expensive, the wool insulation is nice to handle and means in the future anytime I venture into the loft I'm not left all itchy from disturbing the fibreglass insulation.

Our heating system was also about 30 years old and had started taking a long time to heat the house. A new boiler wasn't so cheap, £2300 to be precise. The replacement uses considerably less gas for the same heat output. Perhaps more importantly it actually works to heat the house quickly. It isn't going to pay for itself and it isn't going to save the environment, but it reduces our gas usage and makes for a warmer home. Thing is, I'm not sure I did the right thing there....

All our lighting was long ago replaced with LEDs. They're just better. It makes absolutely no sense not to do this.

Our car purchasing decisions were influenced by carbon emissions and air quality concerns, so the diesels went and we bought the most efficient petrol cars available to us at the time.

So what next?

Other small changes include making sure the radiator is turned down in our guest bedroom when it isn't in use. I've also installed Hive heating controller - whilst I don't like or recommend Hive, it does mean we can easily turn off the heating if we're out of the house. This is beneficial as our schedule can be unpredictable.

Some years ago we visited Cruachan power station, It's a stunning feat of engineering that can provide a huge amount of electricity to the UK grid, very quickly, on demand through hydro storage. Unleash the water to drive the turbines when you need power, and then pump it back up slowly overnight with surplus electricity. It was a clever way of meeting peak demand without building huge excess capacity. The example given was balancing the grid during the ad breaks in Coronation Street when half the country turned on their kettle at the same time.

It's brilliant, but... turn it on its head. Rather than attempting to have generation meet demand, instead regulate demand to the available generation capacity. It's the principle behind the old Economy 7 system that remotely turned on electric heating at times of lower demand, and charged less for that electricity.

In the past I've always switched to the cheapest energy provider, this time I looked at who I thought was the best and went with Octopus Energy (yes that's my referral link).

Octopus are at the innovative end of domestic smart-grid development and it's really exciting. If you have a compatible smart meter and know what you're doing, for the true nerd they have an agile tariff that tracks the wholesale electricity price and updates what you pay every 30 minutes. It won't surprise you that wholesale prices are high at peak demand and lower at other times. So if you have a load you can shift around such as heating water or charging an electric car, not only can you save money but you can help reduce the load on the grid. Right now I don't have the big load I can shift, but if it cost me much less to move my cooking time back by 40 minutes, I'd be likely to do that.

Another increasingly viable option is battery storage. Tesla were in the headlines a little while ago for their work installing the world's largest on-grid battery in Australia. The headline purpose was to provide power continuity on that part of Australia's grid - which is stretched out pretty thin. Worth noting however is Tesla make money from this by storing electricity when it's cheap, from renewables, and selling it when it's expensive, from fossil fuels.

We all ripped out old hot water tanks in favour of gas combi boilers, but they're going to make a come back. New, highly insulated, mains-pressure hot water tanks will become the standard. Heated by solar where possible and topped up with cheap off-peak electricity.

The next big change we're all going to make is the switch to electric vehicles. Right now they're either too expensive, not available, don't have the necessary range or a combination of these negative attributes but, crucially, they're being built and in increasingly large numbers.

I expect one, if not both of our cars will be fully electric in the next 18 months.

Lots has been said, mostly by those with a finger in the fossil fuels pie, about how electric vehicles will devastate our electricity grid and require new power stations and lots of nuclear and they'll make everything worse. This is designed to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt among the public. It's all about holding back the inevitable.

Here's what's going to happen.

Everything will become electric. To heat our homes we'll eventually move from gas to heat-pump systems, though this will take a long time. Faster will be the return of the hot water tank, heated with off-peak electricity from the grid, or solar from your own roof.

Every daily driver vehicle will be electric, and these batteries can also provide buffer to the grid.

Those with room will install domestic battery systems to make the most of their roof solar.

Energy companies (Tesla has just applied to become a UK energy supplier) will build grid battery systems.

All this electricity will come from renewables.... eventually I really do think all of it will. Every last bit. We'll have enough generation capacity between solar and wind coupled with enough storage to make that work through the night and on the quiet days.

It's going to take time to get there, but I rather suspect it's going to happen quicker than most of us suspect.

Meanwhile I try to use as little energy as I can. I turn the heating down, I insulate (myself and my home), I don't drive unless it's necessary and I use an energy supplier that invests in renewables and at least lets me offset my gas use.