Ed Miliband wants kill switches in your house

Telegraph

3 days ago

That nice, goofy Ed Miliband. Why would he possibly want to cut off your heating?
As the UK staggers towards an energy cliff edge, and days on which supply can't meet demand, this is becoming a genuine fear. A 'kill switch' is a mechanism that stops a device operating to fulfil its primary purpose – and now two thirds of UK households have one. It's called a smart meter, and 35 million can be used to remotely cut off supplies as of the end of March. Labour's aspiration is to have three in every property: one for water, too.
So can a power company cut you off, just like that? The suppliers certainly have a statutory right to do so. With conventional meters, bailiffs require a warrant to enter the premises and disable the connection. With a smart meter, which is talking to a network all the time, it can be done with a flick of a switch back in a remote control room. However, this is where it gets complicated.
Consumers still have layers of legal protection from capricious decisions – and even if you're in desperate financial trouble, disconnections are very rare: you're far more likely to be switched to a prepayment or credit scheme than be cut off. Ofgem rules state that a supplier must make at least ten visits before installing a prepay meter, and asses the vulnerability of the user, particularly if they are elderly or have young children.
So far the threat of disconnection has arisen from our possible failure to pay for energy. But going forward, the threat is of 'demand management' – that is rationing of energy. For decades we have neglected supply, in the hope that demand would come down. It leaves us in a near state of emergency.
The lifespan of a combined cycle gas plant rarely exceeds 25 to 30 years, explains Kathryn Porter of independent energy analyst Watt Logic. She reckons that with over 10GW of our gas generation fleet built in the 1990s and 9.3GW more built in the 2000s, around a third of the gas generation 'is very vulnerable to closure in the next five years'.
'Most of these older units won't be economic if anything breaks', she says. The problem is that there are often periods, sometimes quite long, when wind and solar produce little if any power. Our increasingly rickety gas infrastructure may soon be unable to back it up.
Suppliers may have no choice but flick the switch. Load shedding, the euphemism for forced disconnections, takes place when demand exceeds supply. One mechanism for this is rolling blackouts. Another would be the use of smart meters to cut off supplies in a more targeted way.
'Demand management was always the unwritten drive behind smart meters,' says a senior industry source. He told me that he was shocked how many of his industry peers are relaxed about energy becoming a luxury good rather than a 24x7, always-on utility.
A year ago the Government was mocked for warning us to stock up on bottled water, along with battery powered radios, torches and wet wipes in case of a national emergency, like a power cut. In Miliband's Britain, no one's laughing now.