DECC’s Smart Metering Implementation Programme aims to install new metering systems in 30 million GB homes between 2014 and 2019. But why wait? (more…)
Telecoms & Media
Advance UK time to CET? No!
The government is proposing a 3 year trial in which UK time will be advanced by 1 hour to match CET. It is hoped that this would aid the tourist industry, and it is easy to imagine how this could benefit many British businesses too. I wonder however, what the National Grid would say?
The UK National Grid has multiple High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) interconnects with neighbouring countries, including France and Holland, and is planning another to Norway. They assist in maintaining security of supply by providing route diversity, and allowing international transfer and trading of surplus supply. But advancing UK time to CET will hamper the UK’s ability to trade energy with other countries.
At the moment, UK electricity demands don’t align with those in France. Simply put, we sell to them as they all arrive home from work, and buy from them when we all arrive home. We can only do this because our clocks differ by an hour. If all UK and French clocks are synchronised, then our peaks and troughs of demand will also be synchronised. What will we do with surplus demand when there is no-one to sell it to? And who will have surplus supply when we need to buy it?
So alignment of supply and demand reduce international energy trading opportunities and devalue interconnects. OK, so security of supply is very important, but will we really need three interconnects with Europe, two of which come ashore in Kent?
I’d vote for leaving UK time alone. What’s a single hour to a tourist? They will, after all, get it back when they return home.
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UK’s energy market: leaving the age of telegraphy
Our energy market has much in common with the telecoms market of the mid eighteen-hundreds: too much, actually. (more…)
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Smart Energy Companies?
The £11.7bn Smart Metering scheme will provide 30 million UK homes with exact details of how much gas and electricity they use. It will also save billions of pounds for the energy companies. The government expects the consumers to benefit from these savings, but will the energy prices be reduced, or will the suppliers resist?
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What kind of 4G can the UK afford?
Ofcom has published a second consultation on allocation of spectrum for 4th-generation mobile networks in the UK. The consultation proposes to oblige those networks that buy 4G licences to provide near-universal UK 4G coverage. It’s an obligation which will be costly for the network operators, which will tend to depress the market for 4G network services, and which, I suggest, is based on two misconceptions. (more…)
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There is no information explosion: that’s the problem.
There’s a lot of talk about an information explosion. Petabytes, exabytes, zettabytes and so on. There are certainly a lot of ones and noughts being stored, and storage vendors are happily hyping that up into an information explosion. But information is what it’s not. (more…)
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Top Predator
Ofgem has recently made media headlines by calling for energy suppliers to offer simpler, more transparent tariffs. In an effort to enforce that sort of thing, Ofgem is to regulate against ‘predatory’ tariffing, where long-standing consumers on a costly tariff subsidise consumers, typically newly acquired ones, on a cheap tariff. Whether the prevention of predatory pricing is a good thing, for consumers or the market, is debatable. Some of the liveliest parts of the telecoms market have thrived on it, and it may have contributed to the relentless driving down of average telecoms service prices over the years. (more…)
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HD Voice finds its market
High Definition TV has taken hold of the UK television market. Less than two years after the BBC began HDTV transmissions, Ofcom’s 2011 UK Communications Market report shows that about a third of the UK TV-owners had HDTV in their homes. (more…)
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The Prince Consort, power and wind.
Prince Philip, always an intellectual force to be reckoned with, has done a good job of stirring up debate about the value of wind power in the UK. He rightly pointed out that wind power can’t do much, if anything, to reduce our dependency on less sustainable power sources, because we’ll always need a full country’s worth of generators for when the wind isn’t blowing.
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The shop sells more if its doors are open
BlueVia (Telefonica), Betavine (Vodafone), the OrangeAPI, the oneAPI. All of these are attempts by the telecommunications industry to open up networks to third parties. The idea is that the operator gives controlled access to, say, an SMS service, and a third-party which uses it for some new innovative service gets a bit of the revenue that using the network generates. The operator-specific ones try to be different from each other; the oneAPI tries to unify and standardise such access.
But why would you, as an operator, want to open the doors to your network to strangers anyway?
There are financial reasons, business reasons and technical reasons: (more…)
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