UK's National Grid Is COLLAPSING | But I Can Fix It!

[00:00:03]Now, many viewers looking to switch up to an EV have legitimate concerns about our national grid. In fact, even some of our seasoned EV owners wonder if it's all going to hold up as the number of EVs on our roads grows. We hear all the time about our national grid is already failing while the demand is rocketing.

[00:00:21]EVs, heat pumps, AI data centers, and now with global warming, air conditioning units. By using traditional thinking, the answer is blindingly obvious. Build more. Build more energy production like gas powered turbines, nuclear reactors, and also wind farms and solar farms. Build more pylons and cables. Build more battery storage systems. But stop right there. There is a better way. It's called lateral thinking.

[00:00:53]Build more, build more. Who's going to pay for all that? was estimated that already over 200 billion is needed for the grid just between now and 2030 and that is not likely to be completed on time. Add in the nuclear fiasco which will add a further 80 billion for two reactors if they ever get them finished.

[00:01:15]Traditional thinking well that worked well for the legacy car makers, didn't it? Most are so deeply in debt and unable to switch to EVs that few will survive. Just look at VW and the total mess they're in. They used very traditional thinking.

[00:01:33]But few people are asking the right question. Who's going to pay? Because I think we all already know it's us mugs.

[00:01:41]The government tells us it'll be worth it. We will suffer higher bills right now and for many years to come. But build all this at your expense. Uh, and at some point, totally unspecified, bills will tumble. Oh, hang on a minute.

[00:01:58]There goes that pig once again.

[00:02:01]Does anyone really believe bills will tumble at any time in the future? Or do we instead believe it'll be the private sector and the investment and pension funds that'll just make higher and higher profits all at our expense? This is Dave Takes It On. I'm Dave with a radical new idea. Ditch traditional thinking, use lateral thinking. Problem solved.

[00:02:22]Well, first let me quickly explain national grid power and storage. So, kilowatt is simply a measure of power being the voltage times the current. A kettle element might use 3 kW or 3,000 watts of power. At 230 volts, toaster might use 2,000 watt. A light bulb might be just 30 W. These are all power measurements and your home needs to have enough power to be able to operate them all simultaneously. Now, most homes are fine. They're rated at about 23 kW of available power as the incoming fuse is 100 amps and the voltage is a nominal 230 volts. That's 23,000 W available.

[00:03:02]And that means we very rarely ever run out of electricity, very rarely turn on appliances and nothing happens. Now, gigawatt hours or kilowatt hours, they're a measure of quantity. If you operate a 3 kW kettle for exactly 1 hour, you've used 3,000 W or 3 kilowatt hours. That's a quantity. It's used in our homes primarily as the way of charging us for our electricity. Your home has used 8 kwatt hours today. Each one's 26p, so you owe us 28p. Now, we generally never worry about the quantity that the grid provides. We just accept it will always be there and always be enough. But a grid is very similar to your houses just on a larger scale. It typically runs with a supply power of about 30 gawatt of power during the day.

[00:03:52]35 gawatt at peak times that drops to about 20 gawatt at night while we sleep.

[00:03:58]This supply is drawn from various generators like gas for turbines, nuclear, wind, solar, hydra. The grid has a constantly changing demand from us and businesses and needs to make sure it always takes in enough from the generators to meet our demands. That's it. If it doesn't, we have problems. And that is why they have banks of engineers all working in labs and studios uh to try and keep it all in balance. Now, if this grid takes in too little electricity, we could get power cuts. If it takes in too much, it could blow the fuses or the trips in our homes. And that's because a precarious balance between uh alternating current electricity because it cannot be stored.

[00:04:39]Only direct current can be stored that's in batteries. So what happens if the grid gets it wrong and takes in too little? Well, this is actually quite fascinating because to prevent power cuts, the first immediate step is just make all our devices use less power. The kettle when plugged into 230 volt supply uses actually 2,990 W. But that same element, if you drop the voltage to 215, only uses 2,795.

[00:05:07]Drop the voltage, everything uses less power. And the only difference we notice, if at all, is that it takes a little bit longer for the kettle to boil. Likewise, if the grid takes in too much supply, it can increase the voltage and devices then just use more power.

[00:05:21]Our kettle boils quicker. But there are limits. While a kettle could happily work at say 100 volts, just really slowly, your TV won't. Likewise, it's likely to start popping fuses if you pour in 260 volts or more. Now, if you're enjoying this or learning from this video, please subscribe. Does make such a difference to the channel. Okay, so where's the lateral thinking come in?

[00:05:45]Well, as Edward Deono coined the phrase, and it's remarkably simple in concept.

[00:05:50]Lateral thinking simply means looking at any problem from the opposite angle.

[00:05:54]Take the national grid. Government and national grid solutions usually just involve same old same old. Building more and more power plants, more and more associated power lines and pylons to meet that growing demand. Lateral thinking would ask, well, who's causing that increased demand? Instead of building more, ask, well, can we just stop them creating that huge rise in demand? And one instant answer is AI data centers. Well, they're a primary source of that increased demand. And to stop that, simply deny AI data centers access to the grid, make them operate off-rid. One simple law or planet condition, and the future grid demand shrinks dramatically. Now, AI data centers can still be built, but they must also build their own power generation independent of the national grid. So they operate totally off-rid. Problem solved. As long as the government holds them to the same pollution and CO2 targets already in existence for the national grid and the rest of the country, they cannot just build dozens of cheap gas fired power stations. Well, this lateral thinking would also solve the massively worrying water shortage.

[00:07:08]See, these AI data centers use simply gargantuan amounts of fresh, clean water. So stop that. In a world where rivers are drying up, reservoirs are running dangerously low, and droughts are far more common, the only reason they use this ridiculous, obscene amount of fresh water is that it is by far the cheapest way they can cool the AI data centers. Now, there are plenty of alternatives. One would be heat pumps, but most, if not all, are dear. So, simply simply stop them using mains water. Problem solved. If they so desperately need these AI data centers, which I think they probably do, let [snorts] them find the next cheapest way to call them. Now, our grid will then go back to just providing power for public homes and businesses. End of electricity demand crisis. And more importantly, end of us having to fund a new bigger national grid so that the obscenely rich multi-billionaire companies and pension funds can make even higher profit at our expense. that will also take some of the massive strain off our dwindling rivers and reservoirs.

[00:08:12]So, can we apply this to the grid in other ways? And the answer is, well, obviously yes. EV demand. Well, that's increasing. Heat pump demands increasing, air conditioning use is increasing. They should all be looked at using lateral thinking. Tackle the problem from the opposite direction and the answer is usually already there.

[00:08:31]That's the way my mind works. I use lateral thinking all the time. How can I look at this problem in a different way?

[00:08:39]There's Einstein who is credited with saying that doing exactly the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

[00:08:51]So what is the lateral thinking solution to our grid problem regarding EVs? Now I haven't forgotten all this but it's important to understand how the grid works first. So EVs will definitely increase the demand on our grid.

[00:09:04]millions of them, tens of millions of them, as predicted by all serious sources, will be more than a potential issue. It will be a serious problem. But lateral thinking tells us at the same time, they can also be the solution.

[00:09:20]Here goes. Well, typical EV has a single or twin motors and the rated maybe 100 kW up to more than 400 kW. pressure accelerator and the battery provides that 100 kW or 400 kW of power. Now, that same battery might have a capacity of 80 kW hours. That's a quantity. So, if you draw 100 kW of power, you'll only be able to drive with that battery for less than an hour before it's flat. Now, don't worry. See, EV motors rarely ever draw their full power, and the batteries last for many, many hours of normal motoring. But yes, put an EV on a racetrack and floor the accelerator, hold it there flat out, it will only last less than an hour. And exactly the same goes for petrol. It's not exempt.

[00:10:08]Tanks empty at a frightening pace if used flat out on a racetrack. It's like a Lemon's car might only get as little as 5 miles per gallon flat out. Back to those batteries. An astonishing fact.

[00:10:21]The vast majority of cars, petrol, diesel, hybrid, hydrogen, and BVs, they're stationary and locked off for about 90 to 95% of each day. It's about 22 hours a day. And while parked, fossil fuel cars are just totally useless. EVs are not. They hold a massive store of energy in the form of electricity. maybe 50 kilwatt hours of it is spare as we only use on average less than 10 kilwatt hours each day for commuting. The rest is just sitting there. Hence the massive interest in releasing that electricity.

[00:10:57]Now you hear about V2L, V2H, V2G. This simply means that the battery in those EVs can be used apart from driving. With V2L, your EV battery can power small mains devices uh like kettles or fridges or coffee machines via an adapter. If you're out camping, VA means you can power your entire home through a special birectional charger. Now, typical home uses less than 10 kwatt hours a day.

[00:11:24]It's around 2,800 a year. Typical home battery is 10 to 15 kwatt hours, so you can run your home for about a day. Your EV has a battery about 50 kwatt hours spare, and it's quite capable of you running your entire home for a good number of days while still leaving you plenty for your daily commute. your EV huge potential yet right now it just sits there 22 hours a day idle. So VG is the ultimate as this cannot only run your home. It can also generate mains electricity and feed that through a special birectional charger back into the grid becomes a generator. When demand is low or wholesale wholesale prices drop mainly overnight your EV battery can take excess from the grid store it then when demand is high and wholesale prices are skyhigh peak hours you can supply it back to the grid.

[00:12:14]Yeah, those giant mega pack, the BSS, battery energy storage systems being installed all over the world are just larger versions of your EV. They buy in electricity when there's excess coming from the generators and it's cheap [clears throat] and they store it. When demand exceeds supply and the grid is running short, it's sold back to the grid instantly.

[00:12:35]And that is the secret key to lateral thinking our way out of a grid problem caused by EVs. On a typical day, we do not have a supply problem in the UK. We have a demand problem.

[00:12:47]About half our electricity is now renewable, and that's not a regular source. At night, solar panels stop producing altogether, and on clear summer days, they produce far more than we can possibly use. Wind farms are different. They do produce almost 24 hours every single day. It's extremely rare to get no wind at all because of their locations, right? They are located in areas with well above average wind.

[00:13:12]But the supply variability is an issue.

[00:13:14]Some days they are pretty low producing, others massively overproducing. And unlike solar, the wind farms operate 24365.

[00:13:25]Now BSS battery empty storage systems are the missing link. They're being installed to remove this variability.

[00:13:32]But most people don't realize that on a typical day, wind and solar can produce an excess excess of 15 to 25 gawatt.

[00:13:42]Yeah. On a typical day, there's already almost a whole day supply being turned off. How do we know? Well, that's the amount on average that the national grid 2025 paid to wind and solar farms to turn off the supply because there's too much. Crazy, isn't it? They turned off 15 to 25 GW electricity each and every day. Now imagine what happens if we store it all. We could store a whole day's electricity in those batteries, whether they're BSS or EV batteries. The amazing thing is the more EVs on the road, the more storage will be available to the national grid. When clean green renewables produce excess electricity above our demand, we'll simply store it for later use. And when the grid is short at peak times, it can be released back into the grid. This is the balancing nature of renewables. But the real picture is far more ingenious. Just think for the moment about batteries. If you got a a multi-ower battery torch, might have three power settings, low, medium, and high. Turn it on to low and the bulb operates as it lowest setting.

[00:14:49]Turn it up to high and instantly, without having an army of engineers carefully balancing power, the battery just releases more power. Switch it back to low, it reduces power again almost instantly without any human interference. BSS are now performing this specific function.

[00:15:07]It's called grid balancing. The army of engineers sat in control rooms across the country now believe they're controlling national grid supply and demand. and they're using the traditional way of running the grid.

[00:15:20]That's manual balancing power. Batteries just do it far better and quicker. Your torch might be capable of supplying full power, but if the switch says low, it will only release that amount. The rest just sits there waiting to be used. The second the switch moves to high, uh, extra electricity is instantly released.

[00:15:40]No engineers are needed. Batteries are almost the perfect grid balancing system.

[00:15:46]But of course that makes the highly skilled and trained engineers roles redundant and the grid can't have that today. They control the absolute national grid and they will not give up that extreme power easily. Hence the traditional ways are always put forward as the answer to the future of the grid.

[00:16:06]Same old same old. More of the same.

[00:16:09]They never say, "Oh, let's get rid of all those expensive engineers and the control rooms and let batteries do their jobs much better and much cheaper and much faster." Perish the thought. So, there is now a massive surge in the installation of these grid connected batteries with built-in balancing systems, and they are still supposedly being controlled by those same engineers, highly paid engineers in those same control rooms. But that change is on the way. Just like several million domestic solar arrays in the UK on our home roofs cannot be stopped from producing. So a new energy source is poised to hit the scene and spoil their day. That's the EV batteries.

[00:16:50]Now not today, but increasingly EVs are being equipped with V2G capability.

[00:16:56]Leave them plugged in all the time and that's 90% or more when they're not being used. They can act like mini BSS.

[00:17:04]But technology is already well ahead of that and the utility companies now already have the software to take on hundreds, thousands or millions of these EVs all plugged in and then they can operate them like a single power plant.

[00:17:19]It's called a virtual power plant VPP.

[00:17:21]And while it might not sound much to add a few dozen kilowatts into the grid, think big. By 2030, it's forecast that there will be 10 million or more EVs on the UK roads. So, let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet. Let's look at just 1 million in the next year or so. Each capable of releasing between 100 and 400 kW of power when plugged in. Yes, the tech is not there yet to use all that.

[00:17:49]It will be one day. Now 1 million EVs with just 100 kW of power is 100 gawatt of power going into our grid. That could be as high as 400 gawatt if all the EVs are the more powerful ones. 400 gawatt.

[00:18:04]Our grid UK grid currently only uses about 30 gawatt at any time. That's only for a million EVs can run our grid up to 10 times in sheer power. But buying it off the grid, storing it, then releasing it, that all does require someone somewhere to generate it in the first place, put it into the grid, that will be the wind and solar farms. Well, today the total output of renewable is quite capable of running the entire grid most days. Unlike California or Texas, solar is not our best solution in the winter.

[00:18:37]Our current wind farms already built and in operation are they are generating more than 30 gawatt and we have a pipeline of new projects that amounts to additional 11 gawatt. Now to get real 1 million EVs cannot supply that amount of power for 24 hours a day each and every day. At present it's more likely to be about an hour or two flat out like if motor racing. So the idea run the entire grid permanently off the 1 million EVs is not going to happen just yet. But estimates show that by 2030 we could have 10 million EVs. Not one, 10. That's 10 times. And that's now very interesting. You start to get the picture. Now let's look at one additional key feature of our EVs.

[00:19:22]That's VPPs. About 40% of that electricity being stored in our EV batteries will have been supplied by the grid via public chargers and about 60% by individual houses and homes with chargers acting as that VPP. That electricity is not needed for much of the day as an energy source for the grid. That could be live wind and solar.

[00:19:44]It comes into its own in peak hours. The rest of the time it's just storing excess electricity direct from the grid.

[00:19:52]So we can now run homes off uh EV batteries. Now remember, an average home only uses about 10 kwatt hours a day.

[00:20:00]That simple action removes an absolutely massive chunk from the grid at peak times. Demand will go down. EVs are not required to top up the grid at all during these periods. But if they keep storing excess and not using it at all for either driving or running homes, then we build up a simply massive store of electricity in the country to cover times when it is dark or times when the wind doesn't blow for several days at a time. So let's just look at that storage. 10 million EVs with VTG formed up into a VPP can run on entire grid for a couple of days. But now imagine 15 million EVs. We get a staggering figure.

[00:20:40]15 million EVs, each with a 50 kWh battery linked into a VPP, could now run the entire UK grid for 24-hour period.

[00:20:49]That's a whole day. In other words, continuously.

[00:20:52]That's the scale of what this lateral thinking offers. Don't look on an increasing number of EVs as a drain on our existing grid that has to be built to replace something that we need masses of power plants and pylons and everything. Instead, just look at them as a new power generation source. One million EVs is a sizable quantity easily capable of running all the EVs and EV chargers, public chargers. That's self-sustaining. Now look at 20 million EVs, 30 million EVs. EVs are not a drain. They are the lateral thinking solution. They are quite capable of storing all the electricity each day without any new power stations, pylons or cables. Yet again on national grid just stuck firmly in the past. Build more. Build more. Now if EVs are seen as be as are seen as BSS not a drain but a source then this can work and the best is yet to come. This costs the government next to nothing. People are buying or leasing their EVs already.

[00:21:54]Yeah, there's a small grant and yeah, there's a generous benefit in kind tax for business users, but essentially this is self-funding. But why would we buy or lease that many EVs? Besides being much better cars, as a member of a VPP, we'll get paid for supplying electricity into the grid. Yeah, while a petrol filled car sits there idly for 22 hours a day, in future EVs can be buying and selling electricity. And the more on our roads, the more the power and storage capacity they offer the grid. And all we need to do to make this work is to build more solar and wind farms along with BSS, which are already underway as they're now the cheapest generators in the world. Unlike nuclear reactors, by the way, that take decades to build, costing billions and producing deadly waste products. Wind farms are now being built and switched on in less than 5 years.

[00:22:49]And while a 1 gawatt nuclear reactor costs up to 20 billion, a 1 gawatt wind farm costs less than 5 billion. It's quicker and cheaper. Now build excess and that has an even greater advantage.

[00:23:04]First, prices start dropping. Well, crashing with excess electricity. The price will have to be heavily discounted to sell it. With far more electricity than we can ever use, we could also uh at last start looking once again at hydrogen. If all the electricity used for electrolysis and the entire production and compression transport cycle is powered entirely by renewable energy either directly or from stores, then hydrogen actually offers a sensible renewable energy source. It produces zero emissions at source, just fresh water. But hey, that fresh water is desperately needed with our rivers and reservoirs drying up. In fact, hydrogen could become a valuable source of fresh drinking water at virtually zero cost.

[00:23:52]Forget desalination that produces masses of really heavily concentrated brine that cannot simply put be put back into the sea. Just use hydrogen.

[00:24:02]We actually live in the 21st century.

[00:24:04]Yet most of the methods of operating almost all of our societal infrastructure are dated back many decades or centuries.

[00:24:13]Lateral thinking can give us that leap to bring the entire country into the 21st century. I'm Dave [music]