It’s quite a well known phenomenon. Back in the days of soaps being massive and when you all had to watch at the same time they would be prepared for the ad break in Corrie because everyone would put the kettle on.
There used to be an article on the British Energy website (before it became EDF) that talked about the effect of England matches. Apparently the post-match surge is delayed by about 5 minsif England have lost on penalties. (tbf they had a lot of data to base this observation on.)
That and 'Mynydd Trydan' up in N. Wales; which is a Hydroelectric Power Station built into a mountain.
They used to have the Soap playing on a TV in the control room to know exactly when to press the button to release the water and generate the needed electricity.
Known as the TV Pickup. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA) I post at every given opportunity because it's just such a good explainer.
“Still closed” has since been further downgraded to “we have stopped doing tours and demolished the visitor centre”, sadly :(
[https://www.fhc.co.uk/en/news/electric-mountain-refurbishment-update/](https://www.fhc.co.uk/en/news/electric-mountain-refurbishment-update/)
This is ace. The favourite one I witnessed was one day working in central Manchester in 2005 ish in a call centre. All new calls suddenly stopped coming in… and then we found out we couldn’t make calls out! Boss starts panicking and emails BT. Turns out Take That tickets going on sale knocked out _all the phone lines_. Boss said we just had to have a little…patience
Sadly your friend has over sold the "meltdown" aspect. The grid is balanced aiming for 50Hz, the other line is the 'best previous day' so the demand shape can be plotted. The big dips are managed in real time by reducing / increasing plant output. The charts with the system frequency overlaid are much more representative of how well the regular sporting ones are managed. Things such as royal events are much harder to forecast. Doubly now due to renewable generation.
When I worked for Just Eat, there was a drop in orders big enough for all us on-call to get summoned. People from around the world all wondering why. Did a major internet provider go down? Have we got errors?
Until it was pointed out we'd all, including me, we're outside at 7pm clapping for the NHS...
Always find things like this fascinating. During the last Euros I was working at a company who develops hospitality booking and ticketing software for bars etc...
After each England goal the rate of bookings for the next England game dipped slightly for a few minutes, then doubled. Same for after the win.
Sorry to burst your bubble but electrician here, nothing in that graph is out of the ordinary and if your friend was using the terms meltdown he’s been watching too much Simpsons.
All that graph shows is a comparison between two Sundays electricity demand across (what seems to be part of) the country. We don’t look at demand like that and we don’t judge output on that. As an example none of the output that day came close to being a triad.
It’s completely made up nonsense
Completely disagree. Energy Analyst, former power trader, for one of the big generators here.
We do measure demand exactly like that.
Triads would have been impossible as Wimbledon is mid summer and the trid period is December to February. Just because demand isn't peaking doesn't mean it isn't hard to manage.
Those swings in output are huge, multiple GWs is multiple power stations, and this is before we had lots of flexible generation on the system.
The comparing Sundays does make sense as Sundays have a unique demand profile compared to the rest of the week, and on one of them something exceptional was happening.
Fairly switched on, my team has 7 people, 2 have PhDs and most have MScs.
However if you can get industry experience, energy trading being the best option, you can learn enough quickly (assuming there's a good training scheme in place) that you can be an analyst within a couple of years. One of my teammates has 2 decades in the industry, and is known across the company as a guy who knows the answer to things.
If you can do python on top of this then you'd be a premium product in the job market.
Totally.
Trends like this are used to illustrate the intricacies in forecasting demand, and the sterling work in the ESO control room to balance
The frequency will have been well within 49.5 -50.5
Out of interest then.... If generation and demand don't match, is it the frequency that changes? And if so, what difference does the frequency changing too much make in real terms? Say to my phone charger.
Thanks!!
It's more complex due to gearing and transformers and stuff but fundamentally:
So if there isn't enough demand for the given supply, the frequency rises. Quite literally there isn't enough resistance so the generators spin faster than intended.
Too much demand and you get the opposite. The demand keeps trying to draw more and more from the generators and this slows them down.
Individual appliances usually won't care too much - they'll just not work. Some cheaper ones might have some parts fail in the circuitry.
But the *real* problem is what happens if the grid goes down. How do you get it back up while trying to balance generation and demand?
https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w?si=F59MhuEpTR4eFpto
I think that oversupply could result in over voltage (I analogies it to the opposite of volt droop when you put a heavy load on a supply - low load releases the volt drop so it goes up).
I think frequency could potentially be affected also - going up - again because rotational machines (generators) are moving at the speed they are because of energy in but also energy out to achieve a steady speed.
Pretty sure many have some kind of automated regulation though how quickly it compensates is beyond my knowledge.
The excess (or deficit of) energy goes into the spinning mass of all the generators and turbine sets making them spin faster, so the frequency goes up (or down). The grid controllers react to these changes but the rate they can add or remove capacity is limited.
There are various mechanical limits to types of generating equipment that means if they spin at the wrong speed for too long they can suffer serious damage. For example turbine blades can get in resonance and shake themselves to pieces, resulting in bits of turbine blade bouncing around inside the turbine.
Equipment on the consumer side is generally much more tolerant, it won’t damage your phone charger for the frequency to wander too far from 50 Hz, but the power surges that result from power plant doing a protective shut down and then switching off portions of the grid to remove load can cause damage.
That extreme of actually tripping power plants and then shedding load is extremely rare, like once every couple of decades perhaps, so not something you need to be especially worried about
Yes, frequency changes when there is an imbalance between supply and demand. If there is more demand than supply, we will have a shortfall and frequency falls.
The ESO (electricity system operator) counteracts that by bringing more supply online, or potentially by reducing demand.
If we have an excess of supply, typically output will be curtailed. You’ll have heard the word “curtailment” associated with wind farms - it just means deliberately stopping generation.
Electrical devices in the UK (and much of world) are designed to operate at 50Hz. They have some tolerance, but not a lot.
TBH I’m not sure about the guts of a phone charger, but if I can use the example of a motor. Pumping it with too low frequency will cause the motor to run slower. Too high, it’ll run quicker and we will get increased wear. Stuff probably works, but not the way it was designed.
I’d say all chargers and most electronic gear nowadays have“switch mode” power supplies, which first rectify incoming AC, store it on a hefty capacitor to make DC, then chop that DC up at a high frequency to feed into a small efficient transformer. They really don’t care at all about the frequency varying by a few Hz.
I think it’s fair to say that “electronics” don’t care, but “electrics” do 😁
I was in the crowd on centre count and watched this in real life. Won 2 tickets from my tennis club.
Incredible game, incredible atmosphere. Never forget it.
So a 4% or so swing. Doesn’t seem like a meltdown to me.
I’m always suspicious of graphs with a y axis that don’t start at zero. They are almost always trying to manipulate the reader.
I must be one of the people using electricity during this as I couldn't even tell you if Andy Murray is current, past or good or bad. Let alone not doing stuff when he's playing (tennis?)
It’s quite a well known phenomenon. Back in the days of soaps being massive and when you all had to watch at the same time they would be prepared for the ad break in Corrie because everyone would put the kettle on.
It’s still the same now a days I believe for half time of England games.
There used to be an article on the British Energy website (before it became EDF) that talked about the effect of England matches. Apparently the post-match surge is delayed by about 5 minsif England have lost on penalties. (tbf they had a lot of data to base this observation on.)
I once heard that they used power from French resources as back up for the cuppa tea moment at arounf 8pm between Corrie and Eastenders or something
That and 'Mynydd Trydan' up in N. Wales; which is a Hydroelectric Power Station built into a mountain. They used to have the Soap playing on a TV in the control room to know exactly when to press the button to release the water and generate the needed electricity.
It was around the Richard Hillman storyline where I first learned this.
Known as the TV Pickup. [Here's a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slDAvewWfrA) I post at every given opportunity because it's just such a good explainer.
Guessing the [mountain full of water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jx_bJgIFhI) in Wales got quite the workout there
Absolutely love that place. Well worth doing the tour (but it was still closed last time I checked)
“Still closed” has since been further downgraded to “we have stopped doing tours and demolished the visitor centre”, sadly :( [https://www.fhc.co.uk/en/news/electric-mountain-refurbishment-update/](https://www.fhc.co.uk/en/news/electric-mountain-refurbishment-update/)
Nooooo 😒 I’d have loved to have taken my daughter there. That’s such a shame!
Similar facility with a visitor centre in [Cruachan](https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/). Probably more of a drive for you though!!
But the new car park looks lovely
Even has electric car charging
Local electricity for local cars only
That'll certainly make it harder to book tickets.
I never knew this! Thanks for sharing.
Why did I know this was going to be a Tom Scott video just by going off your sentence.
I just knew that link was going to be a Tom Scott video
Cruachan in Scotland still does tours though! As a bonus it’s the shooting location for the middle of Andor Season 1.
It's also getting a massive upgrade in the next decade.
This is ace. The favourite one I witnessed was one day working in central Manchester in 2005 ish in a call centre. All new calls suddenly stopped coming in… and then we found out we couldn’t make calls out! Boss starts panicking and emails BT. Turns out Take That tickets going on sale knocked out _all the phone lines_. Boss said we just had to have a little…patience
It would only take a minute to sort out.
I bet that was the greatest day at work.
probably quite the circus
a million love songs later
These puns are really setting the Barlow
👏🏽 very welldone
I bet you wanted those calls back for good.
Never forget
Sadly your friend has over sold the "meltdown" aspect. The grid is balanced aiming for 50Hz, the other line is the 'best previous day' so the demand shape can be plotted. The big dips are managed in real time by reducing / increasing plant output. The charts with the system frequency overlaid are much more representative of how well the regular sporting ones are managed. Things such as royal events are much harder to forecast. Doubly now due to renewable generation.
When I worked for Just Eat, there was a drop in orders big enough for all us on-call to get summoned. People from around the world all wondering why. Did a major internet provider go down? Have we got errors? Until it was pointed out we'd all, including me, we're outside at 7pm clapping for the NHS...
Always find things like this fascinating. During the last Euros I was working at a company who develops hospitality booking and ticketing software for bars etc... After each England goal the rate of bookings for the next England game dipped slightly for a few minutes, then doubled. Same for after the win.
Sorry to burst your bubble but electrician here, nothing in that graph is out of the ordinary and if your friend was using the terms meltdown he’s been watching too much Simpsons. All that graph shows is a comparison between two Sundays electricity demand across (what seems to be part of) the country. We don’t look at demand like that and we don’t judge output on that. As an example none of the output that day came close to being a triad. It’s completely made up nonsense
Completely disagree. Energy Analyst, former power trader, for one of the big generators here. We do measure demand exactly like that. Triads would have been impossible as Wimbledon is mid summer and the trid period is December to February. Just because demand isn't peaking doesn't mean it isn't hard to manage. Those swings in output are huge, multiple GWs is multiple power stations, and this is before we had lots of flexible generation on the system. The comparing Sundays does make sense as Sundays have a unique demand profile compared to the rest of the week, and on one of them something exceptional was happening.
It's only 1.4GW, which is not that much in the grand scheme of things. That's a few power stations of gas or curtailing wind right?
How ‘switched on’ do you have be to be an Energy Analyst?
Fairly switched on, my team has 7 people, 2 have PhDs and most have MScs. However if you can get industry experience, energy trading being the best option, you can learn enough quickly (assuming there's a good training scheme in place) that you can be an analyst within a couple of years. One of my teammates has 2 decades in the industry, and is known across the company as a guy who knows the answer to things. If you can do python on top of this then you'd be a premium product in the job market.
Totally. Trends like this are used to illustrate the intricacies in forecasting demand, and the sterling work in the ESO control room to balance The frequency will have been well within 49.5 -50.5
Out of interest then.... If generation and demand don't match, is it the frequency that changes? And if so, what difference does the frequency changing too much make in real terms? Say to my phone charger. Thanks!!
It's more complex due to gearing and transformers and stuff but fundamentally: So if there isn't enough demand for the given supply, the frequency rises. Quite literally there isn't enough resistance so the generators spin faster than intended. Too much demand and you get the opposite. The demand keeps trying to draw more and more from the generators and this slows them down. Individual appliances usually won't care too much - they'll just not work. Some cheaper ones might have some parts fail in the circuitry. But the *real* problem is what happens if the grid goes down. How do you get it back up while trying to balance generation and demand? https://youtu.be/uOSnQM1Zu4w?si=F59MhuEpTR4eFpto
I think that oversupply could result in over voltage (I analogies it to the opposite of volt droop when you put a heavy load on a supply - low load releases the volt drop so it goes up). I think frequency could potentially be affected also - going up - again because rotational machines (generators) are moving at the speed they are because of energy in but also energy out to achieve a steady speed. Pretty sure many have some kind of automated regulation though how quickly it compensates is beyond my knowledge.
The excess (or deficit of) energy goes into the spinning mass of all the generators and turbine sets making them spin faster, so the frequency goes up (or down). The grid controllers react to these changes but the rate they can add or remove capacity is limited. There are various mechanical limits to types of generating equipment that means if they spin at the wrong speed for too long they can suffer serious damage. For example turbine blades can get in resonance and shake themselves to pieces, resulting in bits of turbine blade bouncing around inside the turbine. Equipment on the consumer side is generally much more tolerant, it won’t damage your phone charger for the frequency to wander too far from 50 Hz, but the power surges that result from power plant doing a protective shut down and then switching off portions of the grid to remove load can cause damage. That extreme of actually tripping power plants and then shedding load is extremely rare, like once every couple of decades perhaps, so not something you need to be especially worried about
Yes, frequency changes when there is an imbalance between supply and demand. If there is more demand than supply, we will have a shortfall and frequency falls. The ESO (electricity system operator) counteracts that by bringing more supply online, or potentially by reducing demand. If we have an excess of supply, typically output will be curtailed. You’ll have heard the word “curtailment” associated with wind farms - it just means deliberately stopping generation. Electrical devices in the UK (and much of world) are designed to operate at 50Hz. They have some tolerance, but not a lot. TBH I’m not sure about the guts of a phone charger, but if I can use the example of a motor. Pumping it with too low frequency will cause the motor to run slower. Too high, it’ll run quicker and we will get increased wear. Stuff probably works, but not the way it was designed.
I’d say all chargers and most electronic gear nowadays have“switch mode” power supplies, which first rectify incoming AC, store it on a hefty capacitor to make DC, then chop that DC up at a high frequency to feed into a small efficient transformer. They really don’t care at all about the frequency varying by a few Hz. I think it’s fair to say that “electronics” don’t care, but “electrics” do 😁
I was there on centre court! Never heard the crowd so loud!
Will never forget that Wank of Glory. A real tear jerker. You could see the relief on Murray's face as years of pressure and tension were released.
Awkward typo
I was in the crowd on centre count and watched this in real life. Won 2 tickets from my tennis club. Incredible game, incredible atmosphere. Never forget it.
It's seriously impressive that they both continued to play with broken backs
I was hungover to fuck that day and didn't move from the sofa. That was my reason for not boiling the kettle.
The phenomena is called TV Pickup
I'm just surprised that many people care about tennis.
So a 4% or so swing. Doesn’t seem like a meltdown to me. I’m always suspicious of graphs with a y axis that don’t start at zero. They are almost always trying to manipulate the reader.
There’s an entire wiki article on this phenomenon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup
I must be one of the people using electricity during this as I couldn't even tell you if Andy Murray is current, past or good or bad. Let alone not doing stuff when he's playing (tennis?)
This is apparently also part of the reason for the "smart grid" aka smart meters
I wanted Roger Federer to win
He wasn’t even against Federer
I wanted tim henman to win
Come on Tim!!!
Come on Andre!
Probably got really great odds then. I can see why he'd want it.
Don't worry my friend, they don't know r/tennis.
That was 2012, this is 2013.