When you have a large concert hall that can certainly heat up when it has a large audience, what do you do? Guy Chazan writes in the Financial Times about an important experiment at London’s Royal Festival Hall.
Royal Festival Hall in tune with drive to save power
Turning off the air-conditioning at the Royal Festival Hall has not affected musical instruments
In a pioneering experiment, one of Britain’s cooler cultural venues is being paid by the National Grid to warm up.
The Royal Festival Hall, on London’s South Bank, has been curbing the amount of electricity it consumes – a challenge for a site that hosted 27m visitors last year. As part of a trial, its managers were called up at random times over the winter and asked to help take pressure off the grid by turning down the air conditioning.
Hilton Wells, director of technical services, says he was initially worried that this would increase the concert hall’s carefully calibrated humidity levels, causing pianos and other musical instruments to go out of tune. “My main concern was – would there be an impact on performances?” he says. “Would it affect the soloists’ voices?”
Despite his concerns, the experiment worked. The RFH cut its power usage 10 times and no one really noticed. And every time it did so it was paid a fee by the Grid – welcome for an Arts Council-funded venue reliant on public handouts.
The RFH’s partner in this venture is KiWi Power, a company working in the esoteric field of “demand response”. KiWi signs up businesses that are prepared to reduce temporarily their energy use at peak times – by dimming non-essential lights, turning down heating or cooling systems, or switching off their mains electricity completely and using back-up generators instead.
National Grid pays them for each kilowatt of demand that can be shed in this way, and KiWi and the participating company split the proceeds.
A few years ago, not many people in the UK had heard of demand response. Recession, and rising energy bills, have changed that, says Ziko Abram, KiWi’s co-founder. “Ever since the financial crisis, companies are looking at any way to reduce costs or generate revenue streams and not have to lay off more people,” he says. The company now offers its services to more than 50 clients at 650 sites across the UK, and expects that to top 1,000 by the end of the year.
Once an obscure corner of the energy sector, demand response is gaining prominence as the strains on Britain’s grid intensify.
The UK will lose about a fifth of its generating capacity over the next few years, as polluting coal plants and ageing nuclear reactors are shut down. Yet new power stations and wind farms are not being built quickly enough to fill the gap, raising the prospect of power cuts. Faced with a looming capacity crunch, ministers and regulators have been scrambling for ways of reducing stress on the grid – either byrestarting mothballed plants or by cutting demand for energy.
As part of those efforts, National Grid now offers “reserve services” that pay companies to reduce their energy consumption and power suppliers to offer extra generating capacity, during periods of peak demand.
However, many are put off from participating by the complexity of the schemes. That has provided an opening for middlemen such as KiWi, Flexitricity and Boston-based EnerNOC, the world’s largest provider of demand response. Often called “aggregators”, they sign up companies for the Grid’s reserve services, act as their agent and take a cut of the fee for any successful demand management “events”.
“The system operator gets in touch with you and says: in 20 minutes we need 50 megawatts and we have to go ahead, contact our customers and get that 50MW to come off the grid in that 20-minute timeframe,” says Mr Abram.
It’s a fast-growing business. EnerNOC says the US market for demand response is worth $1.5bn, and the global market is three times larger.
KiWi aspires to “events” that have minimal impact on a customer’s operations. It may be next to impossible for an industrial manufacturer to shut down a crucial piece of machinery for an hour or two.
“But if you’re talking about changing the air temperature of 100 hotels by a degree for half an hour, that’s not something anyone’s going to notice,” says Yoav Zingher, KiWi’s co-founder.
That is what happened at the Royal Festival Hall – the brief power shutdowns barely registered.
Ray O’Halloran, the RFH’s director of estates and facilities, says demand response has come at an opportune time. The concert hall spent £1.5m on electricity last year, and is beginning to run up against supply constraints. The site is powered by seven low-voltage transformers that are all running at 90 per cent capacity.
“If we plug in another thing we’ll fall over,” he says. “Anything that assists us in reducing our energy demand is a good thing.”
Energy in Demand - Sustainable Energy - Rod Janssen 