Smart Energy

• To address the 9x rise in global gas prices, incoming UK PM Liz Truss has announced a new Energy Price Guarantee via a massive loan to energy retailers, capping rates at 34p/kWh for electricity & 10.3p/kWh for gas. A couple of interesting reactions:
  • “Imagine spending £130bn to freeze energy bills and then not doing anything new to improve the most inefficient homes in Europe” [Business Green]
  • "Government support for fossil fuel consumption and production across 51 major economies rebounded to an estimated $697 billion in 2021." [Robert Llewelyn quoting figures from OECD and IEA]
• She’s also moving the green levy into general taxation. These numbers make a heat pump with a COP of 3 cheaper to run than a gas boiler. She's also rumoured to be considering how to decouple the price of renewables from the marginal price of gas, so that customers on a 100% renewable tariff will be much less affected by gas prices. Plus a goal of making the UK a net exporter of energy by 2040.
• Can you decouple economic growth from CO2 emissions? We already have.
• A meta-study has produced 4 principles for heat decarbonisation, which broadly are Insulation, Flexibility, Heat pumps and ToU tariffs.
• As always, better insulation remains the #1 measure the UK needs. This new map from TaDo shows why (sample size 80,000 - hooray, I wish more companies would use meaningful sample sizes for their PR).
• “Dynamic heating” is a term coined by TaDo CEO in his piece on optimising heat pumps for ToU tariffs.
• Energiesprong - might we soon hear more of this great Dutch word, about retrofitting homes to zero-carbon in “one leap” - especially for solid-wall.
• My favourite Sankey diagram of the month shows how - end-to-end - heat pumps are nearly 6x as efficient as green Hydrogen.
• Heat pumps sales are up 72% in Poland (which still uses quite a bit of coal for house heating) with Italy a close second.
• California’s grid close to blackout conditions due to heat.
• Tesla’s ex head of storage has started Lunar Energy, a home battery which can manage other devices in your home which has raised $300m.
  • As part of that startup, Lunar has in turn acquired battery pioneers Moixa, whose CEO Simon Daniel I interviewed recently. Congrats to the Moixa team on sticking with it since 2006.
• Solar panels saved the EU €29bn in energy imports this summer.
• Geo’s CEO Steve Cunningham shared some interesting stats in a Times radio interview illuminating the thinking behind their new HEMS offering [no link, as content only available for 6 days, sadly]:
  • ~50% of UK homes now have Smart Meters. UK differs from other nations as meters are designed to deliver user benefits, not just grid benefits.
  • 60% of customers still use in-home displays after 3y, driving claimed 2-3% savings.
  • Save a further 5-7% by opting-in to half-hourly data and bill disaggregation.
  • Save a further 15% by linking to heating.
    • As an aside, from my experiences at AlertMe using IP acquired from WattBox in my own home, I am definitely a believer that smart heating can drive significant savings while also improving comfort, delivering a win-win
  • Then e.g. delaying washing-machine automatically with next-gen displays.
  • Could be part of a national energy rationing programme like in parts of US, by opting-in to peak demand reduction.
• In an analysis last year the EU Commission estimated that the market for HEMS will grow by more than 50% by 2025 (p207) and for Smart Meters offers a set of “2nd-wave” (SMETS2) use-cases such as EV charging, HEMS, bill forecasting and load disaggregation (p214).

EV

• Interesting take on the importance of battery recycling from Tesla co-founder JB Straubel: “Today cobalt may travel 20k miles before being put in a ‘zero emissions’ battery pack”. Though of course there’s been huge progress in removing cobalt entirely e.g. in LFP batteries.
• University of Warwick’s EV-elocity study claims that careful management can stop V2G from damaging the life of car batteries - and even extend their life.
• Paua CEO Niall pointed-out that the amazing Supercharger reliability stat of 99.96% that I quoted last month does rely on Tesla defining uptime as a “site having at least 50% daily capacity functional.” 
• Google Maps now provides routes to optimise range for your car type, including electric.

IoT

• Google has a reputation for killing-off products which fail to take off (unlike AWS which steadfastly maintains its 250+ offerings and growing). Now Google is killing it’s IoT Core platform. So what about devices that depend on it? A company called ClearBlade claims a 1-click migration. 
• Last month I mentioned startup Sateliot offering LoRA connectivity direct from LEO satellites. Now Musk has confirmed that from 2023 Starlink V2 will provide direct cellular access from satellite for T-Mobile subscribers. And the latest iPhone supports satellite comms for emergencies too. Mid-band 5G, only low-bandwidth so for texts etc., but could this be a game-changer for global IoT coverage? The term “SatIoT” is being used.
• Doh! The update code for Hyundai cars was signed using a ‘secret’ key already in the public domain.
• After the mention last month of how the Flipper Zero IoT RF hacking tool can disable a Unitree robot, now a great (mad) Italian review. And of course it now runs Doom.

Until next month,

-Pilgrim

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