What is Energy Shifting?

“Give me a place on which to stand and I will move the Earth” – Archimedes

Okay, so energy shifting will not move the Earth but it is really important in saving energy, money and national energy infrastructures.

So, what is it? Let’s start at home, a simple demonstration of how energy shifting can save you money is the classic ‘day rate’ – ‘night rate’ electricity price scenario where typically, ‘night rate’ is lower than ‘day rate’. You can participate in energy shifting by changing your behaviour (running your washing machine overnight) to move or shift that energy use to a cheaper rate and saving you money. A more powerful way of energy shifting is to use a home battery. In the same scenario it will charge up overnight and discharge during the day avoiding, as much as possible, the higher rate.

On a national scale energy shifting is important because is helps the efficiency of the energy infrastructure (Power stations, turbines, wires and substations etc). Most activity that requires electricity happens during the day so this is when energy production is at its peak. This includes all of the mix of energy sources -solar, hydro, tidal, wind, gas, coal and nuclear. Once demand has exceeded supply from the renewables which only react to weather and tides, nuclear takes up the slack and once exceeds that we move onto high carbon gas and even higher carbon coal.

The point of energy shifting and indeed the reason those day/night rates existed in the first place is to smooth out the demand and reduce the need for fossil fuels. Simply by moving demand away from peak times we can reduce the amount of carbon in the energy mix nationally and move towards net zero.