UK Electric grid voltage drop!

"That's quite possible, stories like this are often planted to "soften up" people for what's to come."

Yes, flying a balloon to see the reaction.

The big gap in power generation are the proposed AI centers. Microsoft, for example are paying for the opening a closed down reactor at 3 Mile Island! And Google are looking at opening other closed down reactors. If the UK hope to keep up with this - as stated by gov.uk, they will have to (help) fund a huge increase in the capacity of the country.

Earplugs Are For Wimps!

Did anyone actually watch the video? The concern outlined was that the DNO’s are more worried about over voltage than wanting to reduce voltage as means of reducing power consumption. The AI generated summary is crap. Even if proposals mentioned are adopted the average voltage would still be over the nominal 230V and the lower legal limit would still be the same as European mainland voltages

How will this reduce power consumption?

You need to use a “smart” meter, obviously.

lol, I thought that.
less voltage = more current :D
I guess they're on about reducing losses, where a chunky 240v+ isn't needed

With a purely resistive load, I =V/R, so assuming a constant resistance lowering the voltage will also lower the current. With reactive loads it is not so simple.

Madboffin’s example of boiling a kettle has to do with thermodynamics and energy. It takes a fixed amount of energy to boil a litre of water. Decreasing the power just means it takes longer to boil.

As mentioned above, lower supply voltage = earlier clipping, so not a good thing for the audio world.

Switched mode PSUs use feedback to regulate the output voltage. Lowering the mains/input voltage slightly shouldn’t have any effect. Some devices will work happily with any supply voltage between 90 and 250.

For amplifiers with unregulated supplies, the difference will likely be negligible. Plugging a kettle, or another amplifier, into a socket next to your amplifier will reduce its output too.

so maybe people are being prepared for the large voltage drops you're going to have during peak hours

There are more likely to be complaints if devices go into protect mode or fail due to over voltage than complaints because a kettle took 20 seconds longer to boil. All my computer equipment runs from a hybrid solar inverter. I left the output voltage at the default 228V. Believe it or not, the sky didn’t fall in.

I still haven’t found any official notification that this is a thing anyway. Neither, a direct search on ofgem’s web site, google, chatgpt nor Grok bought up any results for me. I may just be bad at internet searches, but getting worked up about something mentioned on a YouTube video or some AI generated junk is not worth the stress.

Whether the grid can cope with future demands is a different subject.