Thing with Britain is that pretty much everywhere is close to an urban area. The National Grid is truly that: national. Hydro comes online instantly, faster even than gas. It's perfect for these unique-to-Britain spikes.
The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict, but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're talking about.
I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer. The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a major city on Thanksgiving.
Not exactly the same - especially since water gets drawn out of reservoirs (typically) so there's already significant buffer, but here's a plot of water consumption in Edmonton during Canada's gold medal olympic hockey game back in 2010.
Water can be stored almost losslessly, with cheap fixed costs (e.g. the many cisterns in a household, e.g. the iconic watertank that appears in US movies). Transporting water long distances usually has large fixed costs, and has massive marginal costs if it has to go uphill.
Electricity is expensive to store, both marginal costs (losses) and fixed costs (plant). Pumping water into hydro-electric lakes is a reasonable solution at present but: 1. pumping has significant marginal losses, 2. usually lakes can't be placed near significant urban loads (desireble to reduce network failure risk, and optimise network loading), 3. hydro-electric lakes are often hard engineering (earthquake risks, difficult to get good potential energy storage if flat land), or politically difficult (consent, water rights), etc.
We need to invent better systems that can profitably sell peak load and buy off-peak load (or buy constant load). Especially for periods of a day or even longer. That would also solve a lot of issues with eco-friendly power (solar, wind). Especially that can absorb huge amounts of load (e.g. overnight). Especially that can absorb and release load within sub-minute periods. Big engineering :-)
This is why wind and solar are good partners with hydro. They're more unreliable due to weather but if you have the wind or sun available to generate more power than you need, you can use the excess power to pump water uphill into a hydro lake and store it for later. So even though it's a lossy operation as you say you're basically getting it for free. And like the video showed, hydro is very responsive to short term load demands so if the wind falls off you can quickly start up a hydro plant, as opposed to something like coal or gas which takes much more effort to start/stop.
Theoretically you can put wind/solar much closer to urban centres but in reality the NIMBYs don't want them either near cities where they can be seen or in remote areas which are typically areas of natural beauty.
I would guess due to a design flaw in the market rules (or the rules for the interaction between different national markets).
I think most large windmill turbines are designed to be able to be feathered to limit electricity production - they need some way to not fail when winds exceed generator constraints - but maybe designs use wind stalling or other dynamics to prevent that? Alternatively they could build dumping loads close to the wind power - e.g. warm some seawater with big resistors!
Edit: I love the quote "Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits." LOL.
Electrical cars with "smart" chargers. The chargers will have two settings. Express (high price, uninterrupted charging), and Economy (low price, maybe even free (fixed cost), charging controlled by the power grid, "full by the next morning").
This is has been the dream/vision of the power companies in Denmark for at least a decade. It is usually brought up when the government pressure them to generate more power from wind. Current level is 20%, goal is 50% by 2020.
Even 20% is more than is practical in isolation, but we export peak production to Germany, Norway, and Sweden. The two later have hydropower production (and no earthquakes), which can be lowered when cheap Danish excess wind power is available. Not sure that can be scaled to 50%, especially as Germany has similar plans.
I have read that electric cars will be the new "smart grid" connected appliances. Once say 50% of people have an electric car, which is probably usually left plugged in on the driveway, that's a huge amount of battery power available nationally, ready to be fed back into the grid as needed.
They are! They also cost a bloody fortune for a crappy model when you do manage to find one. None of that lovely British high-tech, insta-boil, sleekly designed space age stuff here: it's all vintage 1980 two-cup Travelodge hotel room specials. For $150.
When we moved to the USA my wife was furious with me for refusing to buy her an electric kettle. It took me months to explain that I'm not spending over $100 (plus the electricity to run it) when I already have a nice old fashioned stovetop model and the landlord pays our gas bill. Water still boils at 100 degrees, and it's just as fast on the burner. (She claimed it 'tasted different' but I didn't have the heart to point out that that was more due to the different water than changing how we applied heat to it.)
Depends on how efficient the heat transfer from the gas burner to the bottom of the kettle is...
I suspect that in the domestic setting an induction stove and kettle with appropriate base would be the most efficient.
I have both gas and an electric kettle (being British in the US) and the electric kettle is significantly faster for me (with similar amounts of water) but loses out because it takes up counter space, whereas the kettle on the stove is only a nuisance when cooking large meals...
I doubt it. Even if you had perfectly efficient electrical kettle, you're starting out at about 50% overall efficiency since a lot of energy was wasted creating the electricity from heat in the first place. This is why I limited my statement to electricity generated from fossil fuels, which does cover a lot of electricity.
The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict, but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're talking about.
I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer. The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a major city on Thanksgiving.