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Britain peak power demand (from BBC TV series: Britain from Above)

fiddyschmitt · 178.9K views · 2010-08-02 · 5:15

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Overview

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the canonical illustration of TV pickup and grid balancing, and as a must-see example of demand spikes.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2026

Topics

Power grid, heating & buildingsDocumentaries & storytelling
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power gridtv pickuppeak demandhydroelectricuk national grid

What people said

defrost · 2026-06 · Strong recommendation

With the obligatory, must see, BBC Britain from Above segment in which Andrew Marr fly on the wall narrates the most challenging part of a live load engineer (UK)'s day ... <doof, doof, doof> the East Enders kettle break. * [VIDEO]

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jeroenhd · 2022-11 · Recommendation

This reminds me of this YouTube video: [VIDEO] . There's a monitoring room to make sure people are ready to switch backups and reroute in case of some kind of grid failure, but also in very specific scenarios. Britain being filled with Brits, what would happen is that once the show was over, half the nation got up from the couch to turn on the kettle for a cup of tea. Those electric kettles are quite demanding, especially if millions of them turn on at the same time. So every time there was a major event, dedicated people are monitoring the grid frequency, power plants on standby and foreign contracts at the ready when needed, just to increase capacity at the right time. You can't just schedule this stuff, because if a football match runs over its allotted time, you may suddenly add power to the grid without any load, causing all kinds of problems like the grid frequency increasing and making digital clocks run ahead. There is a temporary demand of gigawatts of power that rises within five minutes and lasts until the kettles are done. The YouTube video provides an example of 600MW of power being requested from France... for the end of an episode of Eastenders. I always knew the British like their tea and that there's some kind of planning going on for events like street lights turning on, but the combination of the two is a great example of complex behaviour that's easy to overlook.

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vincentdm · 2018-03 · Recommendation

Here's a great movie illustrating how the grid is balanced when a popular tv show ends and millions of people want a cup of hot tea: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by fiddyschmitt, played through YouTube.

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