A radio teleswitch is a device used in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
primarily to allow electricity suppliers to switch large numbers of
electricity meter
North American domestic analog electricity meter.
Electricity meter with transparent plastic case (Israel)
North American domestic electronic electricity meter
An electricity meter, electric meter, electrical meter, energy meter, or kilowa ...
s between different tariff rates, by broadcasting an embedded signal in broadcast radio signals. Radio teleswitches are also used to switch on/off consumer appliances to make use of cheaper
differential tariffs such as
Economy 7
Economy 7 is the name of a differential tariff provided by United Kingdom electricity suppliers that uses base load generation to provide cheap off-peak electricity during the night.
Houses using the Economy 7 tariff require a special electricity ...
.
Service role
The typical use of a teleswitch is to manage the start and end times of off-peak charging periods associated with tariffs such as
Economy 7
Economy 7 is the name of a differential tariff provided by United Kingdom electricity suppliers that uses base load generation to provide cheap off-peak electricity during the night.
Houses using the Economy 7 tariff require a special electricity ...
and
Economy 10
Economy 10 is the name of a tariff provided by United Kingdom electricity suppliers created in 2004. Similar to the Economy 7 this is designed to be used with high thermal mass heating such as storage heaters, underfloor heating, and is also used w ...
. This includes switching between 'peak' and 'off-peak' meter registers as well as controlling the supply to dedicated off-peak loads such as night
storage heating. The use of dynamic switching instead of a fixed timer allows some additional demand management, such as by flexing start and finish times for electric heating loads according to prevailing overall demand levels.
Some suppliers also offer more sophisticated heating control using the radio teleswitch network. For example, Scottish Power 'Weathercall' and SSE's 'Total Heat Total Control' both dynamically vary the length of time storage heating is energised each night depending on the forecast temperature for the following day to help maintain a consistent household temperature.
Teleswitching has also been used to help level out demand in areas where the supply network is close to capacity. In the 1990s,
Manweb
SP Manweb is the regional electricity distribution network operator (DNO) for Merseyside, North Wales and parts of Cheshire. It is now part of SP Energy Networks, itself a subsidiary of the Spanish energy company Iberdrola.
Nationalised in ...
used such a system to provide different households with different off-peak periods on a weekly alternating basis. By spreading out the high peak demand associated with electric storage heating in Mid Wales, the company avoided upgrading costs of over a million pounds, and £200,000 a year in reduced use-of-system charges.
In the north of Scotland, the radio teleswitch service is also used to help control the local electricity distribution network for resilience purposes.
Operation
Each of the user companies (the ''RTS Users'', or ''Service Providers'') has its own database on the Central Teleswitch Control Unit (CTCU), which is an
HPE Integrity computer running
OpenVMS
OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...
on
IA-64
IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by Intel in coll ...
for reliability and clustering technology to minimise downtime.
The database defines how each group of teleswitches belonging to the user-company will control the loads and meter registers connected to it. The CTCU uses the database and certain rules to generate and control a continuous string of messages, which is forwarded to the BBC for transmission.
Although each message will be received by all installed teleswitches, the unique user and group-codes carried by the message ensure that only teleswitches carrying the same combination of codes will act on it.
History
The Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) has its origins in the energy management projects initiated in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
by the
Electricity Council The Electricity Council was a governmental body set up in 1958 to oversee the electricity supply industry in England and Wales.
The council was established on 1 January 1958 to assume the coordinating and policy-making functions of the Central El ...
in the early 1980s. Three projects investigated the feasibility of using the telephone network, the distribution network and national radio for large scale energy management purposes. The radio teleswitch project was chaired by Walter Waring, deputy chairman of
Eastern Electricity
Eastern Electricity plc was an electricity supply and distribution utility serving eastern England, including East Anglia and part of Greater London. It was renamed ''Eastern Group'' under which name it was listed on the London Stock Exchange and ...
, and supported by the
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
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programmes was tested. The BBC was satisfied that there was no discernible distortion of its broadcast service and no infringement of its
, while its application for controlling consumer tariffs and loads was approved by the
. The project was funded by the
and the mainland electricity boards, which were each allocated one of sixteen message channels. One channel was reserved for testing and the final one was allocated to
when it joined the project.
The Central Teleswitch Control Unit (CTCU) system was updated in 2007 to replace the obsolete computing hardware with brand new, modern, fully supported equipment. The old DEC MicroVAX machines were replaced with HP Integrity 2660s. The operating system has also been upgraded to
8.4. No effort has been made to upgrade the obsolete transmitter hardware. All communications lines have also been updated and Internet access has been introduced in addition to the dial-in access by modem.
The new system went live at the end of January 2008 and the update has markedly improved the performance and stability of the system.
In 2016, it was reported that over 1.6 million teleswitches were in use. Around 190,000 were reported as being used dynamically to control loads such as heating on a day-to-day basis, with the remainder following generally fixed switching times that were updated less frequently.
In early 2020, 1.4 million electricity meter 'MPAN' locations were thought to still be using radio teleswitching
- although the actual number of individual premises may be lower as some single-household installations use two MPAN references for historical technical reasons.
(EA), which was previously known as the Electricity Council, entered into a renewed formal agreement with the BBC in 1996 as an agent of the users. The EA had also negotiated an agreement with the
(NGC) concerning the servicing of the CTCU. Since 2004 the functions of EA regarding this contract have been taken over by the
...