I heard our glorious leader will be making an upcoming EO mandating all homes be retrofitted with coal-burning stoves.
Oh say can you see
While solar power is great and possibly the future, I sure hope they fully thought this through. A lot of areas with large numbers of solar panels are struggling to manage overcapacity. Solar energy produced is not always sent to the grid but wasted, as there is often not enough grid-scale storage capacity to absorb it. I'm no expert, but I wonder if mandating smart in-home sodium-ion batteries which intelligently charge and discharge based on grid capacity wouldn't be more effective.
Sunlight hitting a roof without solar panels is also often not sent to the grid but wasted. In fact, I'd say that more solar energy is wasted on roofs without solar panels than with.
People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid. When, increasingly often, they have a choice of either shutting the system off and wasting this energy or sending it to the grid at low or even negative rates, this becomes a problem. The expectation of "my solar system will pay for itself in X years" might become "my solar system will never break even". At least that's an issue in some places with high PV density.
People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid.
Not under this law. This whole article is about solar panels being mandated by law, regardless of whether or not the installer thinks they can profit from them. Keep moving those goalposts, though.
I’m just pointing out an issue with residential PV which, when I first heard about it, surprised me. I hope it does not surprise the people making these laws.
Imagine if, some years from now, seasonal solar oversupply might become in the UK and the people with these by law mandated panels face the choice to either manually switch off their systems or pay to send their solar energy into the grid. It sounds stupid but this seems to be happening in places with high PV density.
And btw you’re getting me wrong, I am a big fan of residential solar. I've got a small system. It’s just, at scale, apparently more complicated than covering every roof with panels…
Imagine if, some years from now, seasonal solar oversupply might become in the UK and the people with these by law mandated panels face the choice to either manually switch off their system or pay to send their solar energy into the grid. It sounds stupid but this seems to be happening in places with high PV density.
Goalposts go wheeeee!!!!
You're allowed to use the solar on the roof before buying from the grid which will save you tons on most days. The UK grid operates on marginal pricing so if you buy from the grid the highest price provider dictates the price.
This essentially means that you pay the peaker plant nat gas price for electricity where every MWh hits pretty hard on the bill. To recoup the investment in the UK, especially with the interconnectors inside the Eurostar tunnel, is pretty easy and a decentralised grid allows the UK to skip building a lot of power lines for energy that's used locally.
We actually have a growing amount of gravity battery capacity in the UK, currently a drop in the ocean around 15GWh, but I believe 200% of that is currently in construction.
IIRC the same article I read about this suggested we could make use of all the old coal mines, retrofit them to become gravity batteries relatively cheaply and gain magnitudes more capacity than we have today.
The UK is no where near the point of having too much power through the daytime. Today was pretty sunny, better than average day especially for time of year. At mid day there was still 5.8GW of fossil fuel use and 3GW of biomass, so about 8.8 GW of CO2 production. Or to put it another way of the 32.5 GW of power needed solar contribute 3.41GW.
There will come a moment where there is an issue where more storage is required to use that power through the evening and night or negative power pricing but its not the issue yet there still isn't enough renewables to make it through a day without burning gas even on a windy sunny day so promoting more Solar and Wind is still necessary to get to netzero for grid power in 2030.
The downside is that when they have too much they turn it off. This is a wonderful problem to have. Your own damn article said it encouraged them to go harder ramping up the storage. It's more cost effective when there's more storage on the grid. Totally insignificant non problem, meanwhile the earth is on fire.
incidentally i contacted a few local solar installation companies and all of them told me my roof doesn't have enough space, but one of them suggested to get a battery and go on a peak/offpeak tariff as this would be more effective than trying to fit solars to my crazy roof
Really, solar panels are just one solution of a home energy system.
Governments should be looking at regulating microgrids for all homes where solar, stationary battery storage, electric vehicle storage, and even diesel/gas generators or geothermal contribute.
As you say, if you don't have a means for local storage and the grid is maxed out, your panels are wasting away their free energy by self-consumption.
Sodium-ion batteries will absolutely seize a portion of the market share, but I don't think we'd want governments restricting building requirements to specific technologies. The analogy in solar panels would be governments restricting home requirements to polycrystalline silicon, when you have other 1st Gen PV types (monocrystalline), 2nd Gen (thin film CdTe), and 3rd Gen (thin film perovskite, organics).
Microgrid controllers would do the smart dis/charging that you're talking about, as well as automatically dis/connecting from the grid and shutting on/off critical loads.
It definitely would be a good idea to put some SIBs in every place that produces intermittent energy.
Also, energy intensive places might want to get batteries too. Let’s say you have an aluminiun factory, which obviously needs lots of energy 24/7. How about you use cheap (or even free) solar power when there’s oversupply to charge the batteries, and discharge them during the night.
Whatever happened to “solar shingles”? There were supposed to be a couple of companies making them, but you never see them on houses.
As far as I understand it they are just a worse solution than mounting standard solar panels on a roof. More expensive, less efficient, thus only gonna get used for aesthetic reasons.
Kinda like solar roadways and some other on the surface cool sounding but in practice niche technologies.
Wasn't Elon pushing solar shingles/roofs a couple of years back?
Man he was shilling hard for that, then all of a sudden he just stopped. I read a good number of stories about the solar shingles overheating, catching fire, burning down, malfunctioning...probably related to him going silent on them.
I've had my doubts about that stuff since I heard about it.
Perhaps it's better as a concept than it is in the real world, with real world conditions.
They were a scam to justify his self-bailout of Solarcity with Tesla funds.
The demo Musk introduced last October at a splashy presentation was a glass-tile solar roof, much different from the metal prototype he’d seen before. How did he pull off this transformation in just weeks? More to the point, who executed the idea and when? Leaders at Tesla and SolarCity, including Lyndon and Peter Rive, gave a variety of different answers on the timeline of its origin and development. At first, the companies said Solar Roof was a Tesla product, and then, later, a SolarCity product. Public statements are similarly contradictory. Some involved with the product’s development suggest that the mixed messages are a result of the combined companies’ wish not to appear as if they rushed out the glass-tile prototype in order to be able announce a high-profile product before the shareholder vote on the acquisition, which some critics viewed as Tesla bailing out SolarCity.
...
No matter how the Solar Roof came to be, it seems to have worked: Three weeks after Musk’s presentation, 85% of shareholders approved the Tesla-SolarCity merger.
The Tesla Solar Roof tiles are still alive, but the product is on the back burner at Tesla as it failed to achieve its promises.
Tesla solar was one of the companies, yes. GAF was also making them and I think a couple of others had them in development.
Well, would you notice them if you did see them? The whole idea is they blend in...
Well, would you notice them if you did see them?
Yes, because they don't look like asphalt.
By 2027? Why not now? These things have never been cheaper. Mandate batteries as well, LiFePo is cheap as hell and it would save so much money it's stupid not to.
Educated guess:
To allow the supply chain to adjust so we don't cause a sudden shortage skyrocketing the price of solar, making homes more expensive to build or delaying construction
A lot of new build are basically copy pastes of the same design, so companies have time to properly adjust designs for them and not just haphazardly slap them on to existing ones which could cause problems
Red tape and Bureaucracy. Updating laws and regulation takes time, then there's risk assessments environmental planning, maybe adjustments to the grid layout on new estates.
Building takes years. You have to subdivide, plan for utilities, stormwater and traffic, permit the buildings, etc, and suddenly invalidating a bunch of stuff midway through the process they just picked a date 2 years out to avoid the legal and administrative nightmare of yanking existing permits and making them re-design.
This is an amazing policy. Very simple, very effective. It comes at a time when Labor is trying to push more housing and Octopus energy makes these panels very economical for the average UK home buyer.
A few decades late, but needed nonetheless.
England churning out those new homes at the rate of one every five or six years, so it's not as late as you'd think.
If Reagan had had a hint of forward thinking he wouldn't have un-installed Carter's solar panel. It was among the FIRST solar panels installed for any residence in the US and it was mentioned as part of his farewell speech.
I like it, but with housing prices already out of control I wonder if this is the wisest? It's just going to make housing that much more expensive. Long term it's great! But I hope they have some fancy financial footwork to curb the upfront costs.
In long term, you would not be paying much on electricity, which is a saving. The upfront cost would be higher, but it is a good move imo, because retrofitting almost always has some shortcomings, like poor implementation, or unnecessary damage
I think 1500 euro on a house will not make a big difference. Last set I put on a roof was about that price (50 euro per panel, 400 for inverter rest for mounting)
It's 1500 here. 3000 for the mandated concrete walkway. Another 5k for the required hard wired fire alarms.
Just examples of things that are reasonable sounding that add up quickly. I hate to sound like some libertarian douchbag, but we need to be careful we don't regulate our way out of affordable shelter.
The solar panels make the shelter more affordable. Whatever you end up paying extra on mortgage, you're going to save more on the power bill.
Our current house has everything electric, including warm water, heating, and transportation (electric car). Our power bill is way lower than our previous apartment of less than half the size.
In April alone our power bill will be around -6 euros, and the summer is ahead of us. December/January were around 400 euros, so I expect a balance of around 1000 euros for the whole year.
We paid 120 euros a month before (so 1400 a year), not including heating, warm water or charging the car. Heating and water were part of a 400 euro "hausgeld" payment that included garbage collection, lift costs, building maintenance, etc, so let's say 200 a month. Car let's say 550 a year (15k km a year, half of it long trips so just counting 7k changing locally). So we are saving 2.5k a year, maybe 3k, in bills.
The whole system (panels, installation, battery, etc) cost 27k total, so our mortgage is about 1.5k more a year extra (assuming 0 upfront investment) than in would be without solar.
So more than twice the size of the shelter and savings of at least 1k a year, very pessimistic calculation. Maybe as high as 6k, if we extrapolate the old costs with the size.
While I have no idea what the market is like there, here in the US, most of the desirable locations have housing price dominated by land. According to my insurer, full replacement cost of rebuilding my home on the current is less than 1/3 the cost of buying the home. Does it really matter if building code makes that replacement house a little nicer, when 2/3 the cost is the location?
with housing prices already out of control I wonder if this is the wisest?
Electricity prices are also already out of control.
The UK does not get a lot of sunlight and by them consolidating all of their energy and putting so much money into solar. It might be a bottleneck or a bad investment and I've seen arguments that prove this. This might be actually kind of bad news and not uplifting news. I would encourage you all to look a little bit deeper.
Rooooight. More coal, it is then! Thank you, expert!
What are you talking about? They're very cost effective here and pay for themselves fairly quickly with the added benefit of reduced emissions.
"I've seen arguments that prove this" provides absolutely no links or evidence okay bud
Making room for the intermittent nature of solar imposes upon the grid a large cost for backup power, adding to the levelized cost of electricity, yet this cost is never ascribed to the cost of the solar panel. The more solar you have the more idle backup power you need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
In France 70% of their power came from nuclear and they added renewables, they then need to throttle the nuclear power plants which is not an easy task, and they then make less money and require tax funded bailouts.
The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.
That won't automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren't considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there's no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.
Britain pioneers alternative power storage methods, particularly pumped hydro, and invests heavily in wind farms, diversifying the grid. So, at the end of the day, they don't need backup power all that much.
Rooftop solar is routinely connected to the grid - no need to build redundant and expensive battery banks for every home, but the power is produced locally, minimizing transmission losses and strain on the power lines.
Nuclear, on its hand, is nice, but simply too expensive to build nowadays. Nuclear plants take a lot of time to pay off, so running existing plants is good, but building new ones can be a worse option overall.
Just in time for their $66M studies into dimming the sun!! 🥴
well with reform UK replacing conservatives, solar panels might be deemed too woke in the next couple years
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