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.
I am guessing the folks that run Britain have some concept of how the weather works there on the daily
Just in time for their $66M studies into dimming the sun!! 🥴
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:
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
Typically when code changes existing permits are grandfathered in, they don’t pull outstanding permits and make them comply with new code. For something as relatively minor as residential solar you should really only need a few months notice at most I would think. Like either the plans are drafted and ready for submission soon or you’re still in the planning phase and just add panels.
If the new rule is all new houses are required to have solar, that’s not a change to the solar code.
And there are other implications, such as all roofs having to be designed to accommodate solar, from structural elements to orientation of faces.
A few decades late, but needed nonetheless.
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.
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.
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.
Tesla solar was one of the companies, yes. GAF was also making them and I think a couple of others had them in development.
Yeah a racist asshole killed that. It could have been good.
They are more expensive and less efficient. Very few people use them.
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.
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
He’s the Uncle in Nepokean Dynamite, but it’s like he’s stuck somewhere between mid to late last century…
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.
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.
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!!!
This is a top comment
Look at the date on the article you linked. It was published on July 7th.
When solar panels are seeing 15 hours of high-angle summer daylight and clear skies, generation should be considerably overcapacity.
Come back to me when you can write that same overcapacity article in November, when your panels are struggling with 9-hours of low-angle overcast.
When you have sufficient solar capacity to meet winter demand, you’ll have 200% - 400% of demand in summer. That is simply the nature of solar production outside of the tropics.
Of course, it depends on the conditions. But any (temporary) overcapacity becomes a problem for people with solar panels when they expect to pay off the cost of the panels not just with a reduction in drawing power from the grid but also with credits from sending power to the grid.
However, there are problems, with some grid operators even charging customers for energy sent to the grid during peak times, such as in NL: https://innovationorigins.com/en/solar-feed-in-tariffs-climb-18-in-six-months/
Solar without storage is less ideal than most people think.
Yes I literally have to pay when I produce more than I use, like every day in April.
I looked into batteries, but they cost 10 times my annual power bill, and of course they wouldn’t replace all electricity, so would take like 20 years to be cost neutral.
I’m considering buying a high power laser and turning it on to consume extra electricity. I’d rather send photons back into space than pay the power delivery company.
Try bitcoin.
The ROI on bitcoin is substantially greater than that of a high power laser aimed into space.
Of course, it depends on the conditions.
Seasonal variation.
If you are doing solar right, you will have surplus power from it 9 months out of the year. The solution to making it profitable is not storage. It’s finding customers who can use that excess power, but won’t increase winter demand.
The ultimate solution is likely the creation of small scale localized carbon capture that exists to manage summer overcapacity.
The current biggest issue with carbon capture is that it’s less efficient than not burning fossil fuels in the first place
Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis. Even if we can’t find anything productive to do with the power, there are plenty of useless, nonproductive ways to monetize excess power: AI and Crypto, for example.
Overcapacity is not an actual problem.
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.
Oh yeah, I read about this. I get the impression that they’re out of the proof of concept stage, based on a few places where it’s worked well; it seems like capacity is on its way upwards now
Oooh. Very interested in this. I was thinking about trying to build my own gravity battery, but my back of the napkin calculations for the mass and height are nutty. I don’t think a small scale home-size device would be viable…
Yeah I did the same. Pity!
Yeah. My crazy idea now is to drill a well, seal it with concrete and use it as CAES, and then put a small Gravity battery inside of it… But even then, the gravity battery would add a negligible amount of energy storage… It’s just really hard to find good energy storage at this scale.
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.
Where did you get those stats from? I wasn’t aware there were places where you could see such granular numbers
I’m sure I read something about using local battery stores. Similar to the battery solution you suggested, but with each battery being shared across multiple neighbours
California’s weather definitely isn’t England’s
Absolutely. But I also read about these concerns in The Netherlands and Belgium, which aren’t quite California.
Best way to deal with this is to have a few hours of rolling blackouts everywhere a few hours per day, especially when the sun is shining.
People will get solar panels and batteries.
There is no such thing as “wasted” solar. Every less gram of carbon put into the atmosphere is a win.
Yeah that’ll surely be great news for all the hospitals and people with medical devices at home. After a few dozen deaths battery sales will be through the roof!
… are you a fucking idiot? Any government official that suggested that would immediately be fired, and any politician would never get a single vote for the rest of their lives.
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.
Let’s say you have an aluminiun factory, which obviously needs lots of energy 24/7.
Very often, they just run overnight, not 24/7. Grid operators incentivize their off-peak consumption to increase the base load on their baseload generators, making them more efficient.
The solar-friendly solution is to just shift their operations to daytime instead of nighttime. This reduces total overnight demand, and reduces the need for storage.
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
I assume that new buildings will be designed with that in mind now though.
That’s actually pretty expedient
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.
with housing prices already out of control I wonder if this is the wisest?
Electricity prices are also already out of control.
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?
It does, when that additional expense is the difference between being able to buy the home and not being able to. Or when it makes a difference in a developer’s decision to build or not build a home.
Affordable?
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
It doesnt add a lot of cost, but it also doesnt help as much as you think.
In Australia its mandatory to have an (I think) 2Kw/h system installed. Which is about enough assuming its running at full tilt to power the air conditioner in the peak of summer on a small house. A mate of mine who knows a lot about solar said “2kw is about enough that your home is essentially energy neutral when you’re not in it. So the fridge, water heater, appliances on standby…”
Of course when you start talking a national scale it does add up.
maybe it is difference in cost of living, or maybe solar output, our monthly consumption in peak summer hits some 1000-1500 units (arbitrary for now), we ourselves do no thave solar (some issues right now, but fixing them) but we in theory can get 100–200 units a day here, more if pick a larger unit, so that is, almost double of our reuirements. In winters, we rarely go over 300 (we do not have centrallised heating, and electricity is used in kitchen, and heating water), with a lowered output energy (lets say 1000 units a month) we would still be thrice over.
Yeah theres a LOT of variables at play here. I saw a headline today that “Uk braces for 30C heatwave.” As an Aussie I thought “Thats cute” we regularly see summer days into the mid 40’s so you can imagine what our peak daytime drain looks like.
You guys also tend towards way smaller houses than us, significantly higher population density, generally cloudier weather, energy costs will be wildly different… so many variables.
You have to remember that without a battery, your solar generally only helps out 8 hours a day and those are usually the 8 hours when you arent home, and arent the times energy companies charge peak rates…
When my wife and I built our house and sorted our (fucking massive) solar system our consultant said "Smart appliances are your best friend. Load the washer and dryer, set them to turn on at 10am before you leave the house. Set the airconditioning to come on at about 3 in the afternoon so that you not only get home to the AC/Heat but your using energy that would otherwise go back to the grid and then once the sun goes down you’re only maintaining temp which is way less energy intensive. Home batteries are still just not cost effective enough yet for us to justify one.
Dont get me wrong, even a small solar system on every house will make a difference. Just maybe not as much as people would like to think. The one benefit of having it be mandatory (and you’re right on this one) is that every new house will se set up for it, wired in right and easily upgradable from whatever they make the minimum standard.
Along those lines, I don’t understand why there don’t seem to be thermal storage head units for heat pumps. Cheaper and more effective than batteries, at least for storing heat, plus less noise and expense as the system doesn’t have to come on as often.
Why doesn’t everyone doing solar or with time of use metering have these? Online I only found one example and it was only available in Canada
My parents had thermal storage electrical heat with time of use metering and it made a huge difference on their electrics bill. Seems like it would apply to heat pumps as well
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That’s the point. They want to squeeze the lower classes.
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.
The “gas” in “gas powered turbines” is natural gas - aka, a fossil fuel, aka, the thing causing climate change.
The heart of your argument is a Myth.
Baseload generation like nuclear requires leveling loads by driving large industrial customers to off-peak hours. This artificially inflates overnight demand that can’t be met by solar directly.
Removing the off-peak incentives and shifting them to hours of peak solar production allows solar to meet that demand. Without those off-peak incentives, solar can operate without nearly as much nuclear “backup” required.
The remainder of your argument is sunk-cost fallacy. Nuclear is much more expensive than solar. Assuming all coal-fired plants are offline, excess nuclear plants should be decommissioned.
Why do you need to force industrial users off during the day, and how do you decommission your backup nuclear power with intermittent wind, when all you did was move from 100% uptime nuclear to variable uptime wind and solar?
Nuclear pushes major industrial users (steel mills, aluminum smelters, etc) to overnight. Nuclear can’t be ramped up or down fast enough to match the normal demand curve, so they use “off peak” incentives to raise the trough and lower the peak. This allows nuclear to meet a much larger percentage of total demand. Without such incentives, nuclear has even more problems than solar. It would only be able to produce about 20% of our power, with 80% coming from “peaker” plants. With those incentives, nuclear can meet about 80% of out need, with peaker plants filling in.
By driving consumption overnight, those same incentives prevent solar from being able to meet the overnight demand.
Removing those “off peak” incentives, and providing new “on peak” incentives pushes those customers to daytime consumption that can be easily met by solar.
Stop thinking of nuclear as a “backup”. Its not a backup. It is baseload generation. “Backup” is not provided by baseload generators. “Backup” is provided by generation that doesn’t suffer from the limitations of baseload generators. “Backup” is from generators that can ramp up and down to match a fluctuating demand curve. “Backup” is provided by “peaker” plants.
Well I mentioned France, who are using nuclear as a backup to the rewables they implemented.
Nuclear cannot be used as a “backup”. France is using nuclear for baseload generation, just like every other grid with nuclear generators.
And that is the underlying problem. Like all grid providers, they are incentivizing overnight consumption to improve the efficiency of their baseload generators.
Those perverse incentives are the primary cause of the problems you are describing.
Remove those perverse incentives. Allow the overnight baseload to fall. Nuclear is no longer adding to daytime generation, reducing the daytime overcapacity problem.
Nuclear isn’t 100% up, France had significant issues due to the summer heat raising riverwater temps, forcing plants to shut down because they couldn’t cool effectively.
Renewables are too cheap to keep nuclear economically viable, even when including battery storage to keep supply up.
This study disagrees after taking into account storage.
https://advisoranalyst.com/2023/05/11/bofa-the-nuclear-necessity.html/
Storage and production of renewables is also done by shipping in Chinese products created burning coal and ignoring environmental concerns. This all hinges on exporting emissions and labor to areas that don’t care about pollution.
I’d also argue that nuclear tech can likely proceed faster than storage, given the dangerous nature of energy storage. Even something as basic as storing water can cause deaths given what happens when dams break, stored energy is volatile by nature.
Storage is a red herring. Storage is attempting to make solar operate the same way as existing generation models: “supply shaping”. Attempting to match supply to demand.
Supply shaping doesn’t even work for our existing baseload generators. We use demand shaping to move our biggest loads to a time of day when we can most easily meet them with legacy generators. Which happens to be overnight. Which is the worst time of day to generate power with solar.
When we get rid of the current counterproductive demand-shaping models, we drop the overwhelming majority of our storage needs as well.
The UK uses gas rather than nuclear for non renewable power.
It’s much easier to turn up and down than nuclear.
Plus we build so few new houses that this is unlikely to be a massive issue, although home batteries and increased electric vehicle charging could be a good place to dump “excess” power.
I’ve tried to make that argument here as well. Adjusting building code to require solar is a great long term idea but in my part of the US there are so few new homes built that it’s really not making a difference any time soon.
It’s more to make the house saleable during its lifetime, and eventually drive a miser sustainable housing supply
I’m just saying if you really want to be green you’re building nuclear.
Yeah, but a clumsy Soviet Union and a massive fossil fuel lobby put paid to that in the UK. 5% of our power comes across the channel from France…
Nuclear is far too expensive for that.
It is, and more than that it takes way too long to build. The time for it was 30 years ago.
I noticed that during the 80s and 90s it “wasn’t safe”, and during the last 20 years it was “too expensive”, but now you see a few powerful people advocating for it.
And I can only assume it’s the same big booming Brian Blessed-esque voice as before: that of the fossil fuel industry.
They know they’re on the way out, but if they can make people bicker and argue and spend all their money on nuclear, which will likely take 20 years to actually come online, they can carry on guzzling dinosaur juice, while simultaneously nixing any large eco friendly plans under a giant banner of “the nuclear is already on it’s way!”
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.
Well wind farms won’t help, if you need 100% reliability. Storage I figured was more expensive than nuclear after adding all the costs together, creating enough hydro for backup is extremely expensive as well.
You’re essentially building a hydro power plant, water storage, pumps, and wind turbine at that point.
The solution to reliability is to overbuild wind and solar, so that even suboptimal weather allows us to fully meet our essential needs.
Which is still cheaper than nuclear.
LiFePO4 batteries within the house are the correct resolution.
In winter the panels make nothing anyway, and in summer the houses will essentially run themselves for somewhere between 4 to 8 months depending on peak power usage and panel array size.
Essentially it removes residential baseload and flattens the duck curve so the peak 1600 to 1900 peak can disappear, with the obvious knock on effect of reducing the LCOE.
