NightOwlSolar panels to be fitted on all new-build homes in England by 2027
DogPeePooThat’s actually pretty expedient
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.
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
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.
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-sizee 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.
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
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
grid.iamkate.com and www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
You can’t check historical granular data but you can look at that granularity for the past 24 hours. If you look at this over many years on many different days you get an impression of the max and minimums of demand and production of the various types as I do now. Wish they did some more stats breakdown however so this was clearer from someone coming new to the site without experience of the data.
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
NighedI assume that new buildings will be designed with that in mind now though.
HamartiogonicIt 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.
RivalarrivalLet’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.
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.
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.
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MisterFrogIs it? We (all countries) need wayyyyy more storage, and we need it yesterday if we’re going to transition in time to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Using substantial resources on solar panels that just end up getting curtailed, on roofs not angled in an optimal way, is a huge waste
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 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.
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: innovationorigins.com/…/solar-feed-in-tariffs-cli…
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.
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.
jagged_circleBest way to deal with this is to have a few hours of rolling blackouts everywhere a few hours per day.
People will get batteries.
… 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.
Dont underestimate the people. There’s about 30% of people that are dumb, but to vady majority understand we are amidst a climate catastrophe, and we want policy to address it
Ok, sure. Go to your city council meeting and suggest implementing rolling blackouts in the town to combat climate change. See how far you get.
Oh, those people are making decisions on behalf plutocrats, not the people.
Ok, go talk to random people in the street and ask them if they are okay giving up electricity in their homes for several hours each day in the name of stopping climate change. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Ah, now were getting somewhere. Because if you explain to them why and tell them the government is going to install free solar panels on their home, most people will definitely be on board.
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!
Its not hard to keep power on at hospitals and 911 centers and blackout elsewhere. This is frequently done in poor countries. I think rich countries van figure out too…
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.
☂️-missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.
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.
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…
MintyFreshI 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.
That’s the point. They want to squeeze the lower classes.
sgaIn 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
They also need to be cleaned regularly
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…”
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.
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
our peak summers reach 55-60 °C, but in uk’s case, they have additional issuee of being very humid, in whuich case, the percieved temperature is much higher.
Where i live, we have both options for solar, that is either to use batteries, or int the days, we directly use solar, and send excess back to grid, and consume from grid during nights. This is kinda battery less (you still need some smaller batteries to get consistent power rates, but batter pak size would be smaller.
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.
that just seems to be a lot of power being wasted. but i can understand your point regarding batteries. We mostly use “dumb” appliances (read not iot devices) and mostly just control manually.
I on the other hand am actually not a huge solar fan, but mostly because we are running out of resources, good quality silicon, silver and other value metals, and cost of solar wwould actually start rising. I am more of a nuclear fan, but i undeerstand, that smaller nuclear reactors are still a thing of future, and I also kinda get why people do not like centrralised large reactors. To me, that is still the most efficient way to generate power.
Its not “wasted” financially. I dont know the rates but if 1 unit costs 50c from the grid during the day they will only pay me 10c to feed into the grid, at peak times (evenings) they want $1 from the grid and I cant contribute. If I preheat/cool my house with 5 units of energy I would have only gotten $.50 for and halve my evening usage on maintaining it from say 10 to 5 im up by $4.50
The numbers are bullshit, but you get the idea.
Also down the track a little my wife and I are looking at making one of our cars a phev so we wanted to be able to charge it at home off solar.
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.
Affordable?
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?