Posted by vrganj 10 hours ago
Government press release with a long list of pull quotes: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...
(I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a decade ago. It is embarrassing to be beaten on environmentalist regulatory efficiency by Germany)
Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the cheapest inverters to sync frequency accurately. And
I have more faith in German standards and work ethic than our own.
It isn't as if electric charge coming from balcony solar panels is some new magical-seeming type of electricity.
So in the UK we have 2.5mm^2 wires in a ring on a 32A MCBs... Of course a 2.5mm^2 wire is rated ~20A so any issues with the ring (sockets still work since connected from the other branch) can burn the wire before the MCB trips...
This Trump-level idiocy that is just never mentioned, even as people blame the gas burned in england on windy days as a cost of wind curtailment, when the curtailment is more a like a third of the cost. Burning gas to power people who chose not to build turbines is the other 2/3rds.
In the alternate world that is tens of billions of gas costs avoided to date and tens of billions more in future.
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c995xjxk97mo
[2] https://www.energyvoice.com/insights/energy-opinion/594763/m...
I read what is happening in exactly the opposite way. To me it shows that Milliand and the government at large do very little with no strategic thinking and no plan (same as the guys before in fairness but this government was supposed to be soo different...) and, in this case, is only reacting in a panic after almost 2 years in office to the pressure of "doing something" because of the Iran war, while also being told (slight mitigating circumstances for Milliband) that it mustn't cost anything. I always picture scenes from The Thick of It/ In the Loop when I imagine how they come up with 'ideas'.
Every solar farm doesn't need to be China Size - it doesn't even need to be a "farm", just put them on roofs.
And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Yes there are times when solar doesn't produce energy, but there are also times where it OVERproduces.
When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could be producing energy instead. So you pay actually twice. When the solar underproduces, you need to bring in alternative sources, but those now have to cover all their fixed costs and generate return on investment over this limited timeframe, which means the actual backup prices hit stratospheric levels.
What's the actual cost of solar with actual net-billing?
I did my own battery backed installation. When I'm underproducing I can shed load (I turn off my AC - almost always that's enough, and it's automated by relay). When I'm overproducing (ex - my battery is full and my load is still not enough to consume input) I just don't let the panels generate more current than I can consume.
Managing grid scale power is different concern, and not particularly relevant to small household generation. Especially not relevant in the 800W category for "balcony solar" (which is much smaller than what I'm working with).
Solar is fucking coming, whether you continue to shove head into the ground or not.
It's just way more affordable. Getting easily more affordable as batteries continue to improve.
I honestly doubt I'll still be connected to a local utility grid for electric 10 years from now, and I live in a region of the US that has considerably cheaper grid power than most areas.
Can't we just throttle the solar panel? In a worst case, you just pull the plug. It's not like a nuclear power plant which needs to be shut down carefully, or am I misunderstanding something?
Not sure how is situation with home installations, factory i work for runs 150kw plant for our own consumption and don't bother with selling, but i know that we can set up how much we want/are allowed to feed back.
I'm also surprised they aren't using batteries to capture overproduction. They've been clutch in the US, and we're not exactly pushing the envelope of green energy nowadays
Here's the thing. That's a rule and not a technical problem. Absolutely no reason to do this other than rules and regulations.
People don't even bother to argue why it's bad, they've just seen so many headlines telling them it's bad they don't question it.
You don't have to do this with solar, you can just disconnect the panel and have it go a bit hotter. For producers that have a long-ish bringup time, yes, you might need to do this at time.
Wind farms don't consume energy, but there is a real issue with how often they have to be "curtailed" (paid to turn off). That is to a great extent due to issues with grid connectivity between Scotland and the rest of the UK, which are (slowly) being worked on.
https://www.enlitia.com/resources-blog-post/what-is-wind-cur...
"paid to turn off" Wind energy providers in some countries are compensated for curtailment, this a form of subsidy for renewables. It can be payed directly by the goverment, or it is added to the price of electricity for consumer.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewable-curtailment-c...
It borders on criminal to have abundant energy production be disservice.
Building a small, prefab, plant like this, if possible, would seem to be mainly a problem of scale, and therefore it seems likely that China will get to it pretty soon.
Charge batteries, do electrolysis, or a multitude of other uses (I know some companies do that already)
There is no clear path to switching these arrays to Net Metering, as of yet. Prepare for all sorts of unrecycled solar panels and potential loss of renewable capacity that is already installed.
Suppose I have a 100MW gas turbine. And suppose there's 1MW of solar installed in my generation network. I don't really care if I sell 80MW at noon and 90MW around dinner time and 50MW through the night, or if instead it's 79MW at noon and 91MW at dinner and 51MW at night. The gas costs about the same irrespective of when I burn it so a bit of a fuel shift doesn't really matter.
But take that 1MW and turn it into 20MW and suddenly we go from 80MW at noon to 60MW at noon, 90MW at dinner to 110MW at dinner and uh oh. You see the problem? Whatever losses I endured at noon I don't get to make up for at dinner because my plant only goes up to 100MW and now we're not just shifting when we burn how much fuel, we're literally having to shift the power generation to a different plant.
Is this example precisely accurate? Absolutely not. But it helps you get a feel for the problem of net metering at scale. The grid can act as a battery for a few % of total generation, but by the time you hit some number, maybe 20% maybe 40% net metering turns from a cool math trick to a real cost on the grid.
It's like if the grocery store let you give them milk for a credit at full price. (Let's ignore the sanitary/health/quality issues that would come up.) You decide to buy a cow and you drink that milk. Sometimes you need more than your cow can give so you buy extra from the store. Sometimes you need less and you sell the extra to the store. Long term, you use as much as your cow produces on average, so you pay the store nothing. But the store has provided a valuable services to you and has incurred expenses in doing so. They have to keep the lights on and maintain a building and pay workers to handle your transactions but they make no money from you. The only way it would work at all is if they made enough money from their non-cow-owning customers to make up for it, and that can only take you so far.
Legislation is, in fact, specifically made so people (i.e. landlord) actually can't easily stop you from doing this.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/climate-adaptation/switzerland-...
For instance, isn't it complicated to have their output be in perfect sync with the frequency that comes in via the electricity net? Because to me it seems that if they won't, you will have lower benefits or even a net minus after plugging it in.
Not especially, given that the inverter has a microprocessor in it. All it has to do is measure the phase of the existing grid.
I don't have references for how it's actually done, but one obvious approach is simply to wait at each zero-crossing for a new half-cycle to cross a voltage threshold before turning on the output. This also implements the requirement to drop out if the grid goes away. It is probably also possible to measure during the "off" side of inverter output PWM, in the same way that variable frequency motor drivers work.
If everyone plugged one in, could the transmission network reliably deliver the power generated where it's needed? I thought that was a serious long term challenge for utilities wrt solar.
Some systems are capable of running in isolation from grid (providing 230V AC on their own), but this is less common and often unnecessary.
Wait until you tell them you can run cars entirely on electricity from a solar farming. I'm sure they will ignore you until the price of diesel reaches four-digit territory. 1000p today? If only we didn't have to pay these incredible prices, what a miracle that would be..
So politicians have a choice: do what's right for the people, or gain more power/money for themselves. Not every one of them chooses poorly, but enough do that it is difficult for real progress to be made.
"Many consumers want to know how long it will take them to make back the upfront costs of solar"
my answer is that the payback is imediate, right from the first moment watching as energy is generated out of thin air, and the sudden relief from getting off the energy angst missery-go-round, and the sheer borring inertness of solar pv as it does the thing with zero detectable effort, is gratifying and relaxing in a way that money never gives.
I will add that solar pv is increadably robust, and damage tollerant as well, you can drive a claw hammer through a panel, and while it does not improve the performance, the degradation is actualy not that much, and it will continue to function for years
> my answer is that the payback is imediate,
So if I pay $35k for an install, I get a $35k check the first time I connect it to the grid? Pretty sure it doesn't work that way. But it would be a nice subsidy from the government if they were really motivated.
I guess you're saying you start to feel good and validated to have spent the money by seeing _some_ savings every billing period. It's hard to argue with feelings of course, but that's not not the original concern. People want to know how long is it going to take: 1, 5, 10 years or ... never (if panels degrade or break before it will never pay off) to pay off their investment.
At the same time, many people will just use a solar calculator or watch or yard lights etc, oblivious to it all.
Show people a solar powered laptop, a solar powered phone, or a solar powered tablet, then they will be impressed.
Remember the craze about solar powered car competitions?
permacompute + solar would make for quite the $100 laptop competition.
Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess if we had a battery too (more investment) then we could switch to using electric oil-filled radiators, though they would not heat the whole house. And we could install a hot water tank.
I guess for new builds there is a real opportunity, but for an existing household I'm struggling to see how it works - and I want it to!
This ROI calculator looks reasonable: https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html - note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case where the final figure is positive is profitable. But of course that depends on whether grid prices go up or down in the next decade ...
I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is that it is understood that electricity production is in dire straights, taking into account that the transition to EV requires a lot of electricity.
For an 800W balcony system your background house usage is likely to be enough to self consume most of it.
You'd wouldn't be able to run even a small oil heater except maybe in peak summer.
It's a good match for working from home as it's a small amount of power spread over daylight hours.