- cross-posted to:
- hardware@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- hardware@lemmy.world
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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.
well with reform UK replacing conservatives, solar panels might be deemed too woke in the next couple years
We many times lament when the government overreaches. This is the kind of Trojan horse that enables the government to overreach.
One might think, this seems innocuous and beneficial, so go ahead, right? Remember that every law is an excuse for violence. You have to ask yourself, how is it moral for the government to, with the threat of violence, force every home to be built with solar panels?
If I’m a small business, and I build a house without solar panels, is it right that I be bankrupted or/and be put in jail?
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.
Now harness the power of gravity and rain. 🙈
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…
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?
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.
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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.
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.
missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.
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.
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.
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!!!
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-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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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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’ve seen arguments that prove this” provides absolutely no links or evidence okay bud
What are you talking about? They’re very cost effective here and pay for themselves fairly quickly with the added benefit of reduced emissions.
Rooooight. More coal, it is then! Thank you, expert!
That’s actually pretty expedient
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 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.
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!”
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…
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.
Indeed, and the environmental factors aren’t the only problem with gas turbines. I’m not going to pretend I am an expert at what is the best solution but interviews I’ve read with experts that speak about the Belgian context. (Which is so densely built there’s not much room for anything) It was the best way balance the grid if more investments were made in solar and wind energy. The reason it didn’t happen is because it was deemed uninteresting because not profitable enough.
So the alternative that was chosen was doing nothing an extending the life of nuclear plants that are working way beyond their planned life and giving the commercial company managing them guarantees they’ll continue making money. Building new nuclear capacity will take longer than a gas turbine and they can’t just be shut down and torn down for something else when better alternatives come along. And this is usually cheered on by people who think they’re smart by pointing out that if you’re in favour of renewables you can’t be pragmatic about dealing with it’s current problems. While those people very often are against more renewables and just want unending nuclear as if that’s a magic bullet.
Well, I’m pro renewables and pro nuclear, but anti NG. Accounting for methane released into the atmosphere during extraction, transport, refining, and storage, it has about the same carbon impact as coal. And if shipped across the ocean in the form of liquid natural gas (likely for you, since a large proportion of the worlds NG reserves are in the good ol’ US of A), it is worse. You might as well just keep old coal plants running.
The actual solution (as pointed out elsewhere in the thread) is dynamic pricing. And a carbon tax. When people and businesses receive price signals about the expense of using electricity at any given time, they will naturally use more or less of it when it is more plentiful / more scarce.
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.
