Free solar panel discussion

John_Pierpoint

Let Pythagoras and Trigonometry be your friends.

jimmyg1981

40.3kwh so far today.

Doc_N

jimmyg1981 wrote: »

40.3kwh so far today.

I'd say that's pretty much exactly where you should be with a 6.62 kWp system. It was my best day so far this year - just over 25 kWh with a 3.96 kWp system.

furndire

25 for us as well today.
April has been a very bright month, we've generated 503 KW in 30 days.

digitaltoast

I've not gone away - I've got a mega-post coming when various councils and bodies hopefully wake up after all the bank holidays!

But one thing that is happening with increasing regularity is stuff like this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13253876

Six Scottish windfarms were paid up to £300,000 each to stop producing energy, it has emerged.
The turbines, at a range of sites across Scotland, were stopped because the grid network could not absorb all the energy they generated.
Details of the payments emerged following research by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF).
The REF said energy companies were paid £900,000 to halt the turbines for several hours between 5 and 6 April.
According to the REF research, the payments made cost up to 20 times the value of the electricity that would have been generated if the turbines had kept running.
The largest payment was given to Whitelee windfarm in East Renfrewshire, owned by Scottish Power, which was paid £308,000 in April.
The RWE nPower-owned Farr windfarm, south of Inverness, received £265,000 in the same month.
Hadyardhill in South Ayrshire, which is owned by SSE Renewables, was given £140,000 to stop producing energy, while Blacklaw windfarm in Lanarkshire - also owned by Scottish Power - was given £130,000.

This is hot on the heels of this report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12985410

Wind farms are much less efficient than claimed, producing below 10% of capacity for more than a third of the time, according to a new report.

The analysis also suggested output was low during the times of highest demand.

The report, supported by conservation charity the John Muir Trust, concluded turbines "cannot be relied upon" to produce significant levels of power generation.

And that's for wind, which starts off with far greater efficiency than solar.

Here's the Renewable Energy Foundation http://www.ref.org.uk/

The Renewable Energy Foundation is a registered charity promoting sustainable development for the benefit of the public by means of energy conservation and the use of renewable energy

So, bearing in mind the REF is campaigning FOR renewables, here's their view on "unreliable" renewables like wind and solar:
http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/231-high-rewards-for-wind-farms-discarding-electricity-5th-6th-april-2011

REF has consistently argued that the scale and pace of wind power development has exceeded the ability of the system to integrate this uncontrollable energy source, and that high costs to the consumer would result as a consequence. Writing in the preface to Paul-Frederik Bach’s 2010 study for REF, Professor Michael Laughton observed:

'The outstanding major concern in the work reported here, and one with very serious implications – especially for the United Kingdom with its predominantly island system with inadequate international interconnection capacity – is the extent to which subsidized wind power can, in practice, be used within the system without needing to be constrained off: in other words wasted, or exported at whatever market prices, perhaps disadvantageous ones, prevail elsewhere.2'

The payments on the 5-6 April confirm the reality of these concerns, even at relatively low levels of wind power currently installed in the UK (just over 5 GW of capacity) and are a worrying sign of things to come.

We conclude that the scale and pace of wind development in the United Kingdom needs to be rethought, and more emphasis placed on the provision of economical solutions to the grid-balancing problem. Some will judge that constraint payments show that the grid network, particularly that interconnecting England and Scotland, needs to be expanded. However, it should be noted that such network enhancement is not cost free, and would have a very significant impact on consumer bills. Indeed, all the currently available solutions for the problems posed by uncontrollable generation such as wind power are expensive. It is conceivable that invention and innovation could reduce these costs, but at present the subsidies to renewables and the socialization of integration costs mean that there is no commercial incentive for technologists to seek less expensive solutions.

So, let's remind ourselves of the government's own official estimate of the cost of solar PV FiTs:
http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/Consultations/Renewable%20Electricity%20Financial%20Incentives/1_20100204103559_e_@@_FITsImpactAssessmentaccompanyingGovernmentResponse.pdf

"The estimated resource cost is £570m in 2020, £8.6bn cumulative to 2030.
The estimated cost to consumers, cumulative to 2030, is £6.7bn
OVERALL NET BENEFIT (NPV Best estimate) £ -8.2bn"

Once again, the COST of the solar feed-in-tarrif over the next 20 years to those in the UK who do not own their own homes and most likely to be in fuel poverty will be £8.2 BILLION pounds.

That's a helluva lot of insulation, research, hospitals, defence, education ... so can someone so enthusiastic about the FiT remind me why once the world's most inefficient and unreliable means of generating electricity should get subsidised so heavily by those most likely to be in fuel poverty?

Cardew

digitaltoast wrote: »

.. can someone so enthusiastic remind me why once the world's most inefficient and unreliable means of generating electricity should get subsidised so heavily by those most likely to be in fuel poverty?

Because it is Green! and green is beautiful.

Because the UK single handedly will save the earth from [STRIKE]global warming[/STRIKE] climate change!

Because China, India etc will be so impressed with the UK and embarrassed about their own coal power stations, they will follow our example.

Doc_N

digitaltoast wrote: »

... so can someone so enthusiastic about the FiT remind me why once the world's most inefficient and unreliable means of generating electricity should get subsidised so heavily by those most likely to be in fuel poverty?

Simply because there's no practical alternative - the EU fines for not meeting the targets we've signed up to would exceed the cost of the FITs.

digitaltoast

Doc_N wrote: »

Simply because there's no practical alternative - the EU fines for not meeting the targets we've signed up to would exceed the cost of the FITs.

Er, seeing as we've established clearly that solar PV will do NOTHING towards our targets, how would that help? Once again, in case you missed it both in several posts in this thread and also peer-reviewed journals by engineers, if every single roof in the UK was covered in PV, it would not take one single coal fired power station offline.

grahamc2003

digitaltoast wrote: »

That's a helluva lot of insulation, research, hospitals, defence, education ... so can someone so enthusiastic about the FiT remind me why once the world's most inefficient and unreliable means of generating electricity should get subsidised so heavily by those most likely to be in fuel poverty?

It's because the environmental movement has, in the last forty years, moved from genuine environmental concerns into nothing more than a very naive ideology, where seemingly many people think they are in a position to 'save the planet' if they just follow what the ideological leaders tell them.

It doesn't appear to matter how much evidence there is for almost every 'green' initiative over the last decades has been a disaster, and in some cases an environmental disaster too, the ideology simply marches on, disregarding those disasters. Windmills and solar did not emerge due to genuine engineering solutions to our future energy shortage - they emerged solely due to governments responding to the demands of the new type of non-environmental so called environmentalists who are largely unconcerned that their proposals don't actually solve anything.

The very simply fact which you touched upon is that it doesn't matter how many windmills or solar panels we have - the amount of conventional stations burning fossil fuels won't be reduced. Due to the decommissioning of a few nuclear stations in the near future, the capacity from fossil fuels will actually increase, and increase in part due to having to be available when the windmills and solar are producing little or nothing.

Doc_N

digitaltoast wrote: »

Er, seeing as we've established clearly that solar PV will do NOTHING towards our targets, how would that help? Once again, in case you missed it both in several posts in this thread and also peer-reviewed journals by engineers, if every single roof in the UK was covered in PV, it would not take one single coal fired power station offline.

Possibly, but it will reduce their combined output. We've agreed, within the EU, to source 20% of our energy needs from renewables, including biomass, hydro, wind and solar power, and whether you agree with that or not, it's something we can't just ignore. Solar PV will contribute towards that target, although I'd agree that it could be an expensive way of achieving it.