Free solar panel discussion

albyota

09 August 2010
Latest Press Releases:
Huhne ends Local Authority power struggle
Councils across Britain will from next week be allowed to sell renewable electricity to the grid and should assume their rightful place leading a local power revolution, Chris Huhne will say today in a letter to all local authorities. At present only 0.01% of electricity in England is generated by local authority-owned renewables, despite the scope that exists to install projects on their land and buildings. In Germany the equivalent figure is 100 times higher.
Full press release text is available on the DECC website

grahamc2003

quoia wrote: »

THESE ARE YOUR FIGURES - not mine.





on your (67,508 systems = £5261.20 an hour) then 128,313 homes would cost £10,000

That's more than all of the ASG + ISIS + HOMESUN systems proposed



... just spread over say 20 million households (I'm sure there are more) it would only cost each £4.40 per annum or £1.10 a quarter.

If your maths are correct, then that sort of cost wouldn't surprise me - bearing in mind those 128,000 installations produce such a small amount of power. The average output, derived from your figures, is about 25MW, which is about 2% of the power from a typical Nuclear station.

Or put another way, the number of installations would have to be 50 times the 128,000 you mentioned just to equal the power of a single Nuclear station.

And remember the capital cost of these systems - at a retail £13k per system, we're talking about £1.6bn (yes, billion) for 128,000.

albyota

‘Planet Earth… Our home’


We are borrowing this planet from our children, gas and oil will eventually run out, or become prohibitively expensive and difficult to drill as well as socially unacceptable.

Therefore UK and in fact the rest of the developed world needs to employ Wind, Tidal power, solar PV & thermal, biomass, Hydro, Carbon capture technology for coal, Gas, and Nuclear / fusion.

We will need a whole mix for a long time, one technology/fuel on its own will not suffice. We must do something now for the future.

There is so much loss in electricity transmission that the whole national grid needs to be seriously overhauled and perhaps we should be looking at more locally generated mechanisms.

The Vision


Like the handful of ‘pioneers’ early adopters to PV, who received the 50% installation grant and 9p/kWh export fee. A few got the LCBP grant of £2,500 And the feed in tariff of 41.3p/kWh, now the grant has gone, some people are waiting for the announcement of the ‘green loan’ or the ‘pay as you save’ scheme, Nevertheless, they are now, or soon will be, generating electricity, and will be for at least 20 years, they will either use it on site (therefore they will have reduced CO2 emissions and the power station doesn't have to burn as much gas/coal, etc) or they will export it, (meaning, the power station doesn’t have to burn as much gas/coal etc) multiply this by a lot of likeminded people, building owners, local authorities, etc and you will have saved tonnes of CO2 and decreased the reliance on importing as much gas / oil from politically volatile countries, (security) (cost).

Every south facing government building, School, hospital, fuel station, commercial building, will have their roof areas covered with solar PV, farmers will diversify and have cattle in enclosed areas capturing methane and their unused land will have solar farms, the coastline will take on the wind generators and the below sea tidal current and river turbine generators.

At the top of every hill, large reservoirs will be built and more hydro-electric generators will come on stream using power locally generated in the day to pump the water from a lower reservoir to the top, at peak load times mornings and advert breaks (kettle on) the use of hydro will be in standby and take on the load.

The demand for electricity is going to rise, with more gadgets shoved at us, all require plugging in and charging, the future electric cars will need recharging stations at every supermarket, garage or service station, new building regulations state all new buildings and homes will be airtight thus all require mechanical heat recovery ventilation and / or air conditioning / cooling systems for the offices server rooms, data centres, school classrooms full of Computers, and with the increasing take up of new heating systems using ground and air source heat pumps. CHP boilers for existing old stock large housing estates. Community heating schemes for new developments. The Code for Sustainable Homes level 3 & 4 are now out of date, And the big developers haven’t built any for a couple of years.

The Energy Saving Trust recommends Code Level 3 as minimum
and will recommend Code level 4 for all new homes by 2010. the requirements are a percentage
reduction in carbon emissions compared with Building Regulations Part L1 (2006), (a 25 per cent
improvement on 2006 Building Regulations)

The Government intends that all new build homes
should be zero carbon by 2016 in England, while
the Welsh Assembly Government has indicated
that all new homes should be zero carbon (Code
level 5) by 2011.

Architects and Builders are running around like headless chickens finding it difficult to meet the code with gas or oil boilers, so are turning to ground and air source heat pumps or direct electric and storage heating, so all this will add to the electricity demands.

More electrically operated items in our hospitals, (computers, blood pressure machines / monitors, CT scanners etc) Schools (PC's / printers / interactive wipe boards), offices, factories robots and retail outlets lighting. There is no getting away from it, Electricity we cannot live without it, there are numerous ways of heating our houses, offices, shops etc. efficiently with heat pumps using electricity!

Generally the demand for electricity is greater during the day than at night, winter more than summer, solar PV would feed into the grid whilst it is daylight, the wind generators only when it is windy, the tidal/river power constantly day and night, Hydro for peak load, whilst the base load can be taken from gas, coal and nuclear.

Anyone remember the strikes in the 70’s?

1972: Miners strike against government: By 5 February, factories were beginning to lay off workers because of power shortages. Four days later, BBC local radio stations were warning of domestic power cuts.

In the Britain of the 1970s, power cuts and lengthy blackouts became a fact of life.
The country's electricity network had long been vulnerable to mechanical failure or industrial action. In December 1970 hospitals were forced to function on batteries and candles during a "work-to-rule" strike. But the oil shock of 1973 caused the situation to become even worse. Prime Minister Edward Heath attempted to impose a prices and incomes policy to cap rampant inflation, but the unions resisted.

Heath declared a three-day week after a series of miners' strikes. Transport came to a halt, and electrical heating stopped working in many homes -anything that depended on a regular power supply was unable to function. The situation calmed after Heath lost the February 1974 election, but the country's generating supply was still precarious. Power would be cut off without warning.
After the "Winter of Discontent" in 1978-79, Margaret Thatcher took on the mining unions. This, together with the deregulation of the energy industry, and the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea, brought an end to the widespread blackouts which had plagued Britain.

Over the next 20 years this has to happen, yes, we have a massive task ahead but unless we make a start now, the lights will go out!

AL

Pincher

Cardew wrote: »

The 'poorer' however will have to live in a house with a South facing
roof that is not shaded, and not a flat.

Whichever way you look at the scheme, it entails all of us paying a few for a hugely inefficient way of generating electricity.

To make matters worse we are now paying so firms can make a profit from a scheme designed for individual householders.

It would make far more sense, and be far more economical, to have hundreds/thousands of panels mounted on the roof of factories/warehouses/supermarkets rather than a few panels mounted on hundreds/thousands of houses!

I totally agree ordinary people have no business generating electricity, like they have no business smelting steel (chairman Mao, Great Leap Forward), unless you are on a hill with no mains supply. It makes more sense to build solar farms where it's sunny, like Spain. You probably need three times the solar panels to generate the same amount of electricity in the UK, what with more cloudy days and weaker sun. In terms of blot on the landscape, it also makes more sense to put up acres of solar panel where nobody sees it.

I have seen solar thermal working with very reasonable installation costs in other countries, and so I am getting ready for when the costs comes down in the UK. As for PV, I am not going to say no if somebody gives it to me for FREE.

This whole thread is based on a freebie, which totally distorts the economics and hence common sense of the situation. Like the Common Market Agricultural Policy, with its butter mountains and wine lakes, it's a lot of money pouring into somebody's pocket, whilst generating a potential landfill nightmare.

skelly01

I notice that Homesun are backed financially by EAGA, and it is also them who do their installs.
EAGA are a pretty large company in renewables.

Jon_Tiffany

Cardew wrote: »

To make matters worse we are now paying so firms can make a profit from a scheme designed for individual householders.

No, the scheme was not designed just for householders, it was designed to encourage small scale renewable generation. This is a quote from page of the government response:

"The FITs scheme is intended to encourage deployment of additional small scale low
carbon electricity generation, particularly by individuals, householders, organisations,
businesses and communities who have not traditionally engaged in the electricity
market."

grahamc2003

albyota wrote: »

‘Planet Earth… Our home’


We are borrowing this planet from our children, gas and oil will eventually run out, or become prohibitively expensive and difficult to drill as well as socially unacceptable.


Over the next 20 years this has to happen, yes, we have a massive task ahead but unless we make a start now, the lights will go out!

AL

While your thoughts on may bring a tear to the eye, I'm afraid they are pretty destructive as far as supplying power to our children in the future, notwithstanding the pioneers with vision who wish to replace our useless grid based distribution system (which incidentally, enables you to plug in your kettle whenever you want, and has done for getting on for a century virtually uninterrupted, each second somehow almost magically matching every watt demanded by an equal watt of generation, every second of every day - still it must be crap and inefficient if you say it is I suppose. I trust you have disconnected yourself from the grid and manage with your own windmill and pv cells?
Yes we are facing power cuts in 6 or 7 years time (not 20 as you state), but it isn't for the reasons you imply (that somehow they'll be caused by grid deficiency). They'll be caused by the combination of growing demand simultaneous with large capacity decommissioning (mainly of the now ageing Nuclear stations, but some perfectly serviceable coal stations due to new, extremely severe emission requirements). Although new Nuclear build has now been given the go-ahead, and is planned for generation in 8 years , there has been no new Nuclear build for a few decades, and that is the further reason for the upcoming cuts.
I'm afraid to say, that situation has arisen due to too many people having similar emotional views to yourself.
While we do need a generation mix (as we always have had, nothing new there) Could you put some figures the 'mix' you want? If e.g. you want more than about 1% pv (none of which will address the most serious concern, which is peak demand), then I'm afraid the country will go bust before you get it. You need a realistic approach to our energy supply, not an emotional one.

PK49

What is the elephant-in-the-room-wrong with this scheme?
Nobody seems to have a convincing 'No' to this.
Further questions:- solar panels - when PV technology improves, would the panels be updated during the life of the system?
Also, same applies to inverter - would it be upgraded if improved?
House selling - if a person was not interested in the pv installation when house viewing, why show them the house? You don't rip out double glazing, or gas boilers if you don't like them - or do you? Hmmmm....

grahamc2003

PK49 wrote: »

House selling - if a person was not interested in the pv installation when house viewing, why show them the house? You don't rip out double glazing, or gas boilers if you don't like them - or do you? Hmmmm....

No one puts a legal charge at the land registry on your house because of central heating, but, if i understand it correctly, they do if you go for the 'free' solar panels.

I think this means that you need the panel owner's permission should you wish to sell your house (willing to be corrected if anyone knows better).

ralph_wilson

Why don't they just line them up in a big field, feed the electricity into the grid and get the money without getting involved with peoples houses?