Solar Panel Guide Discussion

digitaltoast

ronlizpatsimon wrote: »

I have just completed my first year of panel ownaship.
Despite this year having the worst weather for 100 years; I made £1750 on FIT payments and £250 on saved electricity payments. These payments represent a return on investment (£11,000) of 18%

All paid for by the little old lady next door and those most likely to be in fuel poverty who can least afford the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. And not a single gram of carbon saved.
How very depressing.

ronlizpatsimon

Good evening "Zuepater".
The £250 was not an estimate. It was calculated by the simple method of comparing what I paid for electricity in the year before having the panels fitted with what I have paid in the year they have been fitted.

Good Evening "Digitaltoast".
Your tone indicates that you do not approve of having panels fitted. I wonder why you read this thread!
However you are quite right about my neighbors paying extra to make my payments. You should read Mr Darwin's book about the survival of the fittest.
As for carbon; I believe that the carbon released by the manufacture of my panels is less than the carbon released by the coal/oil burnt in the production of electricity which would have occurred replacing the electricity my panels will make during their 35 year lifespan.

Martyn1981

digitaltoast wrote: »

All paid for by the little old lady next door and those most likely to be in fuel poverty who can least afford the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. And not a single gram of carbon saved.
How very depressing.

Oh come on, not that old chestnut again. Even the original author of the 'moves money from the poor to the rich' George Monbiot, retracted that statement over 2 years ago when challenged on-line by 'Monbiotwatch'. Admitting that the green tariff applied to electric and gas bills is paid by everyone, not just the poor.

Also, it should be noted that 10's of thousands of 'free' installs have been carried out by Councils, LHA's and even the dreaded RaR's.

As for saving carbon - that's the new world order, sorry. We're going to see more renewables, possibly CCS on fossil fuel stations, and nuclear. There's no way to escape it. Even the hardened AGW sceptics BEST recently (and quite bravely) announced that they had been wrong, and that AGW is real, and a problem.

What alternatives do we have to subsidies - none. Nuclear has for 50 years enjoyed vast subsidies and is now costing us approx £1bn pa in decommissioning for the next 100 years. The new proposed plants are expected to need 6p to 9p of subsidies per kWh. These will run for 40 to 60 years, before adding another 1 to £2bn of annual decommissioning costs. That is of course if any plants are built, especially after the German nuclear giants pulled out of negotiations citing the falling costs of renewables.

Perhaps if a tiny proportion of the estimated $1trillion dollars per year in worldwide subsidies that goes to the fossil fuel industry was instead diverted into renewables, the picture might be a little clearer.

Till then the relatively small amount of subsidies going into UK PV FITs should be seen for what it is, a tremendous success story, with viability of UK domestic and commercial PV approaching at a shocking rate. Imagine if decades ago we'd only had to subsidise the first one or two nuclear power stations for 27 years, with no decommissioning costs, and then been able to sit back and watch as individuals privately financed the remaining expanding nuclear power sector.

Around Xmas time I guessed that we could see unsubsidised viability arriving in certain areas in about 5 years. I was guessing at Southern Britain, south facing, £5k install, 50% consumption, 15p import and 5p export. I also suggested that fingers crossed we could be seeing £8k installs by the end of the summer. We actually hit £7k installs in the Spring, £6k now and 4.5p export in mid summer.

The future for PV is bright, it's nice to see one UK subsidy doing well, and much, much quicker than was ever hoped.

Mart.

digitaltoast

ronlizpatsimon wrote: »

As for carbon; I believe that the carbon released by the manufacture of my panels is less than the carbon released by the coal/oil burnt in the production of electricity which would have occurred replacing the electricity my panels will make during their 35 year lifespan.

It's quite possible that your panels may indeed exceed their estimate lifespan of 25 years (decreasing in efficiency roughly 1% per year). However, you have to factor in a new inverter every 7 to 10 years (so that's at least 3 of them) and you also seem to be repeating the fallacy that a kW of electricity generated via PV is a kW that isn't required to be generated via carbon emitting methods. In fact, quite the opposite - the more solar PV installed, the less efficient per kW a power station is. I've repeated myself ad nauseum on this point, so I shan't do that again, but either scroll back or google "spinning reserve" to understand more.
This site will also help: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Oh come on, not that old chestnut again. Even the original author of the 'moves money from the poor to the rich' George Monbiot, retracted that statement over 2 years ago when challenged on-line by 'Monbiotwatch'.

Did he? I followed his arguments with various pro-PV people quite closely and I didn't see that. Would love to see a link.

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Till then the relatively small amount of subsidies going into UK PV FITs should be seen for what it is, a tremendous success story, with viability of UK domestic and commercial PV approaching at a shocking rate.

How can the least effective and most inefficient way of generating electricity at precisely the wrong time be "a tremendous success story"?

Remind me again - at 5pm on a freezing December evening when high pressure covers the whole country and not a single wind turbine turns and not a single watt is generated by all those glittery panels, tell me exactly where the currently-required 54 gigawatts required is going to come from, given that, by 2020, the UK is expected to have only 28 GW of wind and 11GW solar capacity by 2020?

Martyn1981

digitaltoast wrote: »

It's quite possible that your panels may indeed exceed their estimate lifespan of 25 years (decreasing in efficiency roughly 1% per year). However, you have to factor in a new inverter every 7 to 10 years (so that's at least 3 of them) and you also seem to be repeating the fallacy that a kW of electricity generated via PV is a kW that isn't required to be generated via carbon emitting methods. In fact, quite the opposite - the more solar PV installed, the less efficient per kW a power station is. I've repeated myself ad nauseum on this point, so I shan't do that again, but either scroll back or google "spinning reserve" to understand more.
This site will also help: http://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Some questionable numbers in there.

Estimated lifespan is not 25 years, try 30 to 40+ years.

Performance does not drop off by 1% per year, older installed systems are showing 0.5% or less.

Inverters should last at least 8 to 10 years, with many companies offering 10 or 12 year warranties, and expecting 20 years or more, hardly 'at least 3'.

Check out the German PV market, with approx 27GW of installed capacity for CO2 savings. They have made remarkable headway, despite having to contend with the decision to turn their backs on nuclear power. Should we assume that they've got it wrong?

Mart.

digitaltoast

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Some questionable numbers in there.

Estimated lifespan is not 25 years, try 30 to 40+ years.

Says who? I'm going by the figures from the Centre for Alternative Technology who have been testing panels since 1982:

http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar-PV-panels

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Check out the German PV market, with approx 27GW of installed capacity for CO2 savings. They have made remarkable headway, despite having to contend with the decision to turn their backs on nuclear power. Should we assume that they've got it wrong?

Absolutely. It's been a disaster for them - see http://en.rwi-essen.de/media/content/pages/publikationen/ruhr-economic-papers/REP_12_353.pdf. All that money spent and they still require the same amount of carbon-emitting power stations. They could install enough panels to cover their entire energy needs at mid-day on a bright clear July day. And 8 hours later they'd be contributing zilch and the coal fired power stations would be spinning away as they had done that whole day.

Martyn1981

digitaltoast wrote: »

Says who? I'm going by the figures from the Centre for Alternative Technology who have been testing panels since 1982:

http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar-PV-panels

Absolutely. It's been a disaster for them - see http://en.rwi-essen.de/media/content/pages/publikationen/ruhr-economic-papers/REP_12_353.pdf. All that money spent and they still require the same amount of carbon-emitting power stations. They could install enough panels to cover their entire energy needs at mid-day on a bright clear July day. And 8 hours later they'd be contributing zilch and the coal fired power stations would be spinning away as they had done that whole day.

I'm not sure what those links were meant to prove.

The CAT link confirms what I said:

What government and manufacturers say
UK Feed-in Tariffs for PV are calculated for an economic lifetime of 25 years, indicating that the Department of Energy and Climate Change believes that panels will produce for at least that long. The warranty conditions for PV panels typically guarantee that panels can still produce at least 80% of their initial rated peak output after 20 (or sometimes 25) years. So manufactures expect that their panels last at least 20 years, and that the efficiency decreases by no more than 1% per year.

So their lifetime is not stated as 25 years, rather, at least 25 years.

Also, it goes on to say that 13 year old panels tested in the UK had lost 0.7% pa and 20 year old Swiss panels had lost 0.5% pa. It even says that the older Swiss panels having suffered a large initial loss, were only losing 0.2% pa since.

I've only skim read the German report you posted, but it appears to mainly be about the PV production industry in Germany, and the FITs scheme. Of particular note is the high financial impact of going in so hard and fast with PV, and sooner than the UK did. Given the comparatively small scale approach the UK has taken I fail to see the similarities. The UK FITs scheme (as it relates to PV) has only had a nominal impact on bills.

I'm sure there are better reports that we can look at to consider actual German CO2 outputs and issues. As I said before, there are no real alternatives to renewables. If we are to stick with coal, then the real costs of using that fuel will need to be added (CCS or carbon taxes), rather than hidden. Germany have already had to face this problem with nuclear reduction. Renewables seem to be working fine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/may/23/energy-nuclear-power-germany?intcmp=122

Mart.

digitaltoast

Martyn1981 wrote: »

IRenewables seem to be working fine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2012/may/23/energy-nuclear-power-germany?intcmp=122

Hmmm, a completely unreferenced article, unlike Monbiot's which are meticulously footnoted. You've not shown me where Monbiot made the retraction you stated, but while you look for that, have a look at these regarding your link above...

http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-cache/germanys-green-energy-supply-transformation-has-already-failed/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/16258812
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/16258957
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/16258613
http://www.guardian.co.uk/discussion/comment-permalink/16259041

grahamc2003

ronlizpatsimon wrote: »

Good evening "Zuepater".
The £250 was not an estimate. It was calculated by the simple method of comparing what I paid for electricity in the year before having the panels fitted with what I have paid in the year they have been fitted.

.

But surely the tariffs you pay on average over the current year are higher than you paid on average the year earlier? If so, your method would indicate savings quite far ahead of £250pa.

Except of course, it's a very poor method of estimating the value you received from the solar energy you used. You've probably become more aware of your electricity use, so behavioural changes would likely account for quite a saving, as would any new devices of any type which in general use less than those being replaced.

From my own experience, with a family at home all day, I've been quite surprised how difficult it is to use a high percentage of the energy even from my small 1.75kW system without using electricty I wouldn't otherwise use. I doubt I'l get very near to a £100 bill benefit from my system.

But all that doesn't matter much anyhow - the returns from these things are from the grants - the electricity generated is very small relative to the large investment and worse, the electricity is generated at times when wholesale electricity prices are cheap anyhow. Overall, they are better viewed as grant generators rather than electricity generators.

ronlizpatsimon

Good Evening "Graham2003",
Yes, you are correct that electricity prices have increased over the year - so I have done a little better than I estimated before. I had not mentioned it before but my Gas used has also decreased a little due to switching to electric immersion heating once the spare electric reaches 2.5 kwh (not that often this year!)