Solar Panels -how much less electricity are you using ?

Martyn1981

Hiya Dave. If you click on the ickle map of France in the top LH corner of Gridwatch, you'll find French Gridwatch. That one has a solar dial and graphs, which for today showed approx 0.5GW at 6pm, and 1GW at 5pm.

The PV generation relates to metered (supply side) PV. For comparisons, and being too lazy to research this properly, I think France currently has approx 4.5GWp of PV installed and the UK is around the 4GWp mark.

When the clocks changed my generation on Sunday at 6pm was ~800W, with the final dregs coming in at around 7.15pm.

I've also noticed that the evening peak doesn't seem quite so impressive anymore. I did ask around at Xmas, but nobody seemed to have a definitive answer. Though obviously PV wasn't contributing at that time.

I suspect that we are now seeing the impact of energy efficiency measures (over the last 10 years) regarding items that are almost definitely going to be on during that peak time - light bulbs, telly, fridge and freezer. As well as some other items that may be on, but are optional - washing machines, dishwashers etc.

Those changes may seem small, but just replacing one lightbulb per household with a low energy bulb at the same time could reduce total demand by ~2GW. So it all adds up.

Mart.

zeupater

Martyn1981 wrote: »

... Those changes may seem small, but just replacing one lightbulb per household with a low energy bulb at the same time could reduce total demand by ~2GW. So it all adds up ...

Hi

Much more savings related to the cumulative effects of the digital changeover and introduction of HD channels 'tempting' a good proportion of consumers to purchase more energy efficient LCD, or latterly, LED TVs .... that's probably knocked somewhere around 3 to 5GW out of the evening demand between 17:00 and 22:00 alone, and unlike lighting, the demand and it's hours aren't particularly seasonal.

HTH
Z