Solar ... In the news

silverwhistle

You do appreciate that your long post 1317 doesn't give a very good impression of you (let alone your arguments)?

[Deleted User]

silverwhistle wrote: »

You do appreciate that your long post 1317 doesn't give a very good impression of you (let alone your arguments)?

Yeah, sounds a bit like Benidorm episode - Mick Garvey ranting after paying a £1 to poo on a budget airline!

EricMears

Cardew wrote: »

Isn't this the disgraceful Nuclear subsidies thread?

There's a bit of a clue at the top of the page !


It says "Solar ... In the news" - and I think that probably means "in the news this week" rather than "reported in the press 5 years ago".

Cardew

EricMears wrote: »

There's a bit of a clue at the top of the page !


It says "Solar ... In the news" - and I think that probably means "in the news this week" rather than "reported in the press 5 years ago".

How astute of you to notice, and a pity you didn't understand the irony.


I know what the thread should be about. However any comment/answer by myself about FIT e.g. a query from 'Lifes Grand Plan' is met by reams from the Guru along the lines of:


Cardew likes Nuclear, followed by a diatribe about the subsidies Nuclear receives. Not just this thread, but every time FIT is mentioned.


On a wider issue, do you not think it rather pathetic that a load of posters(all PV owners) gang up to stifle any criticism of FIT. I do appreciate you have heard it all before, but believe it or not there are new readers of this section, and indeed people like 'Lifes Grand Plan' actually posed a question about FIT! Now we all understand the GURU, with his unquestioning love of solar cannot bear any input from outside his 'gang', but is it necessary for you all to support him? Why not just ignore the posts?

Martyn1981

EricMears wrote: »

Moving forward to 2030 (and I'd be amazed if anyone can really make an accurate forecast that far in advance !) our 'average household will be paying £13 towards FIT payments, £213 towards other levies and (only !) £1300 for the actual electricity. And again, our 'poor households' are likely to pay a lot less than 'average' ones.

Hiya Eric. I'm still pondering that list you posted, very interesting.

Here's a question, possibly pedantic, I'm not sure, and may need Z to explain.

I was thinking again about the carbon tax element for 2030, which is a considerable amount of the total (£80 out of £226). Whereas the other levies are on top of the leccy price for subsidies, promotion, support etc, it seems to me that the carbon tax is actually a cost of generating leccy from !!!!!!.

So its impact should be shown in higher grid prices, not as an add on levy. For instance the cost of raw coal, and labour are in the coal generating price, so payment for CO2 impact, should really be classed as a production cost.

Of course, this makes no difference to final bills, since whether it's added as a higher price, or a levy on top, has the same result. But it seems (to me) that it's better placed as a cost, than a green levy.

BTW, I'm assuming it's placed on costs, because the increase in the carbon tax is one of the reasons given for the closure of so much coal generation recently, as the plant owners are claiming they can no longer compete economically.

Mart.

Martyn1981

Another storage system hitting the streets from Daimler AG:

Daimler Starts Selling Home Energy Storage Units

It's a modular system sold in 2.5kWh increments, with a 1.25kW supply multiple for each pack added, upto 4.6kW.

Here are some specs.


I've tried to loosely string bits together from the article, the specs and the comments, and it seems that a 5kWh model would provide:

4.6kWh of useable storage.
Provide 8,000 cycles at an 80% DoD (20+ years!)
10 year guarantee.
Cost ~£5k.
Cost per kWh, £5k/ 5kWh x8,000 cycles x80% DoD x 97% DC/DC efficiency x 90% battery efficiency over lifetime (100% down to 80%) = 18p/kWh.

[Edit: Should have said, it's a Li-ion battery, partnered with a SMA Sunny Island inverter, suggesting it will work during a power cut. M.]

Bit more waiting to do then.

Mart.

zeupater

Cardew wrote: »

.... On a wider issue, do you not think it rather pathetic that a load of posters(all PV owners) gang up to stifle any criticism of FIT. I do appreciate you have heard it all before, but believe it or not there are new readers of this section, and indeed people like 'Lifes Grand Plan' actually posed a question about FIT! Now we all understand the GURU, with his unquestioning love of solar cannot bear any input from outside his 'gang', but is it necessary for you all to support him? Why not just ignore the posts?

Hi

I don't think that anyone is looking to gang-up on anyone, to me it just seems to be a case of a number of mainly pretty enlightened individuals highlighting how what was considered an ill-conceived and intellectually naive argument against the FiT scheme (at introduction) that it was seen by many as bordering on pathetic at the time, had actually proved to be totally pathetic and almost irrelevant after so few years that Monbiot himself would likely steer clear of anywhere approaching the level of creedence which Cardew continues to apply ... of course, if the worship at the temple of Monbiot is to be defended, the great and worthy George himself is always welcome to join the community and post his own views, but I'm sure that even he'd be given an intellectual whipping if attempting to defend the relevance of past errors ....

Now, in the absence of any evidence that even Monbiot himself believes that the article still has a considerable level of credibility and that his more recent publications, although still critical and full of technical inconsistencies, have been much more considered, I think that it's time that Cardew considered that it's rediculous to continue to grasp at straws and simply realise that reiterating and regurgitating long-discredited 'truths' is just seen as a form of self-denial by almost everyone else ...

Although engineers normally consider themselves to never be wrong, in circumstances where errors are identified & rear their ugly heads the acceptible resolution is to agree, accept, rectify and move forward ....

Now, at the end of any 'in the news' bulletin there used to be a lighthearted comment, so following good practice ...... I'd predict that if we introduced a poll on whether the oft-referenced Monbiot article from years ago was substantially discredited to 98 informed individuals+Cardew+George Monbiot himself, the likely result would be 98 in agreement, 1 against and a single abstention (:hello: hello George!) ....

Z

Martyn1981

zeupater wrote: »

Now, at the end of any 'in the news' bulletin there used to be a lighthearted comment, so following good practice ...... I'd predict that if we introduced a poll on whether the oft-referenced Monbiot article from years ago was substantially discredited to 98 informed individuals+Cardew+George Monbiot himself, the likely result would be 98 in agreement, 1 against and a single abstention (:hello: hello George!) ....

Z

Hiya Z. I think you'll find Monbiot won't abstain, since he admitted 6 years ago that the claim that £8.6bn would be transferred from poor households, was actually not true.

Solar PV has failed in Germany and it will fail in the UK


Comment section, 11-3-2010 14:09

Monbiot

Monbiotwatch:

"Billions of pounds" will not have been committed by 2013 on PV or any other technology as a result of this very modest feed-in tariff scheme.

It's not just the tariffs which will have been forked out by then, but the capital costs, incurred by householders, of the equipment. It will certainly stretch to billions. And if you think 41p is "very modest" I dread to imagine what you'd consider an expensive tariff.

Monbiotwatch:

The total cumulative cost to all electricity consumers (not just households) of this scheme and for all technologies is £6.7 billion by 2030. You claimed incorrectly in your first piece that the Gvt was "about" to take £8.6 billion from the "poor" and give it to the "middle class".

The government's impact assessment shows that the total cost will be £8.6bn. Most of this money will come from tariffs, the rest from spending of other kinds. It's true to say that not all this money will be taken from the poor, but the overall impact, as I'm sure you can see, is regressive.

etc etc ... (I'm meant to be taking my 3-year old to the beach, so no time for the rest. Will come back to it if time later).

So I doubt, 6 years after admitting it wasn't true, he would still try to defend a false claim.


Regarding the issue of all leccy consumers paying for the subsidy, sounds fair to me.

Regarding the issue of the subsidy going to the owners of the relevant and eligible powerstation, sounds logical to me.

Comparing to all other subsidies, including nuclear, they are financed by the same method, but FiTs is the only one where the monies are returned to the demand side (consumers).

Seems to me that FiTs (when compared to the other energy subsidies) is actually the fairest by far. So it seems odd to try to 'spin it' as the bad guy!

Mart.

kevin6666

Interesting sub 10kW PV FIT installs continue to fail to meet UK caps with the extra capacity rolling over into yet lower and lower tariffs.

I think it's fair to say FIT has failed. Appreciate Mart will be on saying PV is now super cheap..yet no one wants it despite it still apparently returning investment over 20 years.

The old boys from late 2011-early 2012 continue raking in the cash, probably looking at 4-6x returns over 25 years, while traditional power generation is at an all time low and making some major losses throughout Europe.

Nice.

kevin6666

http://www.powermag.com/spains-power-system-slashes-debt-2015/

Decent info on what happened in Spain when you introduce poorly thought out FITs to renewables. No conclusions but they can be easily be drawn.

Looks like Spains position on FIT is been held up by the courts so far.