Solar ... In the news

ASavvyBuyer

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Great news, new PV owners won't be charged for export.

................... you what?

E.On to bridge the FiT gap with ‘first of its kind’ Solar Rewards export payment



That's the good news, and well done E.On. But here comes the fun bit:

Octopus scheme for export payments too:
www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/octopus_energy_to_outdo_export_tariff_with_outgoin g_product

michaels

ASavvyBuyer wrote: »

Octopus scheme for export payments too:
www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/news/octopus_energy_to_outdo_export_tariff_with_outgoin g_product

It would be nice if those already with PV could sell their generation as well as still getting the fit....perhaps with a battery install they could still get the fit and then sell export from the battery at peak times....

Martyn1981

New news item, not new news, who knew?

Half a GWh of annual leccy, and no land loss. Nice.

Aviva embraces solar carports with 608kW system at Norwich office

GreatApe

michaels wrote: »

It would be nice if those already with PV could sell their generation as well as still getting the fit....perhaps with a battery install they could still get the fit and then sell export from the battery at peak times....

It is not worth the charge/discharge and capital costs of the battery

It is better to just dump it into the grid until solar saturates the grid and we are very far away from that point.

Also a small amount of batteries will mean any peak pricing is gone. plus peak pricing is mostly irrelevant marginal traders doing their thang most electricity is bought forward or produced by vertically integrated utilities

All battery investments at this stage are a real loss and net negative environmentally vs just dumping into the grid

The only reason it might make a little sense is because the business model is wrong

Electricity should be sold with a high fixed cost and a low marginal cost because that is a truer reflection of how the system operates. Plus with some sort of mechanism to vary price vs peaks both local and national

The marginal cost of a marginal unit of electricity in the uk is about 2p which is 1p gas through a turbine. Electricity should thus cost maybe only 5p a unit with a high fixed charge for the grid connection. So maybe something like £30 a month grid connection for a home + 5p/kwh on top of that.

In some countries they kinda do this already eg in France you can pay for different levels of grid connection. And their lower cost electricity means millions more homes are heated electrically compared to the uk

The French produce about 500TWh from nuclear and hydro which meets 100% of their ~300TWh of electricity needs and the other ~200 TWh meets some of their base load and seasonal heating needs which is why the french use so much less natural gas vs the uk for roughly the same population even once accounting for NG through CCGTs

NigeWick

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Half a GWh of annual leccy, and no land loss.

I wonder if other companies, councils and etc will follow suit?

GreatApe

Martyn1981 wrote: »

Flip & eck. $22/MWh for PV.

Idaho Power PPA Sets US Low Price Record

Then why is solar PV not expanding like hot cakes in the USA?
Last years additions were what, enough to meet less than 0.5% of USA annual electricity demand?

If something is truly economical and better than what come before it, it takes over in a short time frame. Look at shale, 2010-2020 dominated the USA (and arguably world) energy outlook

Shale gas alone, if put through modern CCGTs would be enough to produce 125% of all USA electricity consumption needs and that is in less than a decade of expansion


The amount of bias is amusing.
Something that works and produces >1TW of power is an accounting trick irrelevant and about to fail. While subsidy supported PV is 'too cheap to meter' yet isn't being deployed at any significant rate. I would rather look at real world deployments than propaganda articles

PV will take a lot of market share but it will be slow and supported in one form or another

mmmmikey

GreatApe wrote: »

Electricity should be sold with a high fixed cost and a low marginal cost because that is a truer reflection of how the system operates.

If you consider the impact of this on demand and then Google the term "global warming" I think you'll see the flaw in this thinking!

Martyn1981

NigeWick wrote: »

I wonder if other companies, councils and etc will follow suit?

Well, if you liked that 0.6MWp carport, you'll love Bentley's 2.7MWp baby, assuming it got built?

Construction starts on 2.7MW Bentley solar carport

silverwhistle

mmmmikey wrote: »

If you consider the impact of this on demand and then Google the term "global warming" I think you'll see the flaw in this thinking!

Did you have to quote him Mikey?:D


The level of his contributions don't get any better! His solution would be deeply regressive and secondly, (your point), price signals.

Martyn1981

mmmmikey wrote: »

If you consider the impact of this on demand and then Google the term "global warming" I think you'll see the flaw in this thinking!

Yep, spot on. Gone are the days when energy could just be bought by the rich, so to speak, and wasted, as we now know that there are consequences to its use.

So energy needs to be priced accordingly, almost treated as a luxury, yeah I know that's going a bit far, but certainly not as a product that can be wasted, which is what happens when something has a high fixed price, and low marginal price.

That's one of the reasons I'd like to see standing charges removed, and all costs placed on the unit price. The 'petrol forecourt' solution.

Technically, the average consumer would see no price change, only the low and high users would see a change, rewarding low use and penalising high use.

But more importantly, as the unit price goes up, so do the savings from reduced waste, and the savings from buying more efficient goods, and the savings from self generation.

To test the ideas, take them to the extreme. If we had a £1,000 charge for having a leccy supply, then free leccy, we'd buy the cheapest lamps, possibly incandescents. If we had no standing charge and a £1/kWh fee, we'd all be 'fully' LED already. Not exactly complicated.