Are solar panels pointless?

QrizB

lomasonhere said:

According to the calculator on this site, the 'savings' on my electric bill does not equal my bill. And my usage is not great. 

It would be helpful if you could provide a link to the calculator you've used, and let us know what parameters you put into it.

If your usage is low, it follows that the potential savings are also low.

lomasonhere said:

I have read so many reports since solar panels became common that say they do not live up to the installing companys'  promise.

Installers make some crazy claims - I remember one quote claiming the household would use 90% of the power generated - but that doesn't mean that panels are pointless or uneconomic.

If they do work so well, why do electricity companies not fit them for free, the cost covered by the excess power they supposedly generate? 

I don't know why you think "electricity companies" would want to fit panels to houses. They can put 40MW of panels in a field for much less money than fitting 10000 homes with 4kW each.

... they are above the budget of most people, as witnessed by the number of roofs that carry them. Becoming green is currently for the rich. If the Gov really want to get carbon production down, they would do much more to enable people to cut theirs down.

If you qualify for government help, yes you can get solar panels installed at no cost to you via the ECO scheme.
If you're sufficiently well off not to qualify for help, you are likely to be able to afford to pay for your own panels. A domestic PV installation is a similar price to an 8-year-old Ford Focus and can be financed for around £100/month.

ed110220

This seems to be an ill-informed statement dressed up as a question.

By far the biggest factor in the explosive growth of solar PV has been the increase in manufacturing capacity, volumes made and associated fall in costs. Here's a chart from earlier this year. To show how fast things are moving, more recent estimates are for 250 GW to be installed this year. 


On the other hand the actual technology has only been improving fairly slowly. For example when I first looked into it about 10 years ago, the highest powered panels commonly available for domestic use were about 333W, so I could have fitted 12 x 333W = 4kW. Long story short I couldn't get them fitted until we had our asbestos roof replaced. When I finally got them fitted earlier this year they were up to 400W so 12 x 400W = 4.8kW. But I'd rather have had 10 years of solar electricity than waiting for this modest improvement! I definitely wouldn't be waiting around for more incremental improvements with the rocketing price of electricity at the moment!

Panels generally come with a 25 year guarantee but you see a lot of nonsense claims about them only lasting 10 years or some other made up number. Mine are Hyundai which come with a guarantee of at least 84.8% after 25 years ie the initial 4.8 kW system should have degraded to no less than 4 kW after 25 years. Real world experiences suggests that guarantees are conservative and the rate of degradation is a lot less than the maximum allowed by guarantees. 

Savings are going to depend on how much electricity you use, how much you use during the day and whether you get a battery or batteries to store some of the electricity to use in the evening. And of course how electricity prices change with time.

Since install on 21 June I have used 381 kWh of my solar electricity worth £108.20 and exported 447 kWh worth £31.29. My provider's cheapest tariff available to sign up to today is 56.97p/kWh (!) so that 381 kWh would save me £217.05 at the new rate.

Mikeyboy01443

I never paid much attention to what one installer or another says i could save, you need to work that out yourself based on your usage...
For me i knew i wanted them as a high electric user, with a mainly electric house things will only get worse, i don't want to be paying 3 or 400 a month, that's ridiculous! 
I had mine installed mid may and i keep an eye on it, so far in savings / earnings from export im up over 400 quid so far... would have been more but my export only started in July! 

jamesmorgan

Whilst not pointless, there are too many risk factors in my opinion to justify solar panels as an investment.  Many people install them for other reasons (eg ethical) and that is fine.  In terms of reliabilty they may turn out to be very reliable, but it is too early to really know.  In the same way as early energy saving lightbulbs were sold on the basis of extremely long lives, in real world conditions many turned out not to last as long as was originally assumed.   However, the main issues are not technical but political/policy.  With a really long payback there is too much risk of changes to government policy (or macro economic changes) that would destroy any initial payback assumptions.

If I had a spare £5-10K sitting around and wanted to invest it for optimum payback, solar panels wouldn't be very close to the top of the list.  For example, the FTSE100 total return over the past 10 years is around 85%, so my £10K would now be worth £18.5K.  There is the added benefit that if I decide to no longer invest in the FTSE100 and can take out my £18.5K and invest in something else tomorrow.  Whilst I wouldn't necessary recommend FTSE100 as the ideal investment vehicle, it illustrates the point that other investments are likely to perform a lot better.

My broad thoughts are that energy generation is much better when economies of scale are used to drive efficiency.  Solar farms are a much better long term option than the cottage industry of having a generator on everyone's house.

ispookie666

@jamesmorgan
I paid 5400 for panels in 2015 and have recouped all of it from generation and FiT payment and will have another 15 years of FiT payment along with energy savings. If I put the savings and FiT into a FTSE tracker with the current energy prices I will not be far off ! 

This will not be the case with my second install which has cost me nearly 17k but in the roughly two months my battery has been working I have saved £500approx. 

Financial side is only one facet of this. For me it was more about being energy self sufficient and being a bit of a geek, it was no brainer. I suspect the Solar market is going to cool down significantly in a few years when the electricity prices come down, this has happened in 2015-17.

As I mentioned before Solar is the easily accessible energy generation scheme for domestic market without having to jump through the hoops of planning permission etc.. 

silverwhistle

jamesmorgan said:

.  In terms of reliabilty they may turn out to be very reliable, but it is too early to really know. 

If I had a spare £5-10K sitting around and wanted to invest it for optimum payback, solar panels wouldn't be very close to the top of the list.

Reliability has been established, they've been around for a long time.

As for the spare £6k I spent on mine, they came from my rainy day savings in a cash ISA that was yielding pretty well nothing. I didn't have to touch my long term share investment, and I've since built back up my short term cash savings again. I've invested in infrastructure which is giving me a decent long term return, much more so than a new kitchen or new car.

Beyond the ethical component it also gives me a degree of peace of mind regarding fuel bills and a decent amount of mileage in the summer for my new EV. I agree economies of scale are good, but I am now as a generator as well much more aware of energy usage.

70sbudgie

jamesmorgan said:

My broad thoughts are that energy generation is much better when economies of scale are used to drive efficiency.  Solar farms are a much better long term option than the cottage industry of having a generator on everyone's house.

The huge benefit of domestic PV generation is the impact on behaviours of the owners. This has been shown to have had a much bigger impact on the electricity usage profile than was previously anticipated. 

And although solar farms do have their benefits, they take up quite a bit of space and in this time where people are becoming more conscious of land use, I anticipate the push back for large scale solar increasing.

The, as yet untapped, potential for PV generation is commercial rooftop. Imagine if all new warehouses, distribution centres had roofs that generated electricity? That would go a long way towards, not just offsetting their carbon footprint, but contributing towards supplying the country with renewable energy. The technology is now at the point where >1MW rooftop installations are feasible.

lomasonhere

With the current and increasing cost of electric, and gas, domestic solar panels do become more viable, indeed. But the initial cost of installation is still expensive, or it would be seen on far more roofs. Selling the spare generation is possibly not a good idea, because it would be needed for the shorter, colder days of Winter. So further expense of something like a Tesla battery would be needed. Is there some form of device that connects home generation to a home's 240vlt power grid that stops it feeding into the National Grid? But I would suspect that many who say the system works for them, and even earns money, are not in all day. It's interesting that few wind turbines appear in people's gardens. There are actually hybrid kits, wind and solar, that supposedly generate up to 4kw a day for less than £1000, including a battery. Self installed of course. Worth a thought

lomasonhere

The UK is a small highly populated county, most open countryside is needed for farming, so it's unlikely vast areas will be turned over for solar panels as in some countries, those countries having almost constant blazing sun all year. What there is in the UK are 1000s if not millions of roofs, that the power generating companies could make use of. And for far less than filling the coast with windfarms.

BTW. As I said, I used this site's tool to see what I could generate on my house, and it does not ask for my actual usage. It does not need to.

gazapc

lomasonhere said:

With the current and increasing cost of electric, and gas, domestic solar panels do become more viable, indeed. But the initial cost of installation is still expensive, or it would be seen on far more roofs. Selling the spare generation is possibly not a good idea, because it would be needed for the shorter, colder days of Winter. So further expense of something like a Tesla battery would be needed. Is there some form of device that connects home generation to a home's 240vlt power grid that stops it feeding into the National Grid? But I would suspect that many who say the system works for them, and even earns money, are not in all day. It's interesting that few wind turbines appear in people's gardens. There are actually hybrid kits, wind and solar, that supposedly generate up to 4kw a day for less than £1000, including a battery. Self installed of course. Worth a thought

Installing a domestic wind turbine would be terrible advice for the >95% of people who live in urban areas, have normal sized gardens, or gardens sheltered by trees. The only way they might make sense is if you live in a house on top of an exposed hill etc..