Commercial solar panels and in home battery systems
theoldmiser
Forumite 52 Posts
I'm just thinking aloud: we know that the cost of solar panels has gone down by about 98% over the past twenty to thirty years, and with current electricity prices, you are looking at a payback time of less than five years for a home solar system. You can buy new solar panels at 38p per watt (this doesn't include the cost of batteries and inverters, and installation, etc.) but it's still incredibly cheap. And that's the cost to the public - an electricity company would be buying tens of thousands of panels at a time, direct from the manufacturer, and would doubtless get them at 20p per watt or something like that.
We are told by naysayers that renewable energy isn't going to be able to replace coal and gas fired power stations, because a) the wind doesn't blow all the time, and b) the sun doesn't shine at night, and solar panels have a much lower output when it is cloudy, and it's not possible for energy companies to store gigawatts of energy for the times when these interruptions to renewable energy arise.
But what if all houses were leased or sold on interest free credit, by power companies, 30-50kw/h or LiFePo4 batteries, to store solar power and wind power when they weren't using large amounts in their houses? The battery systems would be spread all over the country, in people's houses, where they are needed, with no transmission losses, and thus solar farms and wind farms could fill these batteries when they were generating more electricity than the public could use (presuming that point is ever reached.)
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A little-known fact about ‘smart’ home chargers and ‘smart meters’ is that the government intend to use all these electric cars as a store of energy to smooth the demand made upon the power generating industry.
Vehicle to grid (V2G) Vehicle to grid technology is an advanced form of power management, and it's a potentially crucial part of the electric car future.
In 2020, Energy supplier Ovo Energy was running a vehicle to grid trial. If you're registered to the trial, you get to choose a charging schedule via an app on your phone. This sets the minimum state of charge you need your car to be and for what time.
For example, you’ve come home at 6pm in the evening, plugged your car in and specified that you want your car to be at least 80% full by 7am the following morning.
Overnight, your car will be charged when demand on the network is low, and when it’s more likely that energy from renewable sources is feeding the grid.
But when demand on the grid is high, the charger can take power from your car, power your home and sell any excess energy back to the grid, helping to manage the UK power network and earning you money. Your app will tell you how much money you’ve made by doing this.
From <https://www.which.co.uk/reviews/new-and ... arthreepin>
Smart grids have been discussed for decades, I remember being told that it would revolutionise everything when I start working in the industry over 20 years ago. But it requires government to implement, as the investment and infrastructure costs are too large for utility companies to bear themselves. It also requires intrusion into private households to force/bribe people to join, which most people would be suspicious of - think of the public reaction to smart meters, let alone a whole smart electricity system!
I already run my house off solar and batteries, using low off peak tariffs. But my EV isn't automatically set up as V2G, and my charging point definitely isn't, so there's a big disconnect that can never be managed by the market alone - it needs government intervention/control to succeed. If you leave it to markets to decide then you will get numerous and incompatible competing technologies that help no one.
If it breaks, well it wasn't working right anyway.
I wonder why we don't have a similar scheme?