Solar ... In the news

NigeWick wrote: »

China's got some on lakes.

Lots of countries have rolled out floating PV on lakes and reservoirs, it's been quite successful I believe.

Bad news.

Can you believe it?

Government quietly shelves plans for feed-in tariff review

Last year a BEIS spokesperson informed Solar Power Portal that it intended to conduct a review of the feed-in tariff, to be published before the end of 2017.

The spokesperson said in April: “BEIS intends to conduct a review of the balance of deployment caps between and within technologies, taking into account deployment patterns and wider government priorities. This will be published later this year.”

This was in response to questions over the government’s commitment to conducting bi-annual reviews of the feed-in tariff’s performance, as mandated within the consultation response published in December 2015.

However the department now appears to have shelved the review, according to written answers provided by Perry.

Good news.

Zestec targets commercial rooftop market with multi-million-pound, subsidy-free model

Zestec Asset Management is aiming to ignite the UK’s commercial solar rooftop market with a multi-million pound, subsidy-free model.

The scheme, which is financed by institutional and private investment, offers commercial rooftop installations for businesses backed by power purchase agreements.

Zestec develops and manages the installs while commercial entities enter into long-term PPAs that only rise owing to RPI.

Yes, Arizona has an ickle bit more sun than the UK but softly, softly, catchee monkey:-

Solar Plus Batteries Beat Out Natural Gas In Two US Electricity Markets

Nicolai_Grenovski wrote: »

This is misleading - there are two things to note.
Firstly, German prices do not include transmission costs -there is no direct equivalency to UK pricing-
You need to add in the region of 25-35% for the UK cost dependent upon multiple factors.
The true measure is LCOL (Levelized Cost of Leccy).


Secondly, there is a lot of what we call "Wiedererwerb" (reacquisition ) of stock and older technology cells.
Older low efficiency panels originally sold for the domestic market are being purchased for solar farms and newer higher efficiency panels (with a smaller footprint) are being installed domestically to increase domestic efficiency.

Simply put: If you have cheap land and a warehouse full of low efficiency (originally domestic) panels cheap enough, then you can undercut the current install price by a significant margin.

I have often heard of the need to add 25-35% (or TBH 30%) to some auction prices, but these have tended to be for very large scale on-shore wind, or off-shore wind.

I'm not sure I've seen a reference for adding such costs to PV.

1. PV is usually (possibly always?) connected to the LV grid, not the HV grid, so whereas an off-shore wind farm needs the whole infrastructure built out, and possibly reinforced, the PV farm probably only needs to pay for the connection fee to the LV grid. And whilst UK DNO's have a reputation for charging a lot to connect new properties, businesses etc, I'm not sure that it would be 35%. Perhaps you have a link/reference, for which I would be grateful.

2. PV farm locations are often chosen for their 'nearness' to a suitable LV grid connection. In fact the proposed giant subsidy free farm in Kent plans to piggy back off the network built out to service a wind farm. Since the technologies tend to be complimentary, rather than competitive, that seems like a good plan.

3. Regardless of such costs, the German contracts in early 2015 were of an almost identical cost to the UK CfD prices !!!8364;91 v's £80 per MWh.

Since then the German costs have fallen by approx Euro50/MWh (around £43/MWh). So whilst it might not be exactly scientific nor economically certain, it does seem fair to suggest that if German costs have fallen by that amount since early 2015, then UK costs would benefit from similar gains.

4 (or 3 pt 2). If UK costs are +35%, then we could take the 2015 £80/MWh price, strip out the infrastructure costs you suggest of +35% = £59/MWh, deduct the German savings of £43 = £16/MWh, then add back on 35% = £21.60/MWh .... but I'm not sure that sounds at all reasonable, so perhaps we'll skip this calculation.

5. I've no idea if your cheap old panel suggestion is true or not, but I should point out that it would mean increased land costs (even if the land is cheap) as a greater area would be needed, so that would carry an annual penalty through OPEX.

6. If you take a look at the second graph in this article, then you'll see that utility scale PV install costs in the UK are slightly less than in Germany, or at least they were last summer.


[Edit - Just to say if UK costs truly are Germany + 25/35%, then that's still excellent news, I've been suggesting that PV is probably about £50/MWh now, and Euro43.30 + 25/35% = approx £47.48 to £51.28/MWh. M.]