Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The Times has seen plans indicating that the British government will soon announce a roadmap for installing solar panels on virtually all newly-built houses. If the legislation passes this year, the requirements might come into force in 2027.
According to experts, the plan will require 80% of new homes to cover 40% of their ground area with solar panels. Another 19% of new builds would have lower requirements due to factors such as roof angle, orientation, and shade. About one percent might be exempt from including panels.
Although the plans would make building new properties up to around £4,000 more expensive, the panels could help families save up to £1,000 on energy bills annually, potentially paying off the extra building costs in four years.
If implemented, the initiative would bring the UK closer to its goal of decarbonizing its electric grid by 2030.
Part of the strategy involves installing up to 47 gigawatts of solar power capacity by the end of this decade. The government is also expected to announce government loans for installing solar panels on existing homes, but building scaffolding and rewiring old buildings for solar is far more expensive than building it into new structures.
Although panels can dramatically reduce (and sometimes erase) energy bills, mass adoption can also throw power grids off balance. In Australia, which has adopted solar energy with remarkable speed over the last two decades, the technology sometimes generates more power than grids can withstand.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by VLM on Wednesday May 07, @05:40PM (17 children)
Panel cost is STILL falling and although very slowly slowing down.
However there's a hard lower bound that even if panels were "damn near free" there would still be the substantial labor cost.
Meanwhile grid tie inverters are not really dropping, holding around ten cents per watt, and are carefully mis-designed to rapidly burn out needing replacement.
My guess is the situation in the Islamic State of Englandistan in 2040 (legacy population will be a small minority by then) will be panels on roofs but not connected to anything because ain't nobody got time (or money) for that.
I don't really have words to express how crazy the current situation is, economically speaking. Cheap import junk designed to rapidly fail inverters are now a 1/3 the project cost, panels are running only about thirty cents delivered in large size and large quantity. At some point, maybe already past, over the lifetime of the system, it'll be cheaper to not grid-tie than to grid-tie. LiFePO4 batteries are dropping at a faster rate than relatively constant grid-tie inverter prices. "If all graphs continue in a straight line" its inevitable that people will not grid tie anymore and there will be no grid once it gets unstable enough (Spain style)
Interesting point to make: at current efficiency, my suburban lot, admittedly kind of large, can reliably generate about 1 MWh of power per year over the long term based on historical solar farm data around where I live (lattitude dependent). If I was willing to live in permanent shadow, treeless. Realistically, us suburbanites will be able to generate at most a MWh with minimal effort. Urbanites will have to live in the dark LOL.
Another novel point: Supply price without distribution, a MWh trades around "fifty bucks" and power companies sell to retail consumers for around "a hundred bucks" and then some govts add lots of taxes etc but the ratio is about 2:1. So I'm not going to get rich as a solar farmer as a suburban home owner.
If the average house uses maybe 10 MWh/yr and the average suburban lot generates maybe 1 MWh/yr there will have to be about 9 MWh/yr of propaganda to make up the difference.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 07, @07:04PM (9 children)
My preferred inverter configuration (in theory, because I still can't make economic sense of solar in my property) is the per-panel AC inverters. When one panel gets shaded, it doesn't bring down the output of all the panels the way a string inverter can. The voltages don't go crazy high the way many panels in series systems can. And, if you want to expand (or contract) the system they are totally modular and mix and match compatible with different size / power panels.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday May 07, @07:39PM (2 children)
You can pay a bit extra to have "compensators" fitted with your solar panels so that any shading on one will not affect the power output of the others in the string.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 07, @08:00PM (1 child)
Many ways to skin a cat...
If I'm doing my own install or even maintenance work on a solar system, I'm much more comfortable up on a roof with 220VAC instead of 600VDC.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, @03:32AM
There are pros and cons to both systems. I'm more inclined to go with the "micro inverters" too.
But to clarify: most solar panels (properly called "module") have Schottky diodes in them.
Series strung modules don't necessarily put out 600V. That's the absolute maximum for most normal wiring. Systems I've done were typically 10 modules per panel, so about 360V open circuit, and around 300-320 running, loaded.
Not to be a nit-pic, and I know many still call it 220, but in the USA we've had 240VAC for 50+ years.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 08, @01:11AM (5 children)
This has also been my conclusion. I keep running the numbers, and the answer I keep getting is that rooftop solar is still not worth it. Last I checked, about 2 years ago, they were asking about $40k for a 12 kW system. Too much risk that the system will fail much sooner than it ought. Lot of risk it will be destroyed by a hailstorm. Yeah, sure, there's insurance. But we all know that it's one thing to have insurance, and quite another to get them to pay up on a claim. I just hate having to deal with the Claims Denial Department, as it is sardonically known. And even if they do pay, they're just going to hike your rates under the excuse that you are now high risk.
There is also insufficient assurance that the rooftop solar will perform as well as advertised. I know too well that salespeople and companies exaggerate. I do not trust them. I know that Walmart used Lennox A/Cs, then switched to Aaon for a short while. But upon noticing that the Aaon units never seemed to cool as much as they ought, sent them to an independent lab for testing, and found that Aaon had lied about the capacity, whereas Lennox had not. Walmart switched back to Lennox. Walmart is big and wealthy enough to check such claims, the poor individual resident is not.
And how typical that commercial vendors take advantage of the focus on the solar cells to dump shoddy inverters on the unsuspecting customer. Years ago, I noticed a similar problem with computers. CompUSA was one of the worst practitioners of the trick of discounting the main item, the desktop PC, then gouging on the peripherals. Counted on the customers focusing too much on the big ticket item. Keyboards and mice started at $30. There simply were none to be had for under $10 each, not at CompUSA. Mouse pads, which cost less than 50 cents, had an outrageous minimum asking price of $5. Even such a simple item as a dual jack for the phone line (back in the days of dial-up), they asked $10 for that while the K-mart right next door was asking $2. Another very common trick, when they did offer a computer with all the peripherals, was to leave out the biggest one, the monitor.
And so, another factor in rooftop solar that the vendors ignore intensively is, how much does an installation increase the property taxes? It's not a trivial amount, it's enough to swing the numbers from paying for itself in 10 to 20 years, to blow out the payback period to over 30 years.
Still another question is, to battery or not to battery? If I could get a reliable battery tech and chemistry that lasts, such as nickel iron, battery may be worthwhile. Nickel iron has a lot of other downsides, however. But if it's the kind of battery that's going to fail in 5 years, or maybe just 2, then no, not worth it. On the whole, I fear that batteries are too high maintenance. It does not increase my confidence to know that Tesla has been caught lying. I know their range claims unrealistically assume ideal conditions. What might they be lying about with their battery tech? Of course, the CEO has now embraced a pathological liar of a politician. Would be a fool to trust anything Tesla claims. So, how about a flywheel? Rosen Motors tried to do a flywheel powered car. I do not fully understand why that didn't work out, and the stories about Rosen's demise tend to blame big automakers for being too conservative, thus suggesting that the flywheel in a car idea did work. As I recall, the issue was that it simply didn't have enough range. For rooftop solar, a flywheel could be stationary, thus eliminating the many problems with trying to make it portable. Probably still hella expensive.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 08, @03:08AM (1 child)
On actual efficiency of the rooftop solar, my neighbor installed a 60 panel system. He told me that after they get pollen covered in the spring (and the pollen can get stuck on in certain dew conditions) that he loses about 30% of his output. There has been a ladder and brush on a stick outside his garage for the past two weeks - they cleaned 3 of the 60 panels before apparently getting tired of scrubbing. I know the phenomenon well, I tried scrubbing the mold off my metal roof once, it's a lot of hot work. I called a local service company to estimate the job: $3K. I can live with some mold on my roof, it's not like I have solar panels that it's shading...
On the shoddy AC manufacturers, I bought a 24000 BTU whole house wall unit, its blower motor failed after a year - just after the warranty expired. Service guy opened it up and found a label on the motor "check lubricant level every 6 months" with a little oil port that is in no way serviceable - service guy had to cut the motor shaft to get it out for replacement and it was buried deep in the unit. Called the company, their line "there are no user serviceable parts inside..." Label proves: made to fail.
>CompUSA was one of the worst practitioners of the trick of discounting the main item, the desktop PC, then gouging on the peripherals.
Best Buy was famous for overpriced TVs and quadruple overpriced cables.
>how much does an installation increase the property taxes?
I think our state (Florida) and several others actually have a property tax exemption for all "green energy" improvements on the property. Though that could change at any moment.
>Still another question is, to battery or not to battery?
Not really a question in my mind. As you say, it's down to chemistry and the leading candidate at the moment is LiFePO4 whiich has a cycle life of about 3000 recharges. When you do the math on that, even if the power going into the battery is free, the battery itself is costing you upwards of $0.15/kWh in its depreciation per charge cycle.
> know that Tesla has been caught lying.
The shock, the horror, the all too predictable plot.
>stories about Rosen's demise tend to blame big automakers for being too conservative
I have heard this several times from new auto-tech inventors at various stages of attempting to get their tech up to economies of scale.
> Probably still hella expensive.
Yeah, there are gyro-stabilizer systems for boats, the one for my 30' 10,000 lb sailboat costs a bit over twice what I paid for the whole boat with engine, rigging, spare sails, air conditioning, nav electronics, etc.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, @03:35AM
Regarding the dirty solar panels: maybe tear-off very thin plastic sheets would be a better solution?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Whoever on Thursday May 08, @03:30PM (1 child)
In 2016, I had solar panels installed on my roof in California. Unlike others, I never saw a significant change in output due to dirt, pollen, etc.. I did periodically clean the panels but it never made a difference. Partly, this was because the inverter was under-sized in comparison to the panel output, so for a couple of hours a day in summer, the output was limited by the inverter. We had a very favorable net energy metering plan which was supposed to apply to the house for 20 years. California is now considering revoking that agreement, or at least revoking it if the house changes hands again (we sold the house last year).
I estimate that the system paid for itself in 5 years. The system output exceeded the projections from the installer.
The installer went bankrupt in 2017 or 2018. However, the inverter had a 12 year manufacturer's warranty and the panels had a 25 year manufacturer's warranty, including a warranty on electricity production (I think it was 80% of rated output at 25 years). It's not too expensive to have the panels replaced, and the inverter would be even cheaper to replace. The inverter was manufactured by ABB, so they were not going to go away any time soon.
Other factors for me were a very favorable roof direction and pitch and expensive electricity from the grid.
California exempts solar systems from property valuations for taxes.
A battery is pretty much mandatory now in California to come close to making a saving through installing solar. It's important to note that a battery with reduced capacity isn't useless. I suspect that careful management of the charge state would extend battery life (it's mostly time at very high and very low charge levels that degrades batteries, rather than number of cycles), although this may be very dependent on the battery chemistry.
As for flywheels: imagine what might happen if the bearing fails and the flywheel is suddenly released. Too dangerous.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 08, @04:07PM
I'm in Texas, which as everyone knows is much less friendly to environmentalism than California. In Texas, solar installations are supposedly exempt from property taxes, but they've attached enough conditions that I am nevertheless scared away. To be eligible, the system must be owned, not rented. The energy it produces must be primarily for use on site. So that means, what? If I install one, I have to submit proof every year that I used at least 50% of the energy it produced? This smells. Smells like lawmakers trying to look environmental without actually being environmental.
I also looked into solar water heating. And, wow, that was so not worth it. When my parent's gas powered tank water heater failed after 27 years of use, I thought it an opportunity to improve the system. But, a new tank was $300. All available new tanks had much better insulation than the one being replaced. Going tankless would require changing the gas piping to larger diameter to support a tankless heater, which I estimated would cost $1500. I decided against that. And solar? $17,000! That's what one of the few businesses in Texas who did that quoted me. When they saw I wasn't biting, they started discounting. Dangling government incentives. They beat the price all the way down to $5000. Nope, still too expensive. Why so expensive? Well, for one thing, they had to get the system from California! Costs $ to haul stuff 1000 miles. We went with the $300 option.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 08, @06:21PM
Best Buy used to be famous for heavily advertising their TVs are a few dollars less than the competition then bitterly upselling $100 HDMI cables.
This seems to be decreasing with Amazon competition.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 07, @07:07PM
> Cheap import junk designed to rapidly fail inverters
The Raspberry Pi project started qualifying components to protect users / customers from the frustrations of saving a couple of bucks to have a flaky system. Seems like something more people / companies should be doing.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @08:51PM (4 children)
You *seem* to make some good points but then you can't stop yourself from trolling, can you?
right... so, my parents generate about 20MWh/yr with 14kW setup... and that' not a lot of solar panels and about $1/W total install a decade ago. So are you missing a 0 in your calculation? Also, microinverters are today at €0.1/W, which pays for itself in matter of months. With 7-10 year warranties here, it's not exactly a very expensive thing. Hail can be more expensive. The most expensive part of solar panels is labour hence why *new* construction is to have them mandated --- the cheapest option re: labour.
I would chalk up your post to A LOT of misinformation (or very outdated) and trolling.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 08, @01:20AM (2 children)
Who the heck did your parents find that can install a solar rooftop system for $1/W? The quotes I've seen are all $3 to $4 per W.
Yeah, labor. Did your parents do the labor themselves, maybe your father got up on the roof and personally bolted on the panels?
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday May 08, @06:24PM
Not the AI parent, but a quick view of the prices here (Europe, Belgium) reports an average €1.1 per watt [livios.be] (source in Dutch). That price includes the complete installation, working hours etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, @08:40PM
Re-read the post, about *when* the labour occurs.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday May 08, @06:23PM
I'm honestly impressed with those numbers, I live pretty far north and just used local data in a rainy locale east of the mississippi. Perhaps if your parents live at a low latitude near a cloudless desert?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, @11:15AM
Take off your white hood you racist scumbag.
To put it in language you might understand f*ck off back to your own country.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 07, @07:00PM (2 children)
I have a mature tree line 30' south of the building site, the home will be shaded and protected from winds - but it will be shite for solar power.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @08:56PM (1 child)
1. you don't live in the UK, do you?
2. average home height in UK is 3 stories.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 07, @11:50PM
The average mature tree height in Wales is around 65 feet (20 meters).
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @07:21PM (1 child)
Where do they find the space?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @08:01PM
Possibly on the 70% of land [zmescience.com] still owned by Nobles and descendants of William The Conqueror. Disgraceful share the wealth communism has destroyed the once Great (but not againm yet) Britain.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday May 07, @07:34PM (4 children)
There are different laws in different parts of the UK. England/Wales together make one jurisdiction. Scotland and Northern Ireland and each themselves relatively independent.
I'm building a new house this year in Scotland and the Scottish planning regulations are such that you are effectively already compelled to have solar panels on a new build. The regulations are different in different parts of the UK.
Solar voltaic panels are quite cost effective nowadays. Installing some by default makes a lot of sense. Even here in Scotland the Sun does shine. You might as well make the hay.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Wednesday May 07, @07:44PM
Exactly. And you don't have to size the inverters to panels if you only have 50% average cycle. you can just have 50% inverter and get less output during peak. And this reduces the costs.
But this advice is mostly for the perpetually overcast areas.
Almost free panels just make sense to install at build time.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday May 07, @09:02PM (2 children)
One question I'd be very curious about is the cost of installing panels during a new build versus a retrofit, simply on the grounds that at some point there's going to have to be an effort to target existing buildings too. But in general, I've long hoped for a future where "what's the power system on this home?" is one of the standard questions answered in real estate adverts.
And of course having an independent power supply makes strategic sense simply from the point of view of making it harder for Russia or other exporters to mess with the UK by cutting off energy supplies.
My understanding is that some Scotsmen think the sun shines out from under their kilt!
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday May 07, @09:10PM (1 child)
My understanding is that some Scotsmen think the sun shines out from under their kilt!
Well, there are some other weather phenomena emanating from that sort of direction but they typically depend on the consumption of turnip, curry and chicken fajitas.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Unixnut on Thursday May 08, @09:54PM
Good to know when they are done capturing cow methane for biogas, there will be a second source readily available up north :-)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 07, @09:05PM (5 children)
With the amount of electronics using DC nowadays, might it make sense to wire the house for DC and get it more directly from the solar panels? Get rid of all the awkward AC to DC adapters? Plug the now-standard USB3 devices directly into DC wall sockets?
Yes, maybe we'll still need AC for a few legacy devices ...
-- hendrik
(Score: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Wednesday May 07, @09:08PM
With an inverter, it's trivial to export power out to the grid when you're not using all of it. It makes sense from that point of view.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 07, @09:27PM
High power DC has a serious problem with arcing during power-off. AC arcs will naturally extinguish twice per cycle, but DC arcs don't. This means systems have to be protected against it with expensive anti-arc switches. So many DIY idiots would end up installing standard AC switches and burning down the building.
AC is a LOT more tolerant of neglect/abuse.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 08, @03:10AM (2 children)
> might it make sense to wire the house for DC and get it more directly from the solar panels? Get rid of all the awkward AC to DC adapters?
50 years ago, maybe.
Today? Inverter tech is efficient enough that it's not such a concern. More hassle to dual wire your home for AC and low volt DC than it's really worth.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday May 08, @09:58PM (1 child)
I thought inverters still have the issue of poor efficiency when at 80% or less capacity utilisation? I.e they only give those high reported efficiencies when they are being driven to near max load capacity.
Fine in areas with constant power draw as you can size the inverter for the load, but not so good in a home for example, where the power requirements tend to fluctuate and be "peaky".
To be able to provide peak power you have to oversize the inverter to handle it, but that means most of the time it will be run under much lower loads, and correspondingly would give very poor efficiency (I've heard <50% efficiency, but this was years ago when I last read about this).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 09, @12:44AM
Whatever it was years ago, I suspect it has been continuously improving with more intelligent switching of the loads and more efficient power switching transistors.
Two pieces of "inverter tech" that I have that I like a lot are my inverter generator, which throttles the engine back to match the load, but converts the generator output from whatever its frequency is to a 60Hz sine wave, and a couple of inverter air conditioner compressors which inversely load up the power system only as much as they need for continuous operation instead of 100%-0%-100% switching by thermostat / hysteresis. The AC on the boat will draw 12A when it's working hard, and can progressively throttle back as low as about 4A to keep a lower maintenance cooling setting - they're converting the 60Hz shore power to whatever the brushless motors in the compressor and blower need to spin at the speed they are targeting.
I saw something recently which does PWM fan driving where the driver feeds multiple fans and spreads their PWM loads so that, for instance, you might have 4 fans running at 25% PWM and the power controller will present a single 100% continuous load to the power source to achieve that instead of a 400% load 25% of the time and 0% load the other 75%, but each fan gets 25% on and 75% off staggered in time...
All these things have been theoretically possible / known since Tesla's time, but the switching efficiency (IGBTs that go full on to full off have been steadily improving, shorter switch times, lower ON impedance, higher OFF impedance) and switching control intelligence have been steadily improving along with them. At this point, a microcontroller that can do just about anything a switching controller would want to do can be had for a few cents.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by Username on Thursday May 08, @10:10AM (8 children)
What's next, requiring all new houses to have water wells drilled and hooked up to the water mains? Requiring all new homes to have gardens to grow food and share a percent back? All new homes to have at least five bedrooms to house refugees. Obviously this doesn't apply to commissars or any leaders.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 08, @11:04AM (6 children)
We are talking about the UK.
It isn't communism, it is merely the setting of minimum building standards for all houses. There is a minimum width for doors, there is a specification for electrical wiring, there is a requirement for a certain level of insulation, etc. These things must be installed in new houses, independently checked by a suitably-qualified person, and guarantees provided to the purchaser of a new house that the necessary standards have been achieved or exceeded. It prevents 'cowboy' builders.
All new house MUST have a water mains connection unless specific dispensation has been sought and granted for an alternative source of water. Connecting any other source of water to the water main is not permitted. This is primarily for health reasons.
I realise that your comment was an exaggeration to make a point, but building standards are common in Europe and, while they might vary, usually all reach a basic acceptable level for new constructions.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 08, @11:05AM
Sorry, I appear to have hit the bold key in error there....
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Username on Thursday May 08, @01:49PM (1 child)
It's communism. How do solar panels make a house safer? All it does is adds expense to an already heavily regulated and expensive endeavor. Gen A most likely won't be able to build thier own house due to this. By the time gen D is around they won't even be able to own a house.
It's all designed to restrict land and homes, and force the working class into pod apartments. Building anything new will require billions, and only accomplished by the state or a corporation. That's the commie or capitalist end game. Forced sharing is the commie one.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday May 08, @05:58PM
Not at all. You will have difficulty finding a builder around here who will build anything that does NOT meet building regulations. They know that the purchaser could take them to court, the local council could take them to court, the government could take them to court. And because all builders have to meet the same minimum standards then competition keeps the prices to an acceptable level.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, @08:50PM (2 children)
It's not "to make a point" but to prsent white-supremacist/Nazi-adjacent/accelerationist talking points as ideas worth discussing.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 09, @03:54AM (1 child)
How on earth are European building regulations anything to do with white supremacy, or Nazi and 'accelerationist' ideals? Yet at the same time you are claiming that it is communism.
We don't all live in your bizarre world.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Username on Friday May 09, @01:52PM
I don't post ac, that's the leftist that likes to mod all my posts troll. Probably replied to wrong post.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday May 08, @11:54AM
Most countries have building requirements like sane egress pathways in case of fire. The ones that don't are usually low income countries. Perhaps if you are unfamiliar with these building codes then you come from such a place? Or your nation's leadership is working on downgrading.
> Obviously this doesn't apply to commissars or any leaders
Well actually it does.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday May 08, @10:56AM
1.) Module prices have come down again. 400W go from 50€ now. Blimey (*). At the current standard 1754 x 1096 mm^2 that's cheaper than ordinary roofing or any other outside building paneling.
2.) There are simple concrete holders for panels on flat roofs, there is competition now (I think "Wattstone" were the OG) and they have come down in price, too, but these still amount to the same price as the panels.
3.) There are videos on YT discussing AC frequency on the grids in context with the recent Spanish blackouts, there are drifts and oscillations which arise in this super complicated interwoven and nonlinear feedback network. If you think calculating and properly damping simple linear feedback control is somewhat of a challenge, you're in for fun... I'm almost tempted to set up an Arduino with an optocoupler on the grid to monitor this for my location.
4.) If they ramp up solar in GB like TFA suggests, how are they ever going to pay for Sizewell C?
(*) sounding british, given the topic.
(Score: 2) by jman on Thursday May 08, @12:06PM (2 children)
Then there are homes like JoeMerchant mentioned which have trees covering the southern facing roof. Great for the summer A/C bill in general, not so much for adding solar. (My own south-facing home has a large seven stalk Live Oak covering most of the front yard. Taking it down in favor of panels on the roof would be the antithesis of "going green"!)
Perhaps, rather than "sun tech", it should concentrate on wind and surf, as one of its constituents - Scotland - has already done. (Over 60% of Scotland's energy comes from renewable resources, and features the largest onshore wind farm in the UK.)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday May 08, @06:34PM (1 child)
Interesting thing is that there's actually a trend towards east- and west-oriented solar panels. The reason is pretty simple: most people are at work during the day, but you need energy in the morning (East) and in the evening (West). The alternative -- if you insist on your south-oriented panels -- is to invest into a decent home battery, which are still a bit pricey over here.
(Score: 2) by jman on Friday May 09, @11:38AM
Thanks for the tip, have to check into that. Due to an old add-on part of the roof does face E/W, and is not in the path of the huge front-yard tree...