connection to the national grid

[The Natural Philosopher]

I was talking averages over a week or so. It is of course quite possible to get days when there is so little sun its almost useless to extract anything from it.

As I keep saying, any person who has done manual photography and used a light meter, bearing in mind that one stop down or a doubling of shutter speed is the same effect as half the actual sunlight, knows that daytime light varies hugely - a cloud on a sunny day is two stops - that's one quarter - heavy overcast is 3-4 stops, sometimes 5, that's up to 10-16 times less. Dusk and dawn - well add in a couple or three more.

In short PV is like any other intermittent renewable, you end up between a rock and a hard place - either a massively overengineered eyesore, or spend a fortune on storage, and STILL have no guarantee that a one in a thousand week wont totally f*ck you up.

[Andy Wade]

Not necessarily. There is now the concept of "competition in connections" for works classified as contestable (new plant and equipment, basically). For the DNO in question see

said, I've no idea how well this works in practice, or whether the OP could actually make a saving. It's got to be worth investigating though.

Yes, and agreed. Having got a second quotation could contribute significantly to the negotiation.

[grimly4]

Off-gridders in the boondocks have been doing it for years. Once again TNP spouts bollocks.

[Jules Richardson]

An expensive way of getting a shiny roof? :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

A fantastc aiming point for pigeons on bombing raids.

[The Other Mike]

December isn't dark during daylight hours for 25 days a month and dawn to dusk sunshine for the remaining six. You don't need 6 months battery capacity as you said before, and you even don't need a months capacity either. Systems installed in the UK and monitored for many years conclusively prove that you don't. Six months battery capacity would only be needed at the poles and it's far cheaper to fly in JP-8 in bulk than a battery bank.

Maybe they do but big house does not necessarily mean high electricity consumption. We use 4 MWh every year, 450W average and that is with near 100% tungsten lighting - there are only two compact fluorescents in the place.

Cost of capital currently and for the past three years has been close to zero. Maintenance on a fixed system is SFA. Obviously you have to move those batteries every five years or so, and get someone to fit them, but spend 24k on cells and there is sufficient profit margin for free fitting if you let the vendor take away the 'waste'

I'd never consider solar pv for a conventional house 'offgrid' , and I think FIT tariffs are immoral, but given what the fully monitored real world performance of small (sub 1kW) systems has been in practice for true offgrid situations then I'd have no worries about using such an approach in future.