Re: Plug in solar panels - announced

' what brought part of the UK grid down. Lots 'renewables' going on strike together.

-- If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Joseph Goebbels

In most technical terms it ought not make much difference. On the plus side a ring may have more over current latitude in the cables due to the additional parallel conductors (depending on installation method). On the down side one ring will likely feed a far greater number of sockets, making the chances that multiple units are connected to one circuit greater.

If you are thinking of "homeplug" style technologies, then they communicated between different circuits anyway (even if the signal quality and hence speed is impaired)

Are FIT payments still available on new installs?

Solar fed battery systems are a more mature tech in the UK at least, but sighting of the kit is often not advised in many of the "obvious" places (lofts, under stair cupboards etc)

I can see an attraction to making it mandatory that you install adequate storage when you install solar. Otherwise if enough people buy into it, you rapidly get to the situation where there is a glut of power being produced when it is not needed, and none when it would be useful.

No, but SEG is available (Small Export Guarantee) which are lower than FIT, some are really piss-poor such 1p/kWh, and require MCS accredited install (except for Octopus Flux who seem not to require that and seems to buy at the same price they sell at).

Indeed, and AIUI in The Netherlands (as one example) you are actually charged for providing solar export during certain conditions

It certainly seems a bit shortsighted to not include compulsory battery storage. Without it, it’s hardly going to help grid stability.

Tim

That's a great analogy.

At some point, the scale of an industrial item, surpasses the interests of the grid.

There used to be an aluminium smelter, on the Niagara river. It was presumably sited there, for the benefits of hydro power.

They used to switch in and switch out, a load in the hundred megawatt level range. Doing this to the local grid, would have done bad things to the distribution to the rest of the citizens there. They made their own hydro generator. It even runs at a different frequency than the local grid. And then when they switch in and out the smelting process, it only rocks the generators on their own hydro station. So they can control how abruptly a step load is applied.

Both the generator and the smelter are gone now.

The coming generation of "AI sites", stand to do similar things to the grid. At least one of them proposes to have a small battery bank, to control what happens to their array of generation devices, as loads are added or subtracted from the facility. Even if convinced to generate all their power locally (the plan being gigawatts of natural gas), there is still a stability issue for them to solve on their own generation and consumption. Having a grid connection, would just degrade things even more, for locals living there.

Maybe we have reached a point, where the activities of industrialists, have exceeded the advantages of a shared grid.

Regarding this idea of "plug in solar", you should at *least* be required to register your "plug in solar" device, with the local authority, as these things need to be included in grid planning exercises. To help predict on a given day, what can be expected from the grid in terms of behaviors. For example, if there was such a concept as "too many of these things in one sector", registering them makes this easier to know. Even if there is no central control of them.

Paul

Now make that a 1GW wind farm when the wind drops at the eye of a depression, or a sudden squall hits it and the wind farm has zero responsibility for any sort of grid stability at all.

I think there's a case for all households to have storage. Those without solar could be topped up cheaply when there's excess supply. The n discharge the battery when they're back on peak. At say £1000 to install 5kWhr, payback could be quite reasonable - < 5 years?

Depends on the amount charged of course, but at present rates (8p off peak,

How long do these batteries last and can they be recycled effectively?

My 5kWhr solar connected battery is guaranteed 10 years at 80% capacity; EV is

Apparently they can be recycled - a quick google search should tell you more.

The battery bank manufacturers generally claim 6,000 cycles for LiFePO4. Even if you halve that due to doing higher than 80% charge and lower than 20% discharge, call it a decade?

Some of the big-names such as Bluetti, EcoFlow etc might be relatively good value for the actual electronics (e.g. £129 for a non-battery 800W inverter) but they seem pretty poor for PV bundled panels and extension batteries (e.g. extra £220 for 2x 400W panels, or for the price of their

Given that we don't exactly live in the Sahara, it's not the solar part of these systems which is most interesting to me, but the time-shift of all the base load and a proportion of the peak loads onto E7 type tariffs, obviously if that becomes too popular those will tend to disappear.

I ' answer for today but I did this calculation 20 years ago and the answer was 'cheaper to buy the electricity'

So 5kWh at 6,000 cycles used between 80%-20% is 18MWh which is about £4.5k of electricity, probably less on some night time tariff. Plus you have the space taken by the battery and the probably very small risk of it needing repair or even catching fire.

I'm by not means an anti-renewables zealot, but to me it's not exactly a no-brainer. Having recently moved house, we now have a long (for round here) back garden the far end of which faces south and is beyond the shadow of the house, so I'm looking into ground-based panels, but batteries don't currently sound like a winner from the financial perspective.

The cost of panels has come down substantially in the past 20 years.

So I'm intrigued at your costs breakdown in today's money.

Meanwhile the cost of electricity has only gone *up*.

I never cease to be amazed at how many people think things decided in the past are somehow magically the same now. It's been the bane of my professional life for 30 years.

"Why are you doig that s*it thing ?" "It's how we've always done it." "How much does it cost you ?" "No idea. We never thought to check." "Well when did you last review it, capture the metric and ensure that you could review again to ensure you are still doing the optimum thing" "This is the kitchen. Every Friday we have a cake selection."

Good old Newton. Never lets you down :)

Some people live in the past and reminisce.

My instinct is that a good modern setup with a means of storage must be competitive with generated power. Especially if you can use off-peak power to recharge batteries in the Winter. But this is hearsay on my part and I don't have figures, just anecdotal stories.