Without battery associated with all those panels, power is going to be a yoyo as is wholesale price. So if the utilities start paying for that power at the wholesale rate and the rate goes negative as it sometimes does now, homeowner bills could go up.

Clearly you don't live here. We've hardly had any rain in 2 months in the east with wall to wall sunshine most days. Completely abnormal weather and yesterday the hottest start to may on record was recorded.

We've got The Sun, the newspaper. We'll burn it to generate heat on cloudy days.

They'll be sticking those solar panels where the sun don't shine.

And they're about to let Bill Gates and his new company start screwing around and make "cloudtrails" to block sunlight....

Modern solar panels are so efficient that they can be run with remarkably little sunlight and there's still worth using.

Know what the UK needs is a functioning economy. 50 years of Thatcher style austerity for the working class and King Charles style opulence for the ruling class hasn't exactly done them any good.

I do wonder how they managed to sell austerity bullshit to their working class though. Here in America we just used moral panics and racism to spook everyone, what we call the southern stra

Yes, and they're working on experiments for 'solar dimming.' In the UK. Definitely brings a chortle.

> But if it's just panels and no batteries, it's half the job.

Solar panels alone are roughly 1-2% of the job.

> Right now we still need panels and energy providers pay well for extra energy we produce during the day. As more people produce, the savings from selling will decline. Batteries that let you produce in the day, use at night and trade on the tariff differences are the game changer. Profit while giving the grid more stability.

ESS schemes suffer from similar sorts of diminishing returns. They'll get you further but not far enough with current technology for substantial decarbonization efforts to work. In the process total system costs will have pushed energy prices higher beyond what they need to be to have any real hope of convincing the rest of the energy consumers to shift to the grid in order to decarbonize.

So let me get this straight, all new homes will get solar? So day 1 you drive bolts through the shingles, (assume asphalt) you immediately lose the warranty on a new roof. Fun times with regulation. Instead of making homes utility companies, make utility companies utility company better with green energy.

The UK has a pretty damn great program of investing in large scale wind and solar, although the Tories did their best to fuck it up completely.

But that’s about spending *public money*. This is about imposing a regulatory obligation on private house builders to put in solar. This is frankly pretty damn cheap for them to do given that the scaffolding is already going to be in place during the construction, and I think the ROI calculations probably look quite different from the norm when you consider this vs a solar farm, because the norm assumes retrofit. A panel is a panel, after all. There’s better and worse siting, sure, and there’s economies of scale with inverters, etc, but the panel output isn’t *that* much lower.

Obliging those builders to pay into a solar farm or similar would be possible but hard to explain and hard to sell as a policy. But obliging them to put some panels in while they’re already building is easy to explain and sell. It has a direct benefit to a home buyer that just isn’t there with a solar farm — a degree of energy independence, lower household bills, etc. I could be swayed by an argument that says forcing builders to get closer to passivhaus efficiencies is better than this. But that would be dramatically more expensive, so the pushback would be much greater.

"invest it in a large scale wind deployment"

the UK already has over 30GW of wind energy, split about evenly between onshore & off.

i have some reservations about this policy but one significant advantage of rooftop solar is that you don't need to build out the transmission network & you're tied into the existing distribution.

> Rooftop solar is amongst the most expensive and wasteful forms of production from intermittent renewables.

Even if that's true, it has the distinct advantage of being the least intrusive. It doesn't require any real estate or have any environmental impacts that needed to be investigated and permitted. It's low hanging fruit.

So you want to force every future owner of a house, to pay an "invest into renewables elsewhere tax", which you collect somehow, take care of it and invest into "cheaper" projects with a higher CF etc. ???

And you think the future homeowners are happy to give someone 3k or 4k money they never see anything from again?

This scheme here is: forcing home owners to put solar on THEIR OWN ROOF.

Who the funk cares if it is money wise more effective to collect 4 billion and build 7 wind farms from it?

If you are going to quote content from publications like the Center of the American Experiment's "How to destroy the myth of cheap wind and solar" you should give them credit so we know where this tripe comes from:

> Rooftop solar is amongst the most expensive and wasteful forms of production from intermittent renewables.

> Take the same money spent on rooftops, invest it elsewhere and you could get literally twice the capacity with a higher capacity factor in a utility PV farm.

I don't own a PV solar farm, but my home does have a roof I can put solar panels on.

If you are losing a significant amount of heat through your roof on a new construction home then the builder probably did not insulate properly up there. New homes with modern insulation are very good.

Same if your solar panels are leaking they were not installed properly, this isn't a new problem.

Insulation solves that. Modern houses have decent insulation now. That's law too.

However, their power bills will also not go down either. The electricity suppliers will increase line charge prices to compensate. The monthly line charges keeps climbing irrespective of unit generating pricing.

Solar panels are typically sold with 25-30 year warranties. They degrade on average .1% per year for the first 20 years.

Modern homes are insulated all to hell, there is no natural ventilation through the roof and the insulation is now better than for other parts of the exterior. It has fuck all heat flux. No one is building throw back open eaves homes in the UK.

So confidently wrong about everything.

1. Incandescent bulbs is about as madly expensive a way of heating a space as you can possibly imagine. The costs of the extra heating required are massively outweighed by the savings in terms of power.

2. Solar panels deteriorate very slowly. This is a non-issue for at least a decade, more likely 3 decades

3. UK has tiled roofs. They are more than capable of having holes drilled in them without leaks. This is a complete non-issue

Panels over your roof are a win win when it comes to heating and cooling impact. In the summer they absorb the light before it hits your roof, and the back sides of the panels are white and the tops are dark, so they radiate most of that energy back into space - meaning your house stays cooler. In the winter, when you are trying to keep your house warm at night, the white backs of the panels reflect radiated infrared back to your roof and help you stay warm.

The effect is exactly the opposite of what you think it is.

I'd much rather heat my home with my furnance than with incandencent light blubs. In fact, I'd much rather the sun not heat my home most of the summer. My home is so well insulated that in the winter this is a non-issue.

Panels are cheaper now so installing them and the wiring during the build will be a lot cheaper than retrofitting.

If the numbers in the summary are correct, the system pays for itself in five years. Maybe six or seven if the estimates are optimistic and the builder adds a profit margin to the added cost. Still the total cost of ownership for the home goes down. Yes, you pay a little more in monthly mortgage payments, but you pay less in electric bills, so the overall expense is lower. Banks will need to take that into account in determining whether people qualify for a mortgage, but assuming they do, this should ma

Mostly consulting contracts, it seems.

Your phone battery perhaps.

An ESS lasts ages.

I don’t know what world you live in, but batteries in the UK do not cost forty thousand dollars. Today, they cost between 5 and 7k gbp, ie 7 to 9k USD. In a couple of years, they’ll be that much cheaper, because the prices have fallen consistently each year for years. So you’re out by at least a factor of four on the costs.

As for lasting just 10 years, this is obvious bullshit you’re feeding yourself. EV batteries are seeing typical state of health of about 90% by year 8, and home st

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter

The continuing extraordinary falls in the costs of solar are why much less wealthy countries than the UK, such as South Africa and Pakistan, are seeing private installs of solar at a fast enough rate to truly change the entire energy generation systems of those nations. This is only going to ratchet up, especially because solar is feasible for a home install, which isn’t true for wind, really.

The interesting thing (no pun intended) is that a change in interest rates will change the price of a house by far more than this, and it never makes the news. Even a one percent difference in mortgage rates can easily make a 30k+ difference in total payments over the life a mortgage.

Don't know about the UK, but here in the US, 5k is nothing on the price of a new house. It's the difference between "builder grade" and "stainless premium" appliances - and if you want kitchen upgrades, you're easily spend