Solar panels to be fitted on all new-build homes in England by 2027

I heard our glorious leader will be making an upcoming EO mandating all homes be retrofitted with coal-burning stoves.
Oh say can you see
- He's the Uncle in Nepokean Dynamite, but it's like he's stuck somewhere between mid to late last century..

While solar power is great and possibly the future, I sure hope they fully thought this through. A lot of areas with large numbers of solar panels are struggling to manage overcapacity. Solar energy produced is not always sent to the grid but wasted, as there is often not enough grid-scale storage capacity to absorb it. I'm no expert, but I wonder if mandating smart in-home sodium-ion batteries which intelligently charge and discharge based on grid capacity wouldn't be more effective.
- Sunlight hitting a roof without solar panels is also often not sent to the grid but wasted. In fact, I'd say that more solar energy is wasted on roofs without solar panels than with.
  
  People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid. When, increasingly often, they have a choice of either shutting the system off and wasting this energy or sending it to the grid at low or even negative rates, this becomes a problem. The expectation of "my solar system will pay for itself in X years" might become "my solar system will never break even". At least that's an issue in some places with high PV density.
  
  This is a top comment
- We actually have a growing amount of gravity battery capacity in the UK, currently a drop in the ocean around 15GWh, but I believe 200% of that is currently in construction.
  IIRC the same article I read about this suggested we could make use of all the old coal mines, retrofit them to become gravity batteries relatively cheaply and gain magnitudes more capacity than we have today.
  
  Oooh. Very interested in this. I was thinking about trying to build my own gravity battery, but my back of the napkin calculations for the mass and height are nutty. I don't think a small scale home-size device would be viable...
  
  Oh yeah, I read about this. I get the impression that they're out of the proof of concept stage, based on a few places where it's worked well; it seems like capacity is on its way upwards now
- The UK is no where near the point of having too much power through the daytime. Today was pretty sunny, better than average day especially for time of year. At mid day there was still 5.8GW of fossil fuel use and 3GW of biomass, so about 8.8 GW of CO2 production. Or to put it another way of the 32.5 GW of power needed solar contribute 3.41GW.
  There will come a moment where there is an issue where more storage is required to use that power through the evening and night or negative power pricing but its not the issue yet there still isn't enough renewables to make it through a day without burning gas even on a windy sunny day so promoting more Solar and Wind is still necessary to get to netzero for grid power in 2030.
  
  Where did you get those stats from? I wasn't aware there were places where you could see such granular numbers
- I'm sure I read something about using local battery stores. Similar to the battery solution you suggested, but with each battery being shared across multiple neighbours
- The downside is that when they have too much they turn it off. This is a wonderful problem to have. Your own damn article said it encouraged them to go harder ramping up the storage. It's more cost effective when there's more storage on the grid. Totally insignificant non problem, meanwhile the earth is on fire.
- Look at the date on the article you linked. It was published on July 7th.
  When solar panels are seeing 15 hours of high-angle summer daylight and clear skies, generation should be considerably overcapacity.
  Come back to me when you can write that same overcapacity article in November, when your panels are struggling with 9-hours of low-angle overcast.
  When you have sufficient solar capacity to meet winter demand, you'll have 200% - 400% of demand in summer. That is simply the nature of solar production outside of the tropics.
  
  Of course, it depends on the conditions. But any (temporary) overcapacity becomes a problem for people with solar panels when they expect to pay off the cost of the panels not just with a reduction in drawing power from the grid but also with credits from sending power to the grid.
  However, there are problems, with some grid operators even charging customers for energy sent to the grid during peak times, such as in NL: https://innovationorigins.com/en/solar-feed-in-tariffs-climb-18-in-six-months/
  Solar without storage is less ideal than most people think.
- incidentally i contacted a few local solar installation companies and all of them told me my roof doesn't have enough space, but one of them suggested to get a battery and go on a peak/offpeak tariff as this would be more effective than trying to fit solars to my crazy roof
  
  I assume that new buildings will be designed with that in mind now though.
- Really, solar panels are just one solution of a home energy system.
  Governments should be looking at regulating microgrids for all homes where solar, stationary battery storage, electric vehicle storage, and even diesel/gas generators or geothermal contribute.
  As you say, if you don't have a means for local storage and the grid is maxed out, your panels are wasting away their free energy by self-consumption.
  Sodium-ion batteries will absolutely seize a portion of the market share, but I don't think we'd want governments restricting building requirements to specific technologies. The analogy in solar panels would be governments restricting home requirements to polycrystalline silicon, when you have other 1st Gen PV types (monocrystalline), 2nd Gen (thin film CdTe), and 3rd Gen (thin film perovskite, organics).
  Microgrid controllers would do the smart dis/charging that you're talking about, as well as automatically dis/connecting from the grid and shutting on/off critical loads.
- It definitely would be a good idea to put some SIBs in every place that produces intermittent energy.
  Also, energy intensive places might want to get batteries too. Let’s say you have an aluminiun factory, which obviously needs lots of energy 24/7. How about you use cheap (or even free) solar power when there’s oversupply to charge the batteries, and discharge them during the night.
  
  Let’s say you have an aluminiun factory, which obviously needs lots of energy 24/7.
  Very often, they just run overnight, not 24/7. Grid operators incentivize their off-peak consumption to increase the base load on their baseload generators, making them more efficient.
  The solar-friendly solution is to just shift their operations to daytime instead of nighttime. This reduces total overnight demand, and reduces the need for storage.
- California's weather definitely isn't England's
  
  Absolutely. But I also read about these concerns in The Netherlands and Belgium, which aren't quite California.
- missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.
- Best way to deal with this is to have a few hours of rolling blackouts everywhere a few hours per day, especially when the sun is shining.
  People will get solar panels and batteries.
  There is no such thing as "wasted" solar. Every less gram of carbon put into the atmosphere is a win.
  
  ... are you a fucking idiot? Any government official that suggested that would immediately be fired, and any politician would never get a single vote for the rest of their lives.
  
  Yeah that’ll surely be great news for all the hospitals and people with medical devices at home. After a few dozen deaths battery sales will be through the roof!

Whatever happened to “solar shingles”? There were supposed to be a couple of companies making them, but you never see them on houses.
- They are more expensive and less efficient. Very few people use them.
- As far as I understand it they are just a worse solution than mounting standard solar panels on a roof. More expensive, less efficient, thus only gonna get used for aesthetic reasons.
  Kinda like solar roadways and some other on the surface cool sounding but in practice niche technologies.
- Wasn't Elon pushing solar shingles/roofs a couple of years back?
  
  Man he was shilling hard for that, then all of a sudden he just stopped. I read a good number of stories about the solar shingles overheating, catching fire, burning down, malfunctioning...probably related to him going silent on them.
  I've had my doubts about that stuff since I heard about it.
  Perhaps it's better as a concept than it is in the real world, with real world conditions.
  
  They were a scam to justify his self-bailout of Solarcity with Tesla funds.
  The demo Musk introduced last October at a splashy presentation was a glass-tile solar roof, much different from the metal prototype he’d seen before. How did he pull off this transformation in just weeks? More to the point, who executed the idea and when? Leaders at Tesla and SolarCity, including Lyndon and Peter Rive, gave a variety of different answers on the timeline of its origin and development. At first, the companies said Solar Roof was a Tesla product, and then, later, a SolarCity product. Public statements are similarly contradictory. Some involved with the product’s development suggest that the mixed messages are a result of the combined companies’ wish not to appear as if they rushed out the glass-tile prototype in order to be able announce a high-profile product before the shareholder vote on the acquisition, which some critics viewed as Tesla bailing out SolarCity.
  ...
  No matter how the Solar Roof came to be, it seems to have worked: Three weeks after Musk’s presentation, 85% of shareholders approved the Tesla-SolarCity merger.
  A few years later...
  The Tesla Solar Roof tiles are still alive, but the product is on the back burner at Tesla as it failed to achieve its promises.
  
  Tesla solar was one of the companies, yes. GAF was also making them and I think a couple of others had them in development.
  
  Yeah a racist asshole killed that. It could have been good.
- Well, would you notice them if you did see them? The whole idea is they blend in...
  
  Well, would you notice them if you did see them?
  Yes, because they don't look like asphalt.

By 2027? Why not now? These things have never been cheaper. Mandate batteries as well, LiFePo is cheap as hell and it would save so much money it's stupid not to.
- Educated guess:
  To allow the supply chain to adjust so we don't cause a sudden shortage skyrocketing the price of solar, making homes more expensive to build or delaying construction
  A lot of new build are basically copy pastes of the same design, so companies have time to properly adjust designs for them and not just haphazardly slap them on to existing ones which could cause problems
  Red tape and Bureaucracy. Updating laws and regulation takes time, then there's risk assessments environmental planning, maybe adjustments to the grid layout on new estates.
- Building takes years. You have to subdivide, plan for utilities, stormwater and traffic, permit the buildings, etc, and suddenly invalidating a bunch of stuff midway through the process they just picked a date 2 years out to avoid the legal and administrative nightmare of yanking existing permits and making them re-design.
  
  Typically when code changes existing permits are grandfathered in, they don't pull outstanding permits and make them comply with new code. For something as relatively minor as residential solar you should really only need a few months notice at most I would think. Like either the plans are drafted and ready for submission soon or you're still in the planning phase and just add panels.

This is an amazing policy. Very simple, very effective. It comes at a time when Labor is trying to push more housing and Octopus energy makes these panels very economical for the average UK home buyer.

A few decades late, but needed nonetheless.
- If Reagan had had a hint of forward thinking he wouldn't have un-installed Carter's solar panel. It was among the FIRST solar panels installed for any residence in the US and it was mentioned as part of his farewell speech.
  
  /c/unexpectedUSAmerican
- England churning out those new homes at the rate of one every five or six years, so it's not as late as you'd think.

That’s actually pretty expedient

well with reform UK replacing conservatives, solar panels might be deemed too woke in the next couple years

I like it, but with housing prices already out of control I wonder if this is the wisest? It's just going to make housing that much more expensive. Long term it's great! But I hope they have some fancy financial footwork to curb the upfront costs.
- I think 1500 euro on a house will not make a big difference. Last set I put on a roof was about that price (50 euro per panel, 400 for inverter rest for mounting)
  
  It's 1500 here. 3000 for the mandated concrete walkway. Another 5k for the required hard wired fire alarms.
  Just examples of things that are reasonable sounding that add up quickly. I hate to sound like some libertarian douchbag, but we need to be careful we don't regulate our way out of affordable shelter.
- In long term, you would not be paying much on electricity, which is a saving. The upfront cost would be higher, but it is a good move imo, because retrofitting almost always has some shortcomings, like poor implementation, or unnecessary damage
  
  It doesnt add a lot of cost, but it also doesnt help as much as you think.
  In Australia its mandatory to have an (I think) 2Kw/h system installed. Which is about enough assuming its running at full tilt to power the air conditioner in the peak of summer on a small house. A mate of mine who knows a lot about solar said "2kw is about enough that your home is essentially energy neutral when you're not in it. So the fridge, water heater, appliances on standby..."
  Of course when you start talking a national scale it does add up.
- with housing prices already out of control I wonder if this is the wisest?
  Electricity prices are also already out of control.
- That's the point. They want to squeeze the lower classes.

Just in time for their $66M studies into dimming the sun!! 🥴

Now harness the power of gravity and rain. 🙈
- You hang a tub from a rope outside. The rope is connected to a set of gears with a super high ration. Connect the gears to a generator. When it rains, the tub will fill with water and will add to the energy going into the generator. Reset it by draining the water from the tub when it touches the ground, and then putting the tub back in the original position.

We many times lament when the government overreaches. This is the kind of Trojan horse that enables the government to overreach.
One might think, this seems innocuous and beneficial, so go ahead, right? You have to ask yourself, how is it moral for the government to, with the threat of violence, force every home to be built with solar panels? Because that's the implication.
If I'm a small business, and I build a house without solar panels, is it right that I be bankrupted or/and be put in jail?

The UK does not get a lot of sunlight and by them consolidating all of their energy and putting so much money into solar. It might be a bottleneck or a bad investment and I've seen arguments that prove this. This might be actually kind of bad news and not uplifting news. I would encourage you all to look a little bit deeper.
- I am guessing the folks that run Britain have some concept of how the weather works there on the daily
- What are you talking about? They're very cost effective here and pay for themselves fairly quickly with the added benefit of reduced emissions.
- Rooooight. More coal, it is then! Thank you, expert!
- "I've seen arguments that prove this" provides absolutely no links or evidence okay bud

Making room for the intermittent nature of solar imposes upon the grid a large cost for backup power, adding to the levelized cost of electricity, yet this cost is never ascribed to the cost of the solar panel. The more solar you have the more idle backup power you need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
In France 70% of their power came from nuclear and they added renewables, they then need to throttle the nuclear power plants which is not an easy task, and they then make less money and require tax funded bailouts.
- The fact that making money is one of the, if not the most important, considerations in this equation is the main problem with this. It simply should be a public service.
  That won't automatically solve all of the other problems but many of the solutions to this problems aren't considered because they are not profitable, even though they exist. An easy example being gas turbine plants which are much easier to spin up and down as required. But perfectly meeting the needs of all people means there's no artificial scarcity and thus lower profits.
  
  The "gas" in "gas powered turbines" is natural gas - aka, a fossil fuel, aka, the thing causing climate change.
- The heart of your argument is a Myth.
  Baseload generation like nuclear requires leveling loads by driving large industrial customers to off-peak hours. This artificially inflates overnight demand that can't be met by solar directly.
  Removing the off-peak incentives and shifting them to hours of peak solar production allows solar to meet that demand. Without those off-peak incentives, solar can operate without nearly as much nuclear "backup" required.
  The remainder of your argument is sunk-cost fallacy. Nuclear is much more expensive than solar. Assuming all coal-fired plants are offline, excess nuclear plants should be decommissioned.
  
  Why do you need to force industrial users off during the day, and how do you decommission your backup nuclear power with intermittent wind, when all you did was move from 100% uptime nuclear to variable uptime wind and solar?
- The UK uses gas rather than nuclear for non renewable power.
  It's much easier to turn up and down than nuclear.
  Plus we build so few new houses that this is unlikely to be a massive issue, although home batteries and increased electric vehicle charging could be a good place to dump "excess" power.
  
  I’ve tried to make that argument here as well. Adjusting building code to require solar is a great long term idea but in my part of the US there are so few new homes built that it’s really not making a difference any time soon.
  It’s more to make the house saleable during its lifetime, and eventually drive a miser sustainable housing supply
  
  I'm just saying if you really want to be green you're building nuclear.
- LiFePO4 batteries within the house are the correct resolution.
  In winter the panels make nothing anyway, and in summer the houses will essentially run themselves for somewhere between 4 to 8 months depending on peak power usage and panel array size.
  Essentially it removes residential baseload and flattens the duck curve so the peak 1600 to 1900 peak can disappear, with the obvious knock on effect of reducing the LCOE.
- Britain pioneers alternative power storage methods, particularly pumped hydro, and invests heavily in wind farms, diversifying the grid. So, at the end of the day, they don't need backup power all that much.
  Rooftop solar is routinely connected to the grid - no need to build redundant and expensive battery banks for every home, but the power is produced locally, minimizing transmission losses and strain on the power lines.
  Nuclear, on its hand, is nice, but simply too expensive to build nowadays. Nuclear plants take a lot of time to pay off, so running existing plants is good, but building new ones can be a worse option overall.
  
  Well wind farms won't help, if you need 100% reliability. Storage I figured was more expensive than nuclear after adding all the costs together, creating enough hydro for backup is extremely expensive as well.
  You're essentially building a hydro power plant, water storage, pumps, and wind turbine at that point.