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‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

euronews.com

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Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#71

Post by 1970-01-01 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #66
1970-01-01 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy, Here's the thing. That's a rule and not a technical problem. Absolutely no reason to do this other than rules and regulations.

Yes, but even more so, it's a good sensible rule! People don't even bother to argue why it's bad, they've just seen so many headlines telling them it's bad they don't question it.

I'll question it. Why does it exist? Why can't we just shut off the panels or dump excess energy into a metal rod? Why do we need to have a buyer at all?

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#72

Post by friendzis »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #71
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but even more so, it's a good sensible rule! People don't even bother to argue why it's bad, they've just seen so many headlines telling them it's bad they don't question it.

I'll question it. Why does it exist? Why can't we just shut off the panels or dump excess energy into a metal rod? Why do we need to have a buyer at all?

Because otherwise the incentive structures for solar-as-baseload, sweeping the actual cost on the consumers, collapse. The system is built on putting equality sign between oversubscribed solar and coal/gas backups during times of undersubscription.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#73

Post by tpm »

tjansen wrote: post #18
dust42 wrote: post #6

I once read an article that in Berlin the sewage system is flushed with fresh water because too many people have installed water saving toilet flushers. So plenty of people bought these water savers and now the price of water has gone up because the water that is directly flushed needs to be paid too. The 'balcony power stations' are the same thing. They get subsidised, and you even get a fixed kWh price when pushing…

As soon as everybody is paying spot prices, balcony power stations are not economically viable anymore. Even today, on a sunny day, spot prices for electricity are either very low or even negative. The more solar power is available, the lower these prices will be. So your balcony power station is replacing electricity you could get for free anyway. At night, when you are not producing electricity, you still need to b…

> As soon as everybody is paying spot prices

Which is never, because even then you are still paying some sort of taxes on top of the spot prices and also network fees.

The price of electricity from the network also has to include the price of delivery, while homemade electricity only has to recoup initial investment.

Of course this means given enough home installations (in places with enough sun) the price of electricity from the network will rise, more people will install their own stations, some will even disconnect, rinse and repeat. I read somewhere this exact situation is already playing out already in Pakistan.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#74

Post by mytailorisrich »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
zowie_howie wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it immediate? Sure, there is satisfaction that you are using 'free' electricity. But it does have an upfront cost. I calculated that it would take over 11 years to recoup the investment based on our current usage. Given we already get cheap night-time rates to charge the car and run appliances, it is hard to justify. Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess if we had a battery too (more invest…

I don't think it ever makes sense to switch to electric radiators. It might make sense to switch to a heatpump, but you need to avoid being hugely overcharged by the installers and there are flow issues if you have 8mm piping. This ROI calculator looks reasonable: https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html - note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case where the final figure is positive…

Well France did move to electric everything (cooking, hot water, heating) in the past thanks to ample nuclear electricity production (and possibly not too harsh winters). Unfortunately they let their nuclear programme decay and are struggling now (EU grid integration does not help)...

I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is that it is understood that electricity production is in dire straights, taking into account that the transition to EV requires a lot of electricity.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#75

Post by RealityVoid »

pjc50 wrote: post #54
RealityVoid wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When solar OVERproduces you have to literally pay someone to consume that energy, most probably wind farms, which could be producing energy instead. You don't have to do this with solar, you can just disconnect the panel and have it go a bit hotter. For producers that have a long-ish bringup time, yes, you might need to do this at time.

The situation is slightly complicated by dispatch order, and domestic solar isn't usually dispatchable at all. Grid-scale farms are. Wind farms don't consume energy, but there is a real issue with how often they have to be "curtailed" (paid to turn off). That is to a great extent due to issues with grid connectivity between Scotland and the rest of the UK, which are (slowly) being worked on.

My understanding is that all inverters sold at this moment, in the EU, need to have demand response and grid curtailment mechanisms by law.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#76

Post by pjc50 »

conorcleary wrote: post #67
raverbashing wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you find dollar bills on the ground you need to pay someone to collect it as litter" Charge batteries, do electrolysis, or a multitude of other uses (I know some companies do that already)

Used 240w modules built in 2010-2012 are worth $60-100 CAD at the moment in small quantities. There will be hundreds of thousands hitting the market (as long as they didn't hit the ground with careless removals) in ~2030+ as microFIT contracts in Ontario expire. There is no clear path to switching these arrays to Net Metering, as of yet. Prepare for all sorts of unrecycled solar panels and potential loss of renewable…

Could you elaborate on this? Why would people remove a working solar system?

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#77

Post by oliwarner »

pjc50 wrote: post #8

Fairly boilerplate article, but the bit that is news is the UK balcony solar permitting. Better longread: https://solarenergyconcepts.co.uk/post/plug-in-solar-uk/ Government press release with a long list of pull quotes: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i... (I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a dec…

British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe plan.

Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the cheapest inverters to sync frequency accurately. And

I have more faith in German standards and work ethic than our own.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#78

Post by TYPE_FASTER »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #15
cjrp wrote: post #4

The UK previously didn't allow small plug in solar panels (the kind that you just plug in to a mains socket) due to, I believe, safety reasons. This has changed within the last few days https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/solar-roadmap/

I believe it’s only legal in Utah so far in the US: they legislated it last year, and apparently half the country is expected to pass a copy-paste version in their next sessions

Current state by state status (not my site): https://pluginsolarusa.com

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#79

Post by tim333 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #58
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He also removed the effective ban on onshore wind construction that was introduced a month after he lost the election, restarting after a decade of lost opportunity. This Trump-level idiocy that is just never mentioned, even as people blame the gas burned in england on windy days as a cost of wind curtailment, when the curtailment is more a like a third of the cost. Burning gas to power people who chose not to build…

At the same time they are banning wind turbines leaders (Chinese companies) from opening factories in the UK... [1][2] [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c995xjxk97mo [2] https://www.energyvoice.com/insights/energy-opinion/594763/m...

That seems rather dumb. I wonder why they blocked the Ming Yang thing in Scotland? The UK seems to make quite a lot of dumb energy decisions like blocking UK North Sea gas and then buying North Sea gas from Norway.

Re: ‘Energy independence feels practical’: Europeans building mini solar farms

#80

Post by mytailorisrich »

tjansen wrote: post #41
mytailorisrich wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me this illustrates that with renewables (solar and wind) the key is storage. You want to grab all you can during excess production/very low prices periods and then use that for the rest of the day. You can do exactly that by buying battery packs but (1) they are more expensice pieces of kit than solar panels and (2) capacity and output of DYI/plug in systems is very limited. A quick check online also says that (i…

> You want to grab all you can during excess production/very low prices periods and then use that for the rest of the day. Batteries help, but even that is limited in northern countries like the UK. If you look at the data, in July '25, solar produced 2.36 TWh. But in December '25, it was only 0.535 TWh: the output in summer is >4 times the winter output. So either you need to discard 75% of the electricity produced…

In the UK wind contributes more to the grid that solar (not unexpected). Overall the issue with either or both is still that production varies widly over time including within a day.

With solar specifically you have the obvious day/night cycle, which makes storage required to make the most of it.

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