[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sfwDyiPTdU[/video]

Just came across this launch presentation from yesterday! Love the way this company is evolving and pushing the solar and battery tech which i can actually see people using.

company fine, but he really needs to get someone better to do his presentations, hard watch that..

Power storage has to be the key to alt. sources of power. Then we can put the “wind not blowing/sun not shining” argument to bed. How many houses could you put solar on for the price of a Hinkley?

How many houses could you put solar on for the price of a Hinkley?

A quick envelope calc says about 5 million or 20% off all the houses in the uk.

For the cost of Hinkley we could super insulate how many houses and offer free solar on all new roofs for how long?…..

For the cost of Hinkley we could super insulate how many houses and offer free solar on all new roofs for how long?…..

Another envelope. About 2 million homes insulated and then solar panels on every new home for the next 30 years

@ nickjb’s calculations – depressing statement of the hand in glove nature of govt and existing power suppliers.

Very impressive. I’d love to redo our roof like that, wonder when they’ll be available in the UK…

Shame he’s such a poor public speaker.

I’ve got PV roof tiles (yes tiles not panels) they’re fitted to every home our estate. They’re awesome. We’ve got about 1.8kw on ours with about 25% coverage.

[video]http://player.vimeo.com/video/158170254[/video]

Power storage has to be the key to alt. sources of power. Then we can put the “wind not blowing/sun not shining” argument to bed. How many houses could you put solar on for the price of a Hinkley?

I’ve been saying this for years. Retrofit to all houses and it goes a long way to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. However, the Gov. are too much in the pocket of the energy firms to make it easy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they put some kind of “special” tax on this kind of stuff.

Power storage = hydro electric. Been around for a long time but nimbyism stops it being used in the UK. Natural flow hydro could sort a lot of our power needs and can be used as both Base load and peak shave power supply. Chuck in some pumped storage to hook in with the fashionable (but frankly ridiculous on a life of field carbon balance) wind fleet we already have … bingo. No need for new nuclear, coal, gas …

Power storage has to be the key to alt. sources of power.

It is! This has been the issue since renewables became mainstream a long time ago. Industry knew that the technologies would not be properly viable until this was sorted. I’d like to have seen the cost/energy analysis for hydro storage on a domestic/district scale to make use of the small scale stuff. Expensive capital outlay though.

Then we can put the “wind not blowing/sun not shining” argument to bed.

We can. Until then, it’s a perfectly viable argument. I like what Tesla are doing. Fingers crossed. I understand they are working with 3M to try and make those tiles as efficient as, or even better than panels.

Wiki gives UK electricity consumption as 347 Terra Watt Hours (twh).

Elon Musk states in that video that to fully decarbonise we need roughly 3 times current current electricity capacity. Seems fair as a back of the envelope figure, so let’s assume 1000 twh.

Hinkley C is planned to produce 3,200 Mega Watts. Assume a capacity factor of 80% (the time it’s working, very low for a nuke) and 8760 hours in a year. Hinkley C will produce 3200*0.8*8760 = 22,425,600 mwh= 22.4 twh annually. Construction cost is £18 Billion according to Wiki.

I can’t find any costs for Tesla roof yet so I’ll guess £10,000 – link for where guess came from. Assume 75m2 roof.

UK average insolation is about 1000 kwh per m2 – wiki and efficiency of a commercial panel is about 20%

So our UK house is going to produce 75 * 1000 kwh * 20% = 15,000kwh annually.

There are about 25 million homes in the UK so if we do them all we get 25,000,000 * 15,000 kwh = 375 twh.

Capital cost is 25 million * £10,000 = £250,000,000,000 = £250 billion

This is just for the solar roof – not for the batteries.

Conclusions:
Hinkley C = 22.4 twh for £18 billion capital. We’d need 50 Hinkleys to decarbonise.
Solar roofs = 375 twh for £250 billion capital. We’d need 2.5 times UK houses to decarbonise.
Decarbonising via a shift to non-fossil fuel generated electricity is going to be expensive

Edited as I missed a factor of 75 from my calcs

Less that 50% of roof surfaces will be suitable

Coupled with solar roads Humans may just ‘make it’ 🙂

The thing is though that all the solar panels and more so the batteries currently come with a large carbon footprints of manufacture. Lithium battery products are not a nice product to manufacture. Its just putting the issue somewhere else.

To me, it has to be more fuel cell type tech. Solar / wind used to create the hydrogen from water, stored in small tanks (similar to LPG heating tanks) and then re-used to create leccy as required.

Hydrogen storage is being done small scale on Unst ( a scottish island) they have a wind turbine, excess electricity is used to split water and they then use the hydrogen in a fuel cell on windless days. They also run a car on it

conversion losses are high and hydrogen is tricky to store and transport.

http://www.hi-energy.org.uk/HI-energy-Explore/the-pure-project.htm

There was an interesting program on Radio 4 the other week about using renewables to create hydrogen

@T1000

I doubt the figure is as high as that. However, it is this sort of issue why this storage technology also needs to be scaled up and attached to grids, so excess grid energy can be stored and fed back in.

Power storage = hydro electric. Been around for a long time but nimbyism stops it being used in the UK. Natural flow hydro could sort a lot of our power needs

Is Scotland not part of the UK? There’s a great deal of hydro up there; natural and pumped.

pump storage is a good method – but low intensity so you need an awful lot of it. IIRC Scotlands pump storage is about 4 hours of UK electricity usage

There are plans for an interconnect to Norway where they will create huge pump storage plants – so Scotlands excess alternative energy can be sent to Norway for storage

Pretty much all the easy locations for large hydro schemes in Scotland were exploited way back in the 1950’s. Building a whole load more is not going to happen.

Indeed. I would guess refurbishment with newer tech could improve efficiency and there is scope for more small local hydro schemes but no more large scale developments

Does installing solar panels on roofs in the UK make any environmental sense given it’s not a very sunny place?
Wouldn’t it be better to install them in say South Africa (which still generates the vast majority of its electricity from fossil fuels)?
The same solar panel would reduce South Africa’s fossil fuel consumption way more than it would reduce the UK’s.

Does installing solar panels on roofs in the UK make any environmental sense given it’s not a very sunny place?
Wouldn’t it be better to install them in say South Africa (which still generates the vast majority of its electricity from fossil fuels)?
The same solar panel would reduce South Africa’s fossil fuel consumption way more than it would reduce the UK’s.

Why can’t you do both?

I see we’re paying for Hinkley’s waste storage too..

May be time to build that straw bale house and stock up on candles.

mikey74 – Member
Why can’t you do both?

Scarce resources.

If you can’t do them both at the same time which one should you do first?

If you can’t do them both at the same time which one should you do first?

But we’re talking the finances of two completely independent Countries. It’s up to each Country to fund their own. One has no bearing on the other.

But we’re talking the finances of two completely independent Countries. It’s up to each Country to fund their own. One has no bearing on the other.

Why couldn’t the UK rent some land in South Africa, cover it in solar panels and sell the electricity to the grid there.

It could use the income to buy gas to run UK power stations.

The net CO2 reduction would be greater than if the solar panels had been installed in the UK.

It could use the income to buy gas to run UK power stations.

You really have missed the point. The point is to reduce, and eventually eliminate, our own reliance on fossil fuels. This is something every country should be doing, not just the sunny ones.

It’s interesting in amongst all the numberwanging for Renewables, that increasing energy consumption never seems to be discussed much…

Elon flogs leccy cars, the more he sells the greater the demand for leccy, (renewable or otherwise) so why wouldn’t he get into the leccy generation game.

The biggest issue IMO is that household heating and lighting will only form part of the demand going forwards regardless of how well our homes are insulated.

just look at the technologies being pushed now, apparently ‘IoT’ and more pervasive use of technology is upon us, self driving leccy cars, crossrail and HS2 will both be leccy powered, all Manor of stuff, how many always on devices does the average home now have?… I am not sure how true it is but I remember hearing the claim a couple of years ago that an iPhone (Other smartphones are available) has about the same carbon footprint for its whole lifecycle as a refrigerator, once you factor in the energy consumption for the eBay/amazon/twitter/instagram/etc servers that phone uses, it feels like people are almost willfully blind to the whole energy consumption picture… We use more today than we did ten years ago and all the noise seems to be about using yet more not less…

You might make some products more energy efficient, but when you quadruple the number of electricity consuming devices in use (which we’re probably going to do in the next 3-5 years) you are going to increase consumption… A few panels and whilygigs on roofing are a positive addition to the mix, but they’re certainly not going to address increased demand…

Solar panels – may make sense in kent. Don’t make much sense in west coast scotland given carbon costs of making them

I reckon that over the last 10 years, my leccy bill hasn’t significantly increased in the same manner that my gas bill has. I think a lot of that is down to countering increased prices with more efficient items in the house, in particular light bulbs (50W to 3.5W), the TV ( 450W plasma , now lower power LED), and tablets.

I see your point about the total cost of power being used, but even then, a large number of the big data centres are moving to renewable energy as their power supply. Arguably, they are ahead of the curve to an extent.

mikey74 – Member
You really have missed the point. The point is to reduce, and eventually eliminate, our own reliance on fossil fuels. This is something every country should be doing, not just the sunny ones.

I really haven’t missed the point.

I’m just thinking about it in a pragmatic way.

Eventually eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels is a great goal. Unfortunately with current technology it’s not practical to do that using just renewables, and I’m not sure it ever will be.

The technology for generation is pretty good now, but storage is still a big problem.

I struggle to imagine a situation where the UK can get through a cold, calm week in winter with just renewables – no gas heating or anything else. A distributed network of batteries would be grand for 24 hours, but beyond that we’re going to struggle.

At the moment we should be focusing on reducing CO2 emissions where we can. Installing solar panels in places where coal is being burned to run air conditioning units on sunny days is probably one of the best ways of doing this.

NewRetroTom

tidal will provide bseload with pump storage smooting it. You are right tho even the scottish governments ambitious scheme (scuppered by westminster) would need fast spinup gas for those winter high pressure events

Batteries are not the answer unless the tech is radically improved

I couldn’t be bothered to expend any significant effort on working out the usable areas that’s why I said less than 50% the reality is it’s more likely to be less than 25%.

Likewise are Tesla’s output figures based on Southern California? Was the roof area per house based on the average US house?

I’ve only skimmed the thread, and didn’t watch the presentation, but solar panels on roofs might make sense in SoCal, but they’re not all that great even in Kent. Storing energy in batteries doesn’t really make any sense at all for widescale adoption. This thing from Tesla is mainly virtue signalling.

I note I’m not at all against renewables, and whilst we disagree on some aspects I’m mostly with tj

Anyone who hasn’t, or thinks that anything other than a combo of renewable and nuclear is the answer should read this.

https://www.withouthotair.com/Electronic.html

Ewan – nuclear is not and can never be part of the solution for a number of good reasons
1) Fuel supply – there is not enough fuel to expand the reactor network enough to make any significant difference to global C02 production ( at the moment worldwide its a few % of all energy usage and we only have 40 years of fuel at current usage)
2) long lead times – New nuclear reactors take 20 years at least from breaking ground to producing electricity – we will be in a shortfall before then in the UK
3) no solution to waste has yet been developed

Insulation and energy efficient appliances are the key. My home is now energy positive in terms of electricity and energy neutral if you include the wood I burn. If I hadn’t insulated it would still be consuming three or four times what the solar panels produce (average of 3300kWh/year over the last six years).