19h ago

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

www.theguardian.com

64 comments

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?
  
  Nuclear pushes major industrial users (steel mills, aluminum smelters, etc) to overnight. Nuclear can't be ramped up or down fast enough to match the normal demand curve, so they use "off peak" incentives to raise the trough and lower the peak. This allows nuclear to meet a much larger percentage of total demand. Without such incentives, nuclear has even more problems than solar. It would only be able to produce about 20% of our power, with 80% coming from "peaker" plants. With those incentives, nuclear can meet about 80% of out need, with peaker plants filling in.
  By driving consumption overnight, those same incentives prevent solar from being able to meet the overnight demand.
  Removing those "off peak" incentives, and providing new "on peak" incentives pushes those customers to daytime consumption that can be easily met by solar.
  Stop thinking of nuclear as a "backup". Its not a backup. It is baseload generation. "Backup" is not provided by baseload generators. "Backup" is provided by generation that doesn't suffer from the limitations of baseload generators. "Backup" is from generators that can ramp up and down to match a fluctuating demand curve. "Backup" is provided by "peaker" plants.
  
  Nuclear isn't 100% up, France had significant issues due to the summer heat raising riverwater temps, forcing plants to shut down because they couldn't cool effectively.
  Renewables are too cheap to keep nuclear economically viable, even when including battery storage to keep supply up.
  
  This study disagrees after taking into account storage.
  https://advisoranalyst.com/2023/05/11/bofa-the-nuclear-necessity.html/
  Storage and production of renewables is also done by shipping in Chinese products created burning coal and ignoring environmental concerns. This all hinges on exporting emissions and labor to areas that don't care about pollution.
  I'd also argue that nuclear tech can likely proceed faster than storage, given the dangerous nature of energy storage. Even something as basic as storing water can cause deaths given what happens when dams break, stored energy is volatile by nature.
  
  Storage is a red herring. Storage is attempting to make solar operate the same way as existing generation models: "supply shaping". Attempting to match supply to demand.
  Supply shaping doesn't even work for our existing baseload generators. We use demand shaping to move our biggest loads to a time of day when we can most easily meet them with legacy generators. Which happens to be overnight. Which is the worst time of day to generate power with solar.
  When we get rid of the current counterproductive demand-shaping models, we drop the overwhelming majority of our storage needs as well.
- 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.
  
  Nuclear is far too expensive for that.
  
  It is, and more than that it takes way too long to build. The time for it was 30 years ago.
  I noticed that during the 80s and 90s it "wasn't safe", and during the last 20 years it was "too expensive", but now you see a few powerful people advocating for it.
  And I can only assume it's the same big booming Brian Blessed-esque voice as before: that of the fossil fuel industry.
  They know they're on the way out, but if they can make people bicker and argue and spend all their money on nuclear, which will likely take 20 years to actually come online, they can carry on guzzling dinosaur juice, while simultaneously nixing any large eco friendly plans under a giant banner of "the nuclear is already on it's way!"
  
  Yeah, but a clumsy Soviet Union and a massive fossil fuel lobby put paid to that in the UK. 5% of our power comes across the channel from France...
- 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.
  
  The solution to reliability is to overbuild wind and solar, so that even suboptimal weather allows us to fully meet our essential needs.
  Which is still cheaper than 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.

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