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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.
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.
missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.
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.
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.
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!
Its not hard to keep power on at hospitals and 911 centers and other critical facilities and blackout elsewhere. This is frequently done in poor countries. I think rich countries van figure out too...
... 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.
Dont underestimate the people. There's about 30% of people that are dumb, but to vast majority understand we are amidst a climate catastrophe, and we want policy to address it
Ok, sure. Go to your city council meeting and suggest implementing rolling blackouts in the town to combat climate change. See how far you get.
Oh, those people are making decisions on behalf plutocrats, not the people.
Ok, go talk to random people in the street and ask them if they are okay giving up electricity in their homes for several hours each day in the name of stopping climate change. Go ahead. I'll wait.
Ah, now were getting somewhere. Because if you explain to them why and tell them the government is going to install free solar panels on their home, most people will definitely be on board.
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.
Seasonal variation.
If you are doing solar right, you will have surplus power from it 9 months out of the year. The solution to making it profitable is not storage. It's finding customers who can use that excess power, but won't increase winter demand.
The ultimate solution is likely the creation of small scale localized carbon capture that exists to manage summer overcapacity.
The current biggest issue with carbon capture is that it's less efficient than not burning fossil fuels in the first place
Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis. Even if we can't find anything productive to do with the power, there are plenty of useless, nonproductive ways to monetize excess power: AI and Crypto, for example.
Overcapacity is not an actual problem.
Yes I literally have to pay when I produce more than I use, like every day in April.
I looked into batteries, but they cost 10 times my annual power bill, and of course they wouldn't replace all electricity, so would take like 20 years to be cost neutral.
I'm considering buying a high power laser and turning it on to consume extra electricity. I'd rather send photons back into space than pay the power delivery company.
Try bitcoin.
The ROI on bitcoin is substantially greater than that of a high power laser aimed into space.
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.
You're allowed to use the solar on the roof before buying from the grid which will save you tons on most days. The UK grid operates on marginal pricing so if you buy from the grid the highest price provider dictates the price.
This essentially means that you pay the peaker plant nat gas price for electricity where every MWh hits pretty hard on the bill. To recoup the investment in the UK, especially with the interconnectors inside the Eurostar tunnel, is pretty easy and a decentralised grid allows the UK to skip building a lot of power lines for energy that's used locally.
Not under this law. This whole article is about solar panels being mandated by law, regardless of whether or not the installer thinks they can profit from them. Keep moving those goalposts, though.
I’m just pointing out an issue with residential PV which, when I first heard about it, surprised me. I hope it does not surprise the people making these laws.
Imagine if, some years from now, seasonal solar oversupply might become in the UK and the people with these by law mandated panels face the choice to either manually switch off their systems or pay to send their solar energy into the grid. It sounds stupid but this seems to be happening in places with high PV density.
And btw you’re getting me wrong, I am a big fan of residential solar. I've got a small system. It’s just, at scale, apparently more complicated than covering every roof with panels…
Goalposts go wheeeee!!!!
This is a top comment
Is it? We (all countries) need wayyyyy more storage, and we need it yesterday if we're going to transition in time to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Using substantial resources on solar panels that just end up getting curtailed, on roofs not angled in an optimal way, is a huge waste
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
https://grid.iamkate.com/ and https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/72h/hourly is also of interest as it shows some comparison across countries on CO2e intensity across nations.
You can't check historical granular data but you can look at that granularity for the past 24 hours. If you look at this over many years on many different days you get an impression of the max and minimums of demand and production of the various types as I do now. Wish they did some more stats breakdown however so this was clearer from someone coming new to the site without experience of the data.
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.
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
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...
Yeah I did the same. Pity!
Yeah. My crazy idea now is to drill a well, seal it with concrete and use it as CAES, and then put a small Gravity battery inside of it... But even then, the gravity battery would add a negligible amount of energy storage... It's just really hard to find good energy storage at this scale.
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