Whatever happened to “solar shingles”? There were supposed to be a couple of companies making them, but you never see them on houses.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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They are more expensive and less efficient. Very few people use them.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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That’s actually pretty expedient