Uplifting News

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

California's weather definitely isn't England's

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.

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.