A Year With Solar Panels

Despite a lousy Summer, a wet Autumn and a generally miserable 2012 weather-wise, our solar panels have exceeded all expectations in their first year.

The estimated annual output from the installers was 2318 kWh. The actual figure was 3100 kWh. Around 30% more than the estimate. I suppose this was down to the panels being specifically designed for higher latitudes like the UK.

The 3100 kWh offsets 1.68 tonnes of carbon, saved us money on our electric bill (about £150), and provided us with a healthy income from the FIT payments (over £1300).

At the current rate, the panels will pay for themselves in just 4 more years. That is more through luck than judgement on my part: We got the panels in the period when everyone thought the government had halved the FIT payments. Consequently, we got the panels at a big discount (30%), and then found ourselves on the full FIT rate when the government had to drop the cut because it was unlawful. If it hadn't been for all that, it would have taken as much as 12 years to pay us back.

Here's how the system performed over the year:

Month by Month Stats

As you can see from the pie chart, there were 7 months of really good generation (March to September) when we could have the dishwashers or washing machine on without it costing a thing; 3 months (November to January) of low output, and two (February and October) that were in between but still useful.

The panels have been no trouble at all (touch wood!). No failures, no cleaning required (They're self-cleaning), and they've survived several storms without being damaged or blown into the next county.

I'm looking forward to seeing how they do in a good year!

George Osborne's Big Gamble

George Osborne, the man in charge of the UK's budget, seems to be obsessed with committing the country to an energy policy built around natural gas at the moment.

Last Spring he announced a raft of subsidies, sorry, incentives for gas exploration in the budget, and dropped any requirement for new gas-fired power stations to have carbon capture. Then he bullied the department of energy into building the Energy Bill around gas (completely ignoring advice from the government's own energy and climate change advisory committee) See here.

And now the government has just announced that shale gas 'fracking' can go ahead in this country.

So the way is now clear for Osborne's 'vision' to come true.

But why is Osborne so obsessed with gas? I guess it's because he's seen what the U.S. has done with shale gas in recent years. They've actually managed to cut energy prices whilst world prices have risen. They've managed this trick because they've got so much of the stuff. Now they don't have to buy expensive imports and can even replace coal-fired power stations with cheaper gas-fired ones.

Sounds like a no-brainer really.....except for a few things:

• Whilst shale gas has been proven to be present under Britain, the actual quantities won't be known until we've started extracting across the country. So we could be committing ourselves to gas when there's not enough shale gas available for our needs or even make it cheap enough to be worth the effort. We'd then be forced to rely on expensive imports which, on past performance, just keep getting more expensive. The result is that we not only get bigger gas bills, we'd get bigger electric bills too (because we're committed to using it to generate electric).

• On similar lines, the government's committee on climate change says that, whilst renewable energy may push up the average annual household energy bill by £100, committing the country to gas may push it up by as much as £600. They worked this out based on the government's own research. See here.

• If agreement is ever reached on climate change, chances are part of the solution will involve a carbon tax. Which would mean the price of fossil fuels like gas would increase even if we did have enough of it to make it viable.

• Considering the increasing resistance to the building of on-shore wind farms because they spoil the countryside, there seems little chance of the public accepting fracking on their doorsteps. There would be hundreds, if not thousands, of rigs dotted around the countryside; Pipelines laid everywhere; and villages blighted by support vehicles transporting toxic waste water. These islands are small and comparatively densely populated, there is bound to be considerable conflict.

All in all, Osborne seems to be gambling with the country's energy policy and the rest of the government are just going along with it. If it works (i.e. Britain gets energy security and fuel bills stabilise) he'll be a hero, but the chances are we'll be cursing his name.

Doha - A Waste Of Time

So the Doha climate conference ended as it began, with disappointment.

There were hopes that the host nation, Qatar (The world's biggest carbon emitter per head), were going to open the conference by announcing bold plans for cutting their emissions (Wow, what an impact that would have had!). Instead, it appears they'd attempted to broker a regional agreement between Middle East countries and failed because of lack of agreement. Which, I assume, led the Qataris to believe they didn't have to make any unilateral commitments....

In a way, this is climate conferences in miniature: A group of nations failing to agree how to tackle climate change (which they all say they want to do) and walking away with a collective sigh of relief - The status quo has been preserved for another year.

Or am I being too cynical here?....Nah! Politicians are masters of seeming to be doing something when, in fact, they're planning on doing nothing.

The Durban climate agreement gave leaders of the rich nations plus the likes of China and India the perfect opportunity to agree precisely nothing until 2015. Doha demonstrated that all too well.

The European Super Grid

Copyright: DESERTEC, michael.straub@clubofrome.de        Author: Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation

One of the many challenges facing us humans in the 21st century is energy. It will need to be plentiful, cheap, reliable, secure, and clean.

Plentiful and cheap because, with a growing world population, anything else will lead to spiralling energy costs for everyone.

Reliable because modern life is increasingly dependant on energy to continue functioning.

Secure because energy security is becoming a priority for many countries. They no longer want their economies held hostage by unfriendly or 'flakey' nations.

And clean because, like it or not, carbon emissions are changing our climate and we need to reduce them. Fast.

'Super grids' may be a way to achieve all these goals.

A super grid is not just a very large electric grid that crosses national borders, as suggested by the above map, or necessarily related to renewables (also implied by the above).

The key elements are smart grid technology (See earlier post) and national grids linked by high voltage DC connectors aka HVDC  (Maybe AC connectors in USA).

The proposed European smart grid, for example, could use that smart grid tech to completely eliminate the use of coal and natural gas, despite making heavy use of intermittent renewables like wind and solar. Studies say this could be achieved based on the principle that, with a wide enough area, there will always be enough wind energy available somewhere.

That wide area would be achieved by running HVDC connections from Iceland (Wind, hydro, and geothermal) to Britain; and from Britain (Wind), Ireland (Wind), Scandinavia (Hydro), and Africa (Solar) to the continent (solar, wind, geothermal, hydro and biomass). The area may even spread as far as the Pacific (via Russia).

With an area that wide, so many sources, and smart grid control, you could achieve that plentiful, cheap, reliable, secure, and clean energy I was talking about.

Pie in the sky? Actually, the basics are beginning to appear now. The UK is already connected to France and the Netherlands. We're also talking to Iceland and Ireland to connect to their resources. There are numerous other connections around Europe, with more under construction.

Meanwhile, the DESERTEC Foundation is promoting the concept of a network of concentrating solar power stations (See the map) in the Sahara that could not only supply Europe with a vast source of electric but North Africa too. It's feasible but expensive. Unlikely in these cash-strapped times but it'd be worth the investment if we did.

Super grids make sense even without renewables. With renewables they unlock a limitless, clean, and cheap resource that no nation or nations can monopolise. They are where the future lies. Not with some rapidly depleting, dirty, fossil fuel peddled by the few at the expense of the many.... and our planet.

More here and here.

What Is A Smart Grid?

When you plug something into a wall socket, chances are you're connecting to a standard electrical grid. Like all grids, they are made up of power stations, a transmission network, and power distribution (i.e. sub-stations that actually supply your home and workplace).

Standard electric grids are overseen by control rooms where supervisors closely monitor the supply and demand sides, and attempt to match the two as closely as possible. They do this by running up or down, fast start, stand-by power sources like gas-fired power stations and hydro-electric. They might even shut down things like wind turbines if there's too much supply.

Standard electric grids depend on a great deal of manual intervention, backed up by a lot of mostly idle back-up power sources. Often these grids are pretty elderly, inefficient, and prone to local failures.

All this may have been manageable 20 or so years ago but things have become increasingly more complex. Back then a grid only had to cope with a relatively few sources of supply producing predictable amounts of energy. Now the grids have to handle far more sources, many of which may be highly variable (e.g. all those separate wind farms and solar arrays) and it's fast becoming unmanageable.

In short, standard grids are now considered inefficient, unreliable, too slow to respond to peaks and troughs in demand and supply, and expensive to run.

-ooOoo-

Source: http://horizonenergy.blogspot.co.uk/

In 2009, a United States Department of Energy study concluded that modernisation of US grids with smart grid capabilities would save 46 to 117 billion dollars over the next 20 years.

So what are smart grids? Well, the basic idea behind them is that they have real-time knowledge of everything that's relevant to them and act accordingly.

The goal is to have systems that know exactly how demand and every element of supply is changing as it happens and adjust both sides to smooth out those peaks and troughs.

If you manage that trick then you need fewer stand-by power stations, have no power outages, can handle more renewable energy, waste less energy, consumers have reduced energy bills, and carbon emissions are cut.

In short, smart grids improve efficiency, reliability, economics, and sustainability. It's good for the power companies, good for consumers, good for the economy, and good for the planet.

All this can be achieved with existing technology. For example:

• Smart meters in homes and businesses which let the system know about electric usage as it happens.
• Fault detection and self healing on all major elements of the system to avoid sudden loss of supply.
• Helping consumers cut their bills by showing them (via the smart meters) which appliances are the most power hungry.
• Reducing demand at peak times by automatically adjusting home appliances like air con, heating and fridges, with no adverse effects for the customer (via the smart meter, smart sockets, and smart appliances).
• Automated systems that juggle everything without the need for human intervention. 
• Once electric cars become more common-place, smart grids will even be able to store excess energy in their batteries, and draw on them when demand is higher.

This may all sound a bit futuristic but, in fact, smart grids are already rolling out across the world in the U.S., Italy, Canada, Germany, China, and the UK to name but a few.

Welcome to the future everyone.

More here.
Detailed 5 page analysis here.