Millions of homes to get grants and cheap loans for solar panels
Ministers are drawing up plans to subsidise the work in a bid to win over consumers as the government attempts to meet its 2030 clean energy pledge
That cash has to come from somewhere. So, whose wallet gets nicked to pay for it?
The money will come from the government’s £6.6 billion warm homes plan and is due to be allocated in next year’s spending review.
And where’s that coming from?
These would be repaid potentially through bills, but at a lower annual cost than a household would currently pay in electricity charges.
No, that doesn’t change the cost. It just moves it around. Even oif we assume that it “works”, in the sense that household solar is cheaper than alternatives. That loss of interest – look, sorry, but opportunity costs are real costs – still has to be carried by someone.
Ministers are also considering increasing the amount households can make from “selling back” any unused electricity they generate to the grid to increase the incentives for homeowners to take up the offer.
Again, someone’s got to pay for that. More solar at the very time of day that everyone’s selling solar?
So, again, to repeat the question. Who has to pay for all this?
As of this minute, all 17 GW of our installed capacity of solar farms is delivering precisely 0.0% to the grid…….
So solar power has already reached Net Zero?
It’s not just the cash, the solar panels have to come from somewhere as well.
I wonder what the carbon footprint of shipping them over from China is.
Maybe they come here on zero-emission container vessels like those bringing all that “bio mass” over the pond (which then generates around three times as much CO2 as the coal that’s already here) as a consequence of generating 9% of our energy right now.
Maybe it’s magic net-zero CO2?
You are forgetting the main advantage of solar panels on people homes. No planning permission required. You just ned a funding model that will persuade homeowners to sign up. Of course, the state does not pay for the whole thing. The homeowner only gets a subsidy that helps lower the cost.
So this is really a tax rebate for the upper middle classes in the form of solar panels with the possibility of selling electricity into the grid to earn some pocket money. As Tim has eluded to, it is a tax rebate that has to be paid somehow.
The other advantage is that it allows the politicians to claim that they have increased the amount of generating capacity by X Gw and they have made the UK more energy independent.
Just do not ask who made the solar panels and if slave labour was involved.
Marvellous; a ‘warm homes’ policy which subsidises something largely useless at the times your home needs warmth.
Household solar strikes me as a really bloody stupid idea. Apart from the panel costs, you’ve got to pay for sales people making relatively small transactions, you’ve got to figure out if the roof is OK, pay for people to go up on a roof, fit a small panel, wire it into everything. A panel breaks, someone has to erect scaffolding.
Put solar on fields, you just buy space by the acre. You fill it with panels. A panel breaks, someone drives up, takes it out easily puts a new one in. Easy to clean. One load of cabling to the grid. Maybe you even have some sort of solar fuel thing from it at peak times.
But I really do wonder if this is worth it on what is a wet island with sporadic sunshine with high costs. Would it not work better to just cover a large chunk of Egypt that is sand and heat with solar on a colossal scale and do the chemistry to pump out barrels of kerosene? A place where a little fluffy cloud in the sky is a rarity. You know, they all live on purified water from the Nile because it don’t rain.
@Western Bloke
Planning permission. You need planning permission to put a solar farm into a field. Change of use of the land, environmental impact statements, lawyers fees to deal with the complaints from locals, etc.
No planning permission required for panels on peoples homes. You can just do it. Just need to get people to sign up to it.
Salamander. “… possibility of selling electricity into the grid to earn some pocket money. “
You’ve not quite got the hang of, “Who has to pay for all this?”
So….. where does this “pocket money” come from? Out of the pockets of other bill payers in higher tariffs.
We put solar panels on our roof about four years ago. No planning permission or scaffolding required. (Two story house.) Paid for themselves already. We have ducted aircon and heating. This is in Australia , so probably OK for us. Friends have two Tesla’s and a Tesla house battery and solar panels. Their bill last quarter was $A 67 in credit. I can understand why not such a good idea in the UK.
A family member recently returned from visiting a few factories in China, on business. This included a huge solar panel factory, which was almost entirely automated.
@Jimintheantipodes
The starting point for solar panels is quartz. You cannot use sand as it has too many impurities. You need to mine quartz and then reduce it using coal (you need the carbon to get the oxygen off the silicon) to get silicon. That part is not fully automated.
Even then, the silicon you get is not pure enough for solar panel manufacturing. You need to carry on until you get to five 9 purity (99.99999). Then you can start to make solar cells which can be made into panels. The second half of the process is where most of the automation is.
Five 9 purity is bloody insane when you think about it but that is not enough for electronics. That requires seven 9 purity. – 99.9999999. It is so insane that I am surprised that there are no conspiracy theories about it. Something along the lines of aliens living amongst, refining silicon so we can have electronics.
Senior government sources said the solar initiative was a “critical element” of the government’s clean energy plan, which could help significantly bring down bills and help consumers directly see the benefits of decarbonising electricity generation.
Lol.
They added that it was also vital to hit the government’s target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.
Fuck your targets.
“At the moment heat pumps cost more than boilers but can be as expensive to run because of the cost of electricity,” they said. “Installing rooftop solar along with battery storage has the potential to change that financial calculation.”
Mugs wanted, must be up to date on your Covid jabs.
The government and the new GB Energy company have a key role to play in helping homeowners with this transition
I’m not a tranny and I’m not taking part in your “transition”.
Salamander: “with the possibility of selling electricity into the grid to earn some pocket money. ”
Errrm… Nope…
As usual the UK is roughly a decade behind in any kind of Innovation, and never looks at what has actually happened in other countries doing the same..
Here in Clogland a similar scheme has been in place for well over a decade already.
As far as solar coverage of homes is concerned, we’ve well passed the point of diminishing returns already.
In the early stages, you could indeed severely limit your electricity bill , and the things paid themselves back in roughly 5 years. Never *made* you money, but savings and rebates paid for the installation and running in a reasonable timeframe.
Now , now that just about every suitable roof has been covered in the things, the rebate scheme has been severely reduced, and will be dropped altogether.
The sheer amount of power dropped on the Grid, which isn’t yet fully adapted to spot-source generation in many places, and won’t be for the next decade, causes immense problems. To the point of transformers quite spectacularly conking out on occasion.
All that power at the wrong time, often not properly synchronised by the older Boxen, causes Blackouts, Brownouts and voltage spikes, so people are being asked to please disconnect them from the Grid regularly, with the more modern meter boxes doing this automatically if there’s a glut.
The energy companies quickly cottoned on, and started charging you for generating and delivering electricity to the net. Capitalist Clown World 101…
Smart battery packs have become popular, because they can conceivably deliver when there’s actual demand, and possibly make a buck there.
Of course, the energy companies cottoned on to that as well, and rigged the rules again, so that you always pay when you deliver to the Grid come Jan. 1st.
And, of course…. Adapting your home to use that battery for the not so powerhungry stuff, and only draw from the grid for power appliances is not yet Verboten, but guess what they’re lobbying for….
The UK has a much less robust Grid, 10 times the Bureaucracy and Quango’s, and has chased just about everybody knowledgeable and experienced enough to actually do the Work towards Greener Horizons.
What on earth makes you think this will actually work? Or make any money other than for the Usual Suspects whether it fails or not?
@Grikath
I never said it would work. Hence why I positioned it as a tax rebate for the middle class. Home solar has only really made sense if you lived in an area with crap grid connections. If you live on an island then then solar and wind has its place. The main advantage (if you can call it that) is a political one. Politicians can say that, on paper, the UK is adding 5 GW of generating capacity to the country’s power system. Yes, it is a joke, but they can do it and hope no one looks into it properly.
The other “advantage” is that it allows people who oppose an alternative to say we do not need the alternative. I remember on BBC question time a debate on whether or not we should build Sizewell C. Many audience members stated that if we build more solar, we would not need to build the nuclear plant. One man stated that if we build solar panels on every car park in the UK, we would generate ten times the electricity of Sizewell C.
A complete joke of course. But it allows people (political grifters and low information voters) to argue that we do not need nuclear or gas.
Nota Benny the point of the expensive and crap solar panels and battery combo (I hope you don’t mind your children being burnt to death in a massive battery fire) is to prop up another retarded, unpleasant, unworkable technology they hope to curse your life with: heat pumps.
The British government is like a demented taxidermist who works exclusively in the medium of human shit. All of their schemes are aimed at making your life Hell.
My roof is a Carbon Capture and Storage system which grows moss for the cause. I demand my £100 per tonne. Seriously, if one kind of micro scheme that helps tackle climate change is to be subsidised, then they all should.
So no, don’t subsidise any of this shit.
Would this be the same government sponsored warm homes plan which persuaded householders to have cavity and roof insulation fitted, something which leaves those same householders unable to sell their properties because of the cavity and roof insulation? Perhaps there’s a recruiting branch of government which insists only cretins, morons, and numpties are employed? Still, it isn’t their money, and the likelihood of those responsible being dragged out and decapitated outside the town hall, is very small, so why not rinse and repeat ad nauseum?
Ah, Steve…. You’re thinking of the Li-ion packs… Only an idiot would use those in a home situation.
Serious “permanent” setups are done with closed lead-acid gel batteries with the correct specs.
Mucho cheaper, mucho safer. completely overengineered, can be acquired almost anywhere, easily swappable should one fail, and have a solid recycling scheme in place since forever.
Just a lot heavier, but you’re not talking about a mobile solution….
And the electronics for it can be ordered at just the click of a button.. Pre-assembled, or home-bake if you *really* are going for that nostalgic Home Electronics feeling..
It’s really not that hard…
Our house had solar already when we bought it. Was early enough to get a decent rebate as well (subsidy for the middle classes as others have commented).
Looked at battery storage to go with it as the FITs payment happens whether you supply electricity to the grid or not (deemed to happen, not measured!).
Battery system would take 10 years to give a ROI but the batteries would need replacing after 7 years. So, will never be in the money (unless I want to bask in virtue signalling about stopping flipper boiling in the ocean).
Cat III autoland weather across all of southern England and most of central and northern Europe right now, thanks to a Dunkelflaute.
The major characteristic of solar electricity is that apart from those few hot, sunny afternoons when you need airco on (if you have it), it produces power when you don’t need it and doesn’t produce power when you do.
Power demand tends to be higher on cold winter days. What are the main characteristics of cold winter days? Low sun, overcast, and they’re short. It’s dark for the morning and evening peak times. You could completely blanket the UK in solar panels and you’d still barely generate enough juice to run a single-bar electric fire. Just the one.
Hey, let’s build more solar. Cunts.
Grikath – according to Wickes:
Why do we use Lithium-ion batteries
Lithium-ion batteries are the most used battery in domestic solar energy systems, and here’s why:
Low cost: They have become the most cost-effective solution for home energy storage with the increase in electric vehicle production, bringing the price down by 97% over 30 years.
Low maintenance: Even the most affordable Lithium-ion batteries will last for over 6000 charges when paired with a good battery management system.
High battery energy density: They can hold more energy than a lead acid battery.
High depth of discharge or efficiency: They can store more energy before they need to recharge.
Long lifespan: At Wickes Solar, we guarantee that our Lithium-ion batteries will last for at least 12 years. Keeping you online for over a decade.
All of the home batteries I’ve seen are Li-ion types (e.g. Tesla Powerwall).
Li-ions!
No planning permission required for panels on peoples homes.
Not wholly true. You need planning permission for listed buildings, conservation areas, designated national landscapes and where the panels are higher than the highest part of the roof or where panels protrude more than 20cms beyond the wall or roof slope.
The thing about this Net Zero bollocks is that it is so obviously fatuous that an unindoctrinated 12 year old could see right through it before you can say “gender-fluid”. Thick they may be but I cannot credit that politicians actually, genuinely believe that what they are doing is achievable.
Sos they’re doing it for other reasons. What are they? “Demonstrating leadership”? That’s a bit white-saviour colonialist, isn’t it?
Like WB I’m confused why policy makers are so attracted to rooftop solar. As Tim says it costs someone ultimately. Let’s say it costs X. Even if you are committed to solar, you can get more solar at a cost of X by other means. Something hasn’t been mentioned yet – good solar facilities can track the Sun over the course of the day, or at least re-angle the panels somewhat. Rooftop solar doesn’t do that so using a panel that way is permanently wasting some of its productive potential. Yes even here they do pay back for themselves, both in £££ and (it’s widely acknowledged, though with some crank claims to the contrary) carbon terms, but you’d still get a better NPV in both respects if you paid to deploy the same area of panels in a less stupid manner. There’s no special prize for breaking even if you could have done better elsewhere. Guess it’s attractive to governments that homeowners pick up part of the tab and feel a sense of “ownership” of green issues but it’s still a silly way of going about it.
Could have been worse, at the start of the Coalition there was a fad for rooftop wind turbines, which really make no sense whatsoever – blade area nowhere near big enough to make that cost-effective even on windy days.
@anon
I shot this photo in South Somerset last week:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qsle29jjx9ywg7v8q11gr/Solar.jpg?rlkey=kj25ra4fykdkqk8l204pe15hj&dl=0
There’s no sign of steer-ability in those panels, and all the other solar fields I saw down there were the same. All a bit academic when it’s pointing at fog, too.
good solar facilities can track the Sun over the course of the day, or at least re-angle the panels somewhat
Observation supports my view that tracking is unusual on solar farm, because of extra cost and complexity. But at least they can carefully site their panels at the optimal tilt and facing due south, options which aren’t available for rooftop installations. They’re also cleaned regularly.
It’s not certain that at temperate latitudes even optimally sited solar panels will generate more electricity over their useful lifespan than was consumed during the entire manufacturing process (including mining and refining the raw materials etc.) Which, given they’re mostly made in China using electricity generated from ‘dirty’ coal, means they don’t even do much to reduce global CO2 emissions.
@Steve, This : “Long lifespan: At Wickes Solar, we guarantee that our Lithium-ion batteries will last for at least 12 years. Keeping you online for over a decade.” tells you they’re lying through their teeth.
I’ve yet to see Li-ion guarantees longer than 5 years on consumer grade.
Or on professional grade, for that matter, but those lunks are modular, so you can swap out dodgy banks. Which comes with the mandatory service contract and other bells like proprietary hardware and software…
And even then they only guarantee the frame and electronics, not the individual power racks, other than what stipulated in that service contract.
And even for that 5 year period… We all have experienced the lovely tendency of phone batteries to rapidly lose their capacity after a year or two. Something, something Laws of Physics inherent with the technology.
5 years is already stretching credulity, even with the best of charge management firmware and software.
12 years? That’s those “6000+ charges”/365/2 . In The Lab. Divide by 5 for actual working conditions, which brings you to an awfully familiar number of years… Coinciding with the average experience people have with Li-ion batteries and effective lifetime…
“Planning permission. You need planning permission to put a solar farm into a field. Change of use of the land, environmental impact statements, lawyers fees to deal with the complaints from locals, etc.”
Planning really isn’t an issue with solar. If its a big enough scheme you get the SoS to give you compulsory purchase powers to acquire all the land you need and the SoS will put the whole thing through on the nod without the locals having a say.
Compulstory purchase for private solar developers? You’re joking, aren’t you?
I don’t see the need for compulsory purchase. All you have to do is make a big, fat, subsidised offer to the landowner knowing your planning application will be nodded through by SoS no matter what the locals think or whether the grid can take it. And eventually, conventional corporate purchase follows thanks to IHT. Trebles all round.
Grikath – I don’t think bolting a massive, flammable battery full of toxic chemicals to your house is a good idea either.
Certainly not to power heat pumps, which only reduce the value of your house while forcing you to spend a lot more money on electricity and don’t heat your home.
The whole thing is mental, it would be infinitely better for the environment if we just fracked gas.
Maybe batteries will take off as the UK electric grid “transitions” to being intermittent and unreliable, like in other unlucky third world countries?
@Grikath
It’s really not that hard…
Actually it is quite hard to do it right otherwise you end you end up with a dubious installation with RCD’s that might not work properly as the supply is coming from the wrong direction and normal ones are not designed to be bidirectional. Earthing requirements can be a problem too.
When your battery pack blows up, your house burns down and you die it brings the IHT bill forward by years.
A win for them.
“Compulstory purchase for private solar developers? You’re joking, aren’t you?”
Nope. Solar schemes over 50MW are considered to be NSIPs (Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects), and developers have to apply for a DCO (Development Consent Order) for them. If granted this gives them statutory powers to install infrastructure and compulsory purchase land required to make the scheme go ahead. So if you plan a massive solar farm somewhere and need to put the cable through a farmer’s land, and he refuses to agree to it you can just force him to accept the cable. Equally if access is needed in a certain spot and the landowner won’t agree it can be compulsorily purchased.
https://www.tlt.com/insights-and-events/insight/permitting-renewable-energy-schemes-under-development-consent-orders/
It can also be used to provide land that the renewables developer has to supply for environmental improvements. I know of cases where landowners hundreds of miles from a proposed scheme are being threatened with compulsory purchase orders because the developer needs to recreate somewhere else an environmental habitat that will be destroyed by their scheme. And that habitat can be anywhere in the country. So the developer finds a suitable spot somewhere, goes to the landowner and says ‘We want to buy (or rent) this land to turn it into a wetland (or something) and if you don’t agree we’ll compulsorily purchase it anyway’. The landowner is getting none of the benefits of the scheme (ie can’t have any of their land covered in solar panels or whatnot and get that income stream) but are having land taken off them to allow a scheme to go ahead hundreds of miles away.
This article tells you whats happening up in Scotland:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/30/net-zero-companies-desecrating-scottish-highlands/
@anon
Rooftop solar makes little sense compared to big farms where the panels are connected in series to generate high voltages which saves on copper and the electronics to convert the DC power. Most in the UK don’t track the sun during the day as this mechanical complexity pushes up the cost too much.
The first issue is that they generate lots of power on summer days when demand is low and very little in winter when demand is high. However thanks to the way electric generators are paid in the UK they still make a lot of money for that power. In the power auctions the solar providers will bid zero to ensure they sell everything they produce. The price they get however is the same rate paid to the eye watering highest bidding generator who’s electricity is needed to meet demand. The output is low but the high rate makes it a good earner.
The second issue with the solar is that in the summer all that electricity and low demand stops the gas plants generating. Whilst they are not burning gas while idle their fixed costs still accumulate which means that their cost of electricity in winter when they are needed will need to be higher. This hurts the consumer but as pointed out above it makes the solar generators richer.
@AndyF errmmm… Nope?
If you use one of those cheep chinese things you plug-n-pray into one of your sockets as “backup” … maybe..
It should sync to the Net, but you know cheep electronics…
They’re actually more likely to trip RCD’s than “not make them work properly” anyways.
And the proper distriboxen take care of all that, if you insert them in the correct place in an existing installation.
Really only one place it can go to begin with in a proper electrcal installation.
Unless, of course, you’re talking about the Victorian Horrors still perpetrated in UK/US/AUS.
But I’ve given up on even looking at those. Let ’em arrive in the 21st century, sometimes even 20th century, first.
Domestic solar only really makes financial sense because of the big fat feed in tarrif.
An above market rate subsidised by …
We will pay back the capital subsidy with a revenue subsidy so it won’t cost anything?
“Domestic solar only really makes financial sense because of the big fat feed in tarrif.”
Feed in tariffs were abolished in 2019. Any small solar scheme (such as on a domestic roof) now falls under the Smart Export Guarantee scheme, which basically is a free market that guarantees one thing only, you can’t be charged for exporting electric to the grid. The rates you’ll be offered for export are a few pence per KwH, far less than you are charged for importing electric from the grid.
Domestic solar only makes sense now if you have a battery storage facility in your house that allows you to generate power in the day and use it at night. Or if you use a lot of power during the day when the panels are generating, then it might add up. Otherwise its pointless.
Roof-top Solar water-heating panels make economic sense in England without subsidy, solar PV does not.
Which did Ed Millionaireband choose to support?
Anyone know what % of UK solar farms vary the angle of the panels over the course of the day to reduce cosine loss? Seems I was incorrect to assume it was universal in big installations. Though even if static they can at least be more optimally angled than a roof panel. Tracking has definitely been done at some British solar farms for over a decade but I can believe the additional complexity making it uneconomic in general. https://www.solarpowerportal.co.uk/gloucestershire_solar_tracking_system_outperforms_all_predictions_2356/
@andyf
“The price they get however is the same rate paid to the eye watering highest bidding generator who’s electricity is needed to meet demand.”
Fwiw this isn’t some weirdness specific to the electricity market, marginal cost pricing is just basic economics for commodities in general. The Helm Review (2017) is quite explicit on this point. The electricity market is inevitably going to be restructured in the near future, if only – as Helm explains clearly – because with all the extra renewable capacity being built, we are increasingly often going to be in a “zero marginal cost” regime where none of the gas plants are going to be required, at least on warm, sunny but windy days. And at that point the conventional market mechanisms will stop working. But it’s finally moving away from marginal cost pricing that will make the electricity market an economic odd-one-out.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-energy-independent-review
All the people gasping at how weird and stupid it is that the cost of “cheap” green electricity is being set by the cost of the marginal gas plant – and there are plenty of them, from politicians to green activists to journalists – are basically showing their ignorance at the economics of commodities. It’s even still a “rational” setup, in the sense that the really expensive producers – those with even higher marginal costs – get pushed out, and without the “cheap” (in marginal terms) providers, we would just have had a more expensive marginal provider and so a higher price.
“Whilst they are not burning gas while idle their fixed costs still accumulate which means that their cost of electricity in winter when they are needed will need to be higher. ”
To an extent yes but part of the selling point of modern gas plants is that their fixed costs are tiny compared to their marginal costs – burning gas is expensive, standby is cheap, and the difference is much more pronounced than for eg coal or older designs of gas plant. They’ve excelled as a flexible option for that reason. Greenery aside, there’s never been any doubt that it makes sense to stop burning gas when you can get the energy from other sources at lower marginal cost, which in the case under discussion happens to be wind and solar, then burn the gas when they’re not available. The point about fixed costs would be more relevant for a country that depended more on power sources with less flexibility and/or higher fixed costs. Coal or nuclear for example.
A certain mix of gas and renewables can make a lot of sense. But if you want to turn the gas plants off forever, you are going to need something else for those times renewables aren’t producing enough. And governments seem rather more committed to the grand turning off than they have been to sorting out what that “something else” might be.