We've been thinking of having solar power installed on the roof.

Does anyone know of a good source of accurate and unbiased information?

Searching with Google most of the sites seem to be run by the Solar
Power comanies themselves and are hardly unbiased.

pfj

--
To contact the author then write to pfjames2000ATicloudDOTcom

On 26/03/18 19:48, PeteFJ wrote:
We've been thinking of having solar power installed on the roof.

Does anyone know of a good source of accurate and unbiased information?

Searching with Google most of the sites seem to be run by the Solar
Power comanies themselves and are hardly unbiased.

pfj

You will if they are water heaters save about £30 per square neter of
panel per year.


Average insolation is around 1000kwh per year per sq meter* so at 30%
eff thats around 300Kwh per sq meter for PV - or at a putative 15p per
unit £45 per year per sq meter.


A sq meter of panel is about a grand to install. So an ROI of around
3-4.5% - untikl the panels die.

Basically a waste of money without subsidies.

And then a waste of everyone elses money.

Only ****s have solar panels



*http://contemporaryenergy.co.uk/insolation-map/



--
The New Left are the people they warned you about.

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
A sq meter of panel is about a grand to install. So an ROI of around
3-4.5% - untikl the panels die.

There's some useful numbers he
https://www.pv-magazine.com/features...e-price-index/
which boils down to a wholesale price of EUR0.45 per Wp for top-quality
modules and EUR0.25 per Wp for bargain-basement ones (and some discussion of
tariffs). The pricing trend is downwards, but somewhat slowly.

That would suggest EUR250-450 for a 1kWp panel, which in the same ballpark
as eg:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Sola...859835583.html
It seems that a rough relation is that 1kWp takes about 8m2.

And then of course there's the inverter and installation on top.
(DIY?)

So I think the ROI can be a bit better, but you have to match the demand
side: better to replace power you don't take from the grid at 15p/kWh than
the current FIT export price of 4.4p/kWh.

Theo

On 27/03/18 10:47, Theo wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
A sq meter of panel is about a grand to install. So an ROI of around
3-4.5% - untikl the panels die.

There's some useful numbers he
https://www.pv-magazine.com/features...e-price-index/
which boils down to a wholesale price of EUR0.45 per Wp for top-quality
modules and EUR0.25 per Wp for bargain-basement ones (and some discussion of
tariffs). The pricing trend is downwards, but somewhat slowly.

That would suggest EUR250-450 for a 1kWp panel, which in the same ballpark
as eg:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Sola...859835583.html
It seems that a rough relation is that 1kWp takes about 8m2.

And then of course there's the inverter and installation on top.
(DIY?)

So I think the ROI can be a bit better, but you have to match the demand
side: better to replace power you don't take from the grid at 15p/kWh than
the current FIT export price of 4.4p/kWh.

The point is that if you stick a couple of grand in a fund, you might
get 8% and teh money is still there in 10 years. In ten years you will
have spent £300 a year servicing the panels and they will still be scrap.


Theo



--
"Nature does not give up the winter because people dislike the cold."

ۥ Confucius

The Natural Philosopher wrote:
The point is that if you stick a couple of grand in a fund, you might
get 8% and teh money is still there in 10 years. In ten years you will

What fund is that? :-) No chance of 8% at the moment except on very
high risk investments I would have thought.

--
Chris Green
·

On 27/03/18 15:31, Chris Green wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
The point is that if you stick a couple of grand in a fund, you might
get 8% and teh money is still there in 10 years. In ten years you will

What fund is that? :-) No chance of 8% at the moment except on very
high risk investments I would have thought.

Well you go on thinking then

I'll go on investing in the top half dozen performing funds.

My high performance depends on you investing in ****.



--
The lifetime of any political organisation is about three years before
its been subverted by the people it tried to warn you about.

Anon.

On 27/03/18 16:38, Huge wrote:
On 2018-03-27, Chris Green wrote:
The Natural Philosopher wrote:
The point is that if you stick a couple of grand in a fund, you might
get 8% and teh money is still there in 10 years. In ten years you will

What fund is that? :-)

Turnip's as good an IFA as he is at most other things.

Indeed. I am.


--
"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him."

Jonathan Swift.

On 26/03/2018 19:48, PeteFJ wrote:
We've been thinking of having solar power installed on the roof.

Does anyone know of a good source of accurate and unbiased information?

Searching with Google most of the sites seem to be run by the Solar
Power comanies themselves and are hardly unbiased.

If you can use the stuff you generate to do stuff you normally use
electricity for even without any FIT etc it's worthwhile. If you have to
fit a battery then I'd say it's not.

One example would obviously be if you have A/C because your house cooks
in the summer then it's worth it. Also it provides a degree of roof
shading reducing the heat absorbed by tiles and slows down the
accumulating heat build-up in the loft and subsequent migration to the
rooms below as the summer goes on.
If you have East/West facing roof you get a longer (more usable) spread
of power and it's kinder to the national grid but a bigger investment on
panels.

If you have an old mechanical meter that goes backwards then you can
lend your electricity to all your neighbours during the day and use the
electricity they would have used during that period for yourself at night.
So I've heard. unleash the wrath of hades

If all you're going to do is shove your energy into heating a tank full
of water that gas does significantly cheaper before pushing it to the
grid and expecting a handsome return from F.I.T. simply skip the
electrical conversion and go with a small thermal set-up, F.I.T. won't
make it worthwhile.

From my own perspective running a pond with 3 water pumps, air pump(s)
and 100W UV etc somewhere around 500-600W continuous during summer
months it's nice not to be worrying about how much electricity it's using.
Haven't got around to doing A/C yet but it's on the cards.

On 26/03/2018 21:20, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Mon, 26 Mar 2018 19:48:37 +0100, (PeteFJ) wrote:

We've been thinking of having solar power installed on the roof.

Does anyone know of a good source of accurate and unbiased information?

Searching with Google most of the sites seem to be run by the Solar
Power comanies themselves and are hardly unbiased.

pfj

To start with, you could do worse than read the relevant page in David
MacKay's book 'Without the Hot Air'.
http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml

+1

Bear in mind also that solar power in the UK produces on average
throughout the year somewhere in the range of 10-15% of the total
rated capacity of the panels, depending on their orientation, angle of
inclination, shading by trees or other buildings etc. The figure can
be as high as 25-30% in Summer, and as low as 4 or 5% in winter.

If there is any shading by trees then forget it (or zap the trees). I
have seen a solar roof in a "green" woodland facility - I estimate they
never got all their panels in sunlight at the same time. Current output
is severely restricted by the one with the weakest output.

This chap has been charting the output of his solar panels for a few
years, to give you an idea of what to expect in practice
http://www.jaharrison.me.uk/Misc/Solar/index.html

Here is another one - an early adopter physicist that I know:

http://www.viridis.net/energy/solar-pv.html

With realtime graphs of import and export of power on various timescales
daily to a few years he has been collecting data for years. ISTR One
interesting feature on cold sunny winters days is that the peak output
at midday is helped by the cooler PV panels despite the low elevation.

http://www.viridis.net/rrd/combined.html

Also some warnings about some of the cowboys in this game and what bogus
claims to watch out for. Has it improved at all?

--
Regards,
Martin Brown