Geekbeat guide to PV installation

27 Jan 2014: Here is a good geekbeat.tv guide to installing Photovoltaic PV panels - many good discussion points covered in just 20 minutes of lecture!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8N5iN_aRXs
See John's accompanying blog post at http://geekbeat.tv/solarpanels

Bosch video on how Photovoltaic panels are manufactured

Bosch video on how Photovoltaic panels are manufactured:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEIaYsB4yg

Large solar farms in Japan

Picture from Gizmodo website

27 Jan 2014: After the terrible experience of the Japanese Tsunami a couple of years ago, and the consequent damage to the nuclear reactor at Fukushima, Japan is finding a new way forward. They are applying their ability to think Big by applying it to solar farms. The amount of flat land in Japan is limited, so this Kyocera sea based one, facing in a westerly direction is saving land, generating energy and is safe against Tsunami (which comes from the east).

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/11/after-two-years-of-nuclear-crises-japan-opens-its-biggest-solar-park/
This one is the "Mega Solar Power Plant Kagoshima Nanatsujima". Whatever the transient cost modelling between nuclear and solar, the one largest factor which is beyond costings is long life safety - this farm can be renewed panel by panel if parts go wrong, workers will not suffer radiation, nothing will melt or blow up, and nearby communities will be safe to live in.
More from Kyocera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uTdsNsJ_D0

Half a million installations!

14 Jan 2014: The Guardian reports: "The solar power industry appears to have installed its 500,000th set of panels in the UK in recent days, in a move that marks a major milestone for the burgeoning sector.
    According to figures by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, 499,687 solar schemes had been installed by 5 January under the feed-in tariff scheme that supports solar arrays with a capacity smaller than 50kW."

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jan/14/solar-panels-on-half-a-million-uk-buildings-figures-suggest

PV roof over supermarket

Feb 2013: This seems like a good idea! Large supermarkets have high electrical costs with all their chillers, hot deli counters, lighting, check-out equipment etc. If they can generate enough to counterbalance this, and provide a bit more on the side, then it's good for profits and it's good PR for the company - and significantly reduces the load on the nearby power station.

What better idea than to make the vast acres of roof into a PV generating roof. And if you're thinking of taking it further, the car parking can double up as a power generating surface while allowing shoppers to get from their cars in shelter from summer sun and winter rains.
   This is the 340kW installation at the Edeka Krawczyk supermarket rooftop in Schwabach, Germany. The installation used 2,500 thin-film CIS modules and was connected to the grid in July 2012. The city of Schwabach has nominated the solar project for its biennial environment award.

Solar companies to sue government

23 Jan 2013: Guardian article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/23/solar-companies-feed-in-tariff-cuts
17 companies suing the British government for £140million. 2012 has been a bad year for the solar industry, not just because of the endless rainfall, but because Osborne cut away most of the incentive provided by the Feed in Tariff - causing immense problems for the Renewables industry which had geared up to meet the demand.

Brighton energy cooperative

Late july 2012: 

Brighton Energy Cooperative has shown confidence in solar power, even in this time of reduced tariff.
http://www.renewableenergyinstaller.co.uk/2012/07/brighton-energy-coop-commissions-first-major-project/
They have proceeded with a proposal to roof five warehouses in Shoreham Port near Brighton. It's an 87 kW installation, equivalent to 25 houses with maximum PV installations. theyve raised 200,000 and have plans for investing in another 40 kW worth of installation. Way to go!

1000 megawatt milestone achieved

26 Feb 2012: Here's a link to a Guardian report that the growth of solar panel installations in the UK has pass the 1000MW mark last week. This has been due to the 'explosive' growth of the rate of installation since the Feed in Tariff was announced in 2009. This is 41 times the amount of PV panels previously installed. I call that a success.

    Looking at it from the higher plane, it should not be about Tariff, which is a short term incentive - but the tariff has been miraculously successful. As a species we are motivated by economic forces.
    It should be about widespread generation of totally Clean Energy with zero infrastructure cost (we provide the roof and pay for the installation), and zero wholesale fuel purchase cost (the Sun), and zero running cost (apart from the FIT which is cheaper than the costs of salaries and maintenance of a power station).
   A good economic justification for the tariff is that energy delivered to houses from distant power stations is only about 1/3 of that generated at source, whereas the energy we supply to our neighbours is 1/1 - 3 times as efficient!

There is still uncertainty in the industry about the status of the FiT, although there is no worry about the 21p tariff - the confusion is about the 43p one. If you have a decent size of roof with good orientation, it is still an excellent investment at the 21p rate.
   It is most unfortunate that at the same time as this confusion is occurring, there is also much discontent in the Wind industry. Although the government is nominally backing it, the confusion in the PV industry and the damage caused by the 100 tory MPs letter has caused the big players in the Wind industry to freeze some projects which would have created thousands of jobs. Whatever you think of wind towers in the landscape, there is still an overwhelming need for electricity in our modern life. The MPs think that electricity flows from a socket, not being aware that it has to be generated somewhere. They would be woken up to reality if there were more brown-outs. In the high winds of last autumn, a nuclear power station in Scotland was out of action for more than 2 days, so it isn't just windmills that have problems sometime.
   The government has a target of 22mW installation by the end of the decade, but their tampering with the FiT and their linking with EPCs has made this target near impossible unless a future government support the FiT more earnestly. Germany has 25MW already.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/23/feed-in-tariff-solar-breakthrough?intcmp=122

Update from DECC and EST on the FIT

14 Feb 2012: Oh dear, so many acronyms!! But the DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change), have lost Chris Huhne, but at least they have made their minds up over the Feed in Tariff.

  Heres a page on the Energy Saving Trust that summarises and explains the updates. The less digestible reading from the DECC is here. It is still worth doing PV, and a very good investment, but you should plan on the expectation of the 21p rate, and the 'better than very good' 43pence rate may be short lived unless you installed before December 12th of last year.

This EPC would require some work to improve it
but I gather that the proposed PV is part of the
calculation, so this 'F' rated house could be level 'C' with
added Insulation and the Photovoltaic.

     The good news is that the link to Insulation is less severe, now that they have settled on an insulation level of 'D'. The previous idea that it should be based on an Energy Performance rating for the house of 'C' was enough to kill the scheme altogether - it is estimated that only 9% of the country's houses would be eligible, and if ten percent of those house holders decided on PV, that would be less than one percent - that would make the UK impossible to catch up with Germany on renewables, would end the solar industry, continue our high carbon emissions, and guaranteed the future of only one industry, the giant nuclear power stations of the big generators.
  Insulation is incredibly important, but it's completely wrong to force them to be linked. They are both important but different.

Renewables in Germany

5 Jan 2012: DNC writes: I was pleasing to read that in Germany, the power generated from Renewables has now become the largest part. Nuclear is in decline, as a policy change since Fukushima.
http://www.ecogeek.org/preventing-pollution/3664
The downside of the story is that the second largest part of German power production is from Lignite, which is brown coal, a more polluting kind of coal.
  For this illustration, I just looked at Germany with googlemaps, and zoomed in on a random part of a randomly picked town, which happened to be Konigsbrunn in Bavaria. In the photo taken from the west, South is off to the right. It is amazing how many people are home-generating, some with larger arrays than the 4kW limit of the UK.
   They are further south than the UK, so will be generating more power, but Rushcliffe and most areas south of here are still getting enough sun for it to be worthwhile.

Power UP and Power Down

  This shows that if we keep plugging away, we can make a difference, one house at a time.

  Converse to energy generation, we also need (as a country) to pay attention to house insulation, so that we achieve a good balance. I don't believe that one should be conditional on the other, as the British government is trying to do after April 2012.
  If you get the two right, it can be a fantastically good balance. My house generates 3,350 kWh/year from the PV roof, but only needs 2,700-3,300 kWh for all heating and hot water (depending on weather variations). So the combination of Powering Up (generate) and Powering Down (insulate) can be effective in reducing carbon emission. 

Register on the BDPV website!

27 Dec 2011: I recently discovered the website http://www.bdpv.com/  which is a French site, providing a geographical database of PV systems installed all over Europe.  Each user is trusted to supply their own data for each month, and have that compared with others near them, and with the classic PVGIS calculation for that same Lat, Long, Orientation and Roofpitch.


Above is the display for my PV system for the most recent year (2011) with an estimate for the final figure for December 2011 (which is already well ahead of the previous year. The chart shows comparisons with the previous two years.
 It is easy to register with BDPV and there seems no charge for using it. I am surprised at how many are using it already, including quite a lot within a short distance of my home. It is easy to make charts like the above, comparing systems with each other or between yours and others.
  One indication of the effect of the british government's changes to the Feed in Tariff was that many of the UK systems that I browsed when first visiting this site all seemed to have been installed in November or December of 2011.

High Court ruling on FIT changes

24 Dec 2011: It seems that the High Court found that the government were wrongful in pressing ahead with major changes to the Feed in Tariff without considering that the consultation process was not completed, and that the deadlines given have caused untold chaos in the solar installation industry.... and we should not forget some of the inevitable job losses or company closures.

[See the Guardian Report for details. ]

Most people assume that Cameron and Osborne (who seems from his actions and saying to have little regard for the 'Green' revolution) will just carry on regardless of the Court ruling, or of the effects on the Solar industry and customers. 

Why link to Insulation?

When this was first mooted, it was proposed that the higher tariff should apply to houses which meet an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) of level "C". Although this sounds at first sight like a good incentive, it reveals, at closer inspection to be just another form of discouragement, and favouring the well off house owner.

   Energy Generation is a different matter from Energy Conservation, and both are excellent, but there is No Reason for them to be so tightly linked, or for one to exclude the other. Should we also make a law that "Only houses with PV panels should be Insulated"? Of course not. That demonstrates the absurdity of the current proposal that "Only houses with Insulation should have PV panels". There are other ways to incentivise insulation, and these are being done.

  Society needs Energy, so why should we not encourage panels to be fixed on garages, barns and old houses that are not easy to insulate? In the same way, there are many buildings than can and should be insulated, but because of chimneys, dormers, trees or hips, they cannot be adapted for photovoltaic. 

    It can cost more to insulate a house up to level C than to fix solar panels. This new requirement becomes a charter favouring the rich or the owner occupier, because it requires an expensive operation on the house first, and perhaps a season's delay. 

   What does it do for social housing (especially of older dwellings)? A quick one or two day installation of panels can reduce future fuel poverty for a whole street, but a programme of insulation of a whole street would mean a complex and expensive process of decanting tenants etc. with funds that the local authorities or housing associations do not have.

PV on Yorkshire hillside

22 Oct 2011: DNC writes: My sister in law and her partner live in Yorkshire, and have been inspired to go as Eco as possible. They have both PV and solar-thermal panels, and they are off both the water and the drainage grids.

 Having a house which is historic, they couldn't consider panels on the roof, but they have a superb south facing hillside immediately behind the house. Paul is a scientist, so the technicalities of planting concrete feet on the hill, getting them perfectly planar, and working out the wiring back to the house are not a challenge.

The final 3.15 kW array is very clean, totally unshaded. It is safe against wind uplift, and is nearly invisible from the road. It maximises PV capture in summer months.

Paul writes: 
   "The concrete was reinforced with steel and had threaded studs set at the top. Our PV installers (Ecoheat) provided the dimensioned drawing.
   "We had our local builders dig the holes and pour the concrete (they needed bits of shuttering at the top where the concrete sticks up above the ground. They had to ensure that they lined up horizontally and vertically, so as to take the support frame. We left the ground underneath as it was, the grass has mainly died away.
   "A galvanised steel unistrut frame was fitted to the concrete supports (as shown in the photos). To this was fitted a Schuco PV Light mounting system for the actual PV panels (18 x BP 4175T). Two buried armoured cables take the DC current from the panels (above and behind the house) to the inverter (a Sunny Boy 1100), which is fitted in a weather proof enclosure mounted on the upper rear wall of the house. Another armoured cable takes the AC current from the inverter into the loft and down into our airing cupboard, where there is a sub-board for the mains connection."

September PV maximum days

2 Oct 2011: The heat wave at the end of September produced 3 successive PV-Maximum days in a row. As it is after the Equinox, these averaged 13.5 kWh only per day on my east facing 4KW array, but it is still nice to have them. The lower daily harvest is due to lower sun angles and short hours of daylight. It's distressing how quickly it gets dark in the early evenings!
    It says something about the summer we have had (a lot of cloudy bright conditions) that that last day that PV was close to a maximum was 14th June, and previous to that it was May 1st and 2nd! For those who installed in early 2011, the good news is that 2011 has so far been sunnier than 2010, July and September being notably better.
DNC (feel free to comment or reply)

Suntech headquarters - largest PV in the world

31 May 2011: BBC2 Newsnight carried a feature about green technology in China, and showed the headquarters of the Suntech company - only ten yrs old, but one of the largest manufacturers in the world. Their HQ building is amazing, including the largest building integrated solar panel in the work, capable of generating over a million kilowatt hours of power annually. The entire south wall is an array of panels, but they are fixed to clear glass, so there is plenty of dappled daylight entering the building behind.
See the movie on their website about their HQ building.

Cleaning your Solar Panels

12 April '11: Karina Wells writes: Brian comes to the rescue!

I have been trying to find someone who could wash and clean my solar panels but to no avail.
Then yesterday it struck me that we have a steeple jack in our skills exchange group. I asked him if he would be willing to give it a go. Armed with very long ladders, a HA-RA window washer and cleaning product (all totally Eco friendly) he set off to tackle a job no one else wanted to do.

Within an hour the job was done and the sun could shine again. The dirt that came off it was amazing and the difference between the panels washed and those that were not made me realize how important it was to do. Thank you so much Brian you have now got another string to your bow.

Probably the best PV solar panel cleaner in town!

To contact Brian call him on 07974550118
or email : coopez@hotmail.co.uk

PS, DNC writes: Some of them he did from a ladder, and some from the Velux Rooflight in the loft. Don't try this yourself unless very very confident at heights, and well equipped and insured.

PPS, DNC writes: It has been pointed out by one of the commenters below that most PV panels have a delicate coating, and anything abrasive in the brush or the water or detergent could be harmful to the hydrophobic surface finish on the panels. Google for 'Lotus Effect' to see how the very best panels throw off both water and dirt. As my Sharp panels are still clean after two years of exposure, I have assumed that the surface is working!

Discussion about getting PV for free

31 Jan '11: Will Vooght of Good Energy has written an article on the pros and cons of having PV fitted for free on your roof. This is only likely to be possible if you have a very clean unshaded roof. If you do, and you lack the capital to have it done at your own cost, then this is still a good idea. You will still enjoy a saving in annual electrical bill, will be able to have no worries about maintenance, and will have the comfort of knowing that the installation takes you closer to Carbon Zero, even if the installer company takes most of the Tariff. Your house isn't as big as Ratcliffe power station, but if a thousand houses have PV installations, the effect begins to be quantifiable, as has been happening in Germany where the impact of PV on nice days reduces the power consumption of the conventional electrical producers.

Installations in Rushcliffe

3 Oct '10: DNC writes: Tim Saunders of the Energy Saving Trust has sent us the sustainable energy installation statistics for Rushcliffe Borough. These date from April 1st, the beginning of the Feed in Tariff.
   It seems there have been 49 installations, totalling a value of 125 kW (averaging to about 2.5 kW each). I am sad to see that there is not a single 'commercial' installation of PV in the time - if we were in China there would have been dozens! The householders of Rushcliffe are gradually getting the message, but not the institutions or businesses.
   There has also been one domestic Wind Turbine worth 5 kW and a commercial one worth 10kW somewhere in the borough.
  Looking at the East Midlands as a whole, Rushcliffe seems to be doing quite well. Rushcliffe is a rural borough smaller than an 18th of the East Midlands, but domestic PV installations of 49 (125 kW) out of a total of 914 (2.371 mW) across the whole region seems quite good.

PV Milestone reached!

28 Aug: DNicholsoncole writes: Today, in the Peveril Solar House, the PV roof galloped through another milestone, that of 3,000 kWh generation since it was installed last October - that is magnificent! about 200 more than expected in one year, and still a month to run before the anniversary! Three megawatts sounds like a lot to me, and we've done it in under 11 months.
   Once the Feed in Tariff has been running for a year, this sort of performance will be bringing in over £1,500 a year, and in our case somewhat more, as we use more of our own power than the average house - having a Heat Pump for heating.

Payback already paying back

22 Aug: D-Nicholson-Cole writes: Last week, I had an electricity bill from my supplier, Good Energy.

 This is a day I have waited for more than a year since I started metering, tuning, installing etc. The Reverse bill! 
   Actually we didn't at first get a reverse bill, we had an electricity bill for £ 36 pounds from Good Energy. They had a real reading for 16 June, and an estimated one for 16 August. It was estimated at 1033 kWh, but the actual consumption in that time was 350 kWh, largely thanks to the Photovoltaic Roof. In the same two months, they also decided to credit us for all the solar electricity that we had generated and 'sold' from 1 October 2009 to 1 April 2010, at pre-feed in tariff rates.
   So when things are added and subtracted, it turns into a bill for Minus 76 pounds!
   The mathematical Minus-result arises because the credits and the payments are in one single bill. I am hoping that when the first Feed in Tariff payments are made they will be a separate payment, so that we don't get negative bills for the next 25 years! My brother in law in Yorkshire, with a 3 kW array facing south has just received a cheque from his supplier for £ 550 comprising the feed in tariff and estimated sales from 1 April 2010 to 17 Aug 2010.