The Economics of Solar

I have seen a few people writing about their solar installations on Hive and it is interesting to compare the experiences. @solominer in the USA has a big system that makes him pretty independent of the grid. @cryptoandcoffee is in South Africa where there are some

such as a hostile energy company who want to penalise those who could help them out by supplying the grid. That grid is fragile and so there are good reasons to have independent power, but then people would like to earn from exporting.

The UK seems to be friendlier to those who want to get into solar. Previously there have been grants and I think export tariffs (no, not that sort!) have been really good at times. Now you will see houses everywhere with panels in addition to large solar 'farms' across the countryside. Those may cause some controversy, but they may be better than building more polluting power stations.

I found

with a nice graph of the increase in UK solar capacity. You can see that small systems under 10kW have rapid growth and those are likely to be mainly domestic.

There is a

that shows where UK power is coming from. Today it was over 50% from renewables at times. The UK shut down its last coal power station a few years back. There are some new nuclear installations under way (at vast expense) and we import some power from mainland Europe. 30% of our solar capacity is domestic and with prices dropping that could well increase.

I am with

who are the largest UK energy provider after buying up some other companies that had problems. They installed our system and give good rates. We get paid 15p per kWh that we export, so that can be several pounds per day in summer. Octopus have schemes to reward you for using less power when demand is high and there is a with incentives to use more when they have an excess of renewable energy. They do this as there are costs for them in either sourcing or disposing of extra power. If people have batteries then they can shift their energy usage or use timers on appliances such as washing machines. We need to be smart in how we use energy.

I also found a

that shows where power comes from in the USA. They have a number of with varying mixes of generation. ERCOT covers Texas and CAISO is in California and both have lots of solar (in yellow). The central USA seems to burn a lot of coal and gas. It seems that those industries have a lot of influence with the current regime, but the economics of solar will make it attractive. Most panels are made in China, so the tariffs will be a consideration.

People will say that China uses lots of fossil fuels, but according to

they contribute half of the world's yearly increase in wind and solar power. They still rely on over 60% of their power coming from burning things, but that may well shift. They have some serious pollution issues that will be an incentive. Whatever your views on climate change the pollution from coal, oil and gas is significant. There are new challenges with sourcing other minerals that are needed for batteries and other new technology. The actual solar panels are mostly which is pretty abundant. Extracting the silicon needs lots of energy, but it is far less than the panels will generate.

It seems to me that a lot of the resistance to solar is politically motivated by the influence of the fossil fuel industry. Burning ancient organisms will not get much more efficient, but solar and battery technologies are still advancing. People can save money by having their own power generation that just does its thing once installed. That needs to be encouraged and supported.