Category: solar

I should probably call this article ‘How I managed to get planning permission granted for a solar farm after initially getting refused’. But I’m sure the algorithm will find it anyway…

Its been a LONG time since the last update. Since then, we put in an application for planning permission and… got refused. This was pretty devastating, and I was fairly convinced that was the end. I’d close down the company, write off all the money already spent and spend my days grumpily complaining to people how the system was broken. Instead… we now have permission! and here is the epic story.

When we initially made our planning application, it included about 30 separate documents detailing stuff like what trees we would plant (to compensate for the horror of building a solar farm. We wont cut down any…), which roads our trucks would go down, what the soil was like, what bird species were common nearby, what panels we would use, what angle they would be at, where the substation would be, what the cables would be like, where the cables would go, what the mounting frames were like, whether or not any great crested newts had been seen in the vicinity of the site in the last decade…

The ridiculously long timeline for the council making a decision came to the end… and then they asked for an extension. We sighed and said yes (to be clear: you have zero real choice). Then when that expired they asked for another extension. We had to say yes again. Then eventually they turned it down.

They do not even email you to tell you. You have to keep checking the site. Yes I am serious.

The reason it was turned down was because its about half a mile away from a long hill (80 miles long in fact), called Offas Dyke. This is a historically interesting hill. Its technically a historical monument. There was absolute dread that there were places on this hill, that if you looked west, you might see our solar farm, and then presumably commit suicide out of horror. Thus we got turned down.

If you think this is insane, I haven’t even told you the best bit.

All the places on the hill that have an offensive view of our site… are private property. The public cannot even go there. I guess that the theory is that people trespassing on private property might interrupt their late night burglary attempts, look west and then recoil in horror at the sight? Needless to say there were no objections to our proposal from any residents.

To make it even more ridiculous, when you stand on the site of our farm and look at the dyke, there is a fucking house on it. A private house. How the hell did that get planning permission?

Anyway…

We decided that this decision was clearly insane, so we resubmitted, with some changes to the layout to mitigate the horrific devastation to the eyeballs that a 1.2mwp solar farm might cause. This resulted in a response from the council, from a hired consultancy company who they asked to appraise some of our paperwork, stating that our visual impact assessment was not good enough, because, among other comments, some of the photos were of low DPI, and one of the diagrams didn’t have a North-symbol on it. Yes really. And yes, amazingly, that company can be hired as consultants to do visual impact assessments which would have been much better. Oh yes, totally legit. Nothing to see here…

So how did we get it through this time?

I made a tactical error the first time, in that I thought if we include all the information, and make a reasonable proposal, it would be granted. This was naive. That time, the decision was made by a single ‘officer’ at the council (this is called ‘delegated powers’). Basically someone reads all 30 documents, then decides to grant or refuse, and they refused. This time around, that same planning officer was not available, so we got someone else, but the second time… I actually lobbied for support.

I emailed the local Councillors for the area, I emailed the mayor of the nearest town, I emailed every environmental pressure group I could find in the county. I emailed the local MP (who ignored me…too busy tweeting about renewable energy believe it or not), I emailed the Green party, The Labour Party and local conservative Councillors. I emailed and facebooked, and tweeted at everyone I could find who was remotely in any way associated with green energy, environmental politics in the local area, or local politics of any kind. I read every news article in every local paper that ever mentioned solar farms looking for names of people that might show their support.

Politically, the most supportive were probably the Green party, but in terms of practical help, it was mostly the conservative party. By a huge margin the least help came from the Liberal Democrats, who basically said ‘good luck, but we don’t get involved’. Thanks. Duly noted.

Anyway…

Eventually this all came down to a one hour planning meeting 3 hours drive from my house… so I went up there and arranged to speak. I was allowed to speak for 3 minutes, and not allowed to speak otherwise. This was a ‘planning committee meeting’ instead of a single officer’s ‘delegated powers’ decision. THIS IS WHAT YOU WANT. A single person will not want to be blamed for anything bad, so they default to refusing everything. In fact, the planning officer’s recommendation was REFUSE, due to archaeological and history concerns (again). Despite this, it was clear that every single Councillor on the committee was very very strongly in favor, and said so, sometimes pretty passionately, talking about climate emergencies and how ridiculous the claims of the history and archaeology groups were. It went to a vote and we won, unanimously! with a few easy conditions (every one of which is pointless, as they are all already addressed in the 30 documents in our proposal). I think it was overwhelming enough that my 3 minute talk didn’t ‘win’ it, but I do think it helped, as I preempted some concerns and addressed them.

It took about 3 days to get the website changed so it officially said granted. Again, obviously no email to tell me… *sigh*. The next morning after the meeting, we went along to the site for the first time to meet the landowner, who is a sheep farmer. He told me he has been trying to get renewable energy on part of his farmland since 1997. TWENTY FIVE YEARS. But yeah… we are totally going to be netzero soon right?

So what next?

Now we need to get a date from the DNO (power network company) for when they can finalize their grid connection and we can provide power. I am hoping for Q1/Q2 2023 but I bet it Q3/Q4. You basically have zero say in this, despite phenomenal cost. I’ve emailed them and am awaiting a reply. The site is muddy and hilly enough to preclude a winter build anyway, so we are looking at April next year to build it as a best case scenario. It would be amazing, but unlikely, to catch much of the 2023 summer output.

I still have 3,024 solar panels in a warehouse waiting to be fitted. I wont order battery or inverters until we get a connection date. Hilariously the panels have gone up in price since I bought them, so its not a bad thing I ordered early, especially given ongoing supply chain woes. There will likely not be updates on this blog for a few months, until I start ordering things and we have proper dates. I still suspect that the hardest part is over, because planning in the UK is so evil, it makes absolutely everything else look easy…

As a bit of background to this post, its worth noting that I am massively into solar panels. I have 10 in my driveway, and I even started an energy company to build solar farms. Bizarrely, I currently own over 3,000 brand new solar panels, and they are sat in a warehouse. Its a very very long story. Anyway…

Solar power has a problem. Its a problem that we are working around, but it also represents an opportunity, because if someone can seize the opportunity, its seriously going to help everyone. It will help energy security, it will help the cost of living, it will help equality, it will help fight climate change. An opportunity existing precisely because solar power has a problem:

Solar panels are things we all know about. You can get big ones, and small ones, even tiny ones that power something as small as a pocket calculator (remember those?) or that unroll and plug into your phone to charge on a sunny day. We all know about solar panels. What most of us are not aware of, is inverters, and how our home wiring works. The big thing I need to get across in this post is that right now there is a LOT of complexity and crap that goes in between those solar panels you see on someone’s roof, or in a field, and the wall socket you plug your TV into.

Solar panels generate DC power. Houses use AC power. Basically AC is safer. AC gives you a shock that throws you across the room. DC is the one that locks your hand in a grip, and makes you look like wile-e-coyote when he gets electrocuted. Its the one that will kill you. Because solar generates DC and we need AC, you need a gadget that swaps one to the other. This is an inverter, and in most solar installs its a pretty big box of electronics and wiring that is usually hidden in someone’s attic or a cupboard somewhere. Here is mine:

The solar panels get connected in one end, then you get AC power out the other end, that goes through a big DANGER cutoff switch and then onward to a meter that calculates how much of a feed-in-tariff I get (old discontinued subsidy), and eventually feeding into the main energy supply for the house.

There is a big bit missing (for another 6 weeks!) from this picture, which is battery storage. To be of any REAL use to me, I need to store that power somewhere so I can use it later. I need home storage. I have ordered 2 big 8.2kwh batteries that will get connected to all this, involving yet more cabling. Each one of those is about 50% bigger than the inverter, and they ALSO need their own inverter, and their own cutout switch, and will be wired up in the cellar.

So to recap, to have a decent bit of renewable energy and home independence that lets me help prevent climate change, gives me energy security and independence, improves the resilience of the national grid etc… I need… *deep breath* Some solar panels, an inverter, a cutout switch, cables, a battery, another inverter, another cutout switch, more cables and a meter.

Actually thats not really the problem. This is the problem:

To even have THE OPTION to have all that, I need: A roof that I own (or in my case a yard/driveway), a cellar or similar space to stick a big box or three… oh and about £10,000 minimum. ($12,000). Yikes.

So what this means is… solar is really a nice handy, excellent option for middle+ income homeowners with a house and access to twelve thousand dollars. Great news for us I guess. Go team us! But hardly much help to people who live in apartments, or who rent, or who frankly are having to struggle financially as it is, ironically in no small part due to high energy bills. How can we solve this?

What we really need. What we REALLY BADLY need, is a way for people in any situation to be able to do their bit. They may not have $12k to invest in renewable energy, they may not even have $1,200 to do so, but they might have a few hundred dollars, or even fifty dollars. We need a way to dramatically scale DOWN solar power so that pretty much anyone, regardless of circumstances, can do something.

The big problem we have is that the entire solar and storage industry is designed to scale up. Just like with wind energy, it seems the easiest way to get costs down per megawatt is to go big. Bigger panels, better panels, bigger batteries. Big solar farms, Big battery storage. Not powerwalls, but powerpacks, or megapacks, or bigger. Bigger is cheaper, so bigger is better right?

The trouble is, this strategy is a way for the rich to get cheap energy, and leave the poor in the dust. Its great news that solar panel prices are falling and battery prices are falling, fantastic news for people who already have a pile of money. But where is the solution for people who are struggling? how do we avoid leaving behind everyone on average or low wages? Are we heading towards a society where energy bills only matter to the poor (who are crushed by them) because the rich generate their own power quite happily, and don’t know what the fuss is about. Maybe they don’t even know the price of energy any more…

What we need is a gadget most people probably already think is there. We need a gadget that you can plug a solar panel of any size into, and then plug it into your wall socket, and have your own micro version of the 4kw + big battery setup that those people with money already have. It needs to be really cheap, and really easy to use. It absolutely needs to be something that does not involve an electrician to install, and is totally safe. Just like plugging in your TV, although you plug in your solar panel instead, and it automatically sorts out whether to charge it’s little mini battery, or feed that power immediately into the house to supply anything that’s currently running…

The thing is… batteries scale down really nicely. My car (Tesla model S) is just a big fat block of small cylindrical batteries known as 18650s. They are used in EVERYTHING. I noticed our vacuum cleaner uses the exact same batteries. You can even just buy a bunch of them on ebay, they are not super obscure tech. And solar panels… they are pretty much a commodity. There are differences at the high end, when you build a solar farm, but you want a 400w panel? a 200 watt one? a 50w one? a 2w one? you can get anything you want..to suit your budget.

The tricky bit is the integration with a small inverter, and the knowing what the house is doing. With current solar installs, this involves additional cables and things called CT clamps to work out if power is flowing in or out. Its complex, and messy, and annoying. Maybe electrical wiring means we just cannot do that, which means we have to go with a bit of a bodge solution, which is one of those small battery/inverter ‘powerpack’ gadgets that you CAN get on amazon:

These are obviously cool, but they are absolutely aimed at people who are going camping, and want to power a laptop or a small TV or whatever, while they are out of the house. Again…its a luxury product aimed at people who want to mess around with a mains-power TV while out on a camping trip. Its not designed to be something used as part of your house, and the assumption with most of these is that you are either charging from the house, or from solar… and then at some later time watching TV.

We need that…but as a permanent thing, in a fire-and-forget setup. In an ideal world you would output from this to a big powerstrip with a ton of devices that you use a lot on it. So TV, plus any speaker system, or streaming stick or DVD player…whatever, so it gets a bunch of use. Something you can buy once, and just use to reduce your household energy bills.

And we need this to ABSOLUTELY become a thing that people do. Not solar geeks, not environmentalists, not people who go on demonstrations, but it needs to become a thing that yeah…if you have $200, then you obviously get the powerpack+battery kit, you stick the solar panel in the window, and plug it in, plug some appliances in…and then your energy bills go down. Not a lot, for sure, and you would be WAY better off with 4kw of solar on a roof, but for someone in a small apartment who has high energy bills and a window that gets a ton of sun…we need this.

All the big tech companies are wasting their time, messing around with nonsense none of us asked for like ‘the metaverse’ or mobile phones that you can fold (why?) which cost $2,000. Or they are working out how to make your next unaffordable luxury phone just slightly thinner. Whatever…

Where is the apple iSolarPack? the google solarpack? the amazon solarpack? the brilliantly engineered (and produced in massive, massive volume) solution that helps absolutely anybody in the world feel like they can partake even slightly, even in a really small way in the revolution in renewable energy. We absolutely massively need this, and if you can make a thing that just unpacks and plugs in and saves everyone a bit on their energy bills, its going to sell like mad.

Even if we cannot do anything better than just make the existing idea of a powerpack much more affordable, and pair it with recommended solar panels in a nice easy package aimed at people whose idea of technology is plugging in alexa once… we really need to do this. Sadly nobody of any size seems to be bothering :(

So… for those who missed earlier blogs, My new company (positech energy) is trying to build a 1.2mwp solar farm in the UK. I thought it might be worth reminding myself how much has been done, and how much further we have to go. Currently, we are awaiting a planning decision, which has been delayed twice already, but should now happen in less than a month. I suspect this date may actually be final this time…

Here is what has cost me money so far:

Amazingly, I have already paid all of this, and yet do not have planning permission yet. In theory, I could be denied planning permission completely with no way to recover, and that would mean all of this money was wasted. Scary hug? But wait…there is more:

Yikes. Those are the big ones. And scary too, because the panels will show up in the UK soon(ish). If you think I can store them in my garage until we get a new site, think again. Its 70 tons of solar panels. In theory, if it all goes wrong, we can cancel and only lose 5%, but more likely, we can re-sell them to someone else, or even have the farm construction company buy them from us. We also have another site currently being evaluated, so we could use them there.

The grid connection deposit can mostly be refunded if we cancel, depending how much work they have done so far, but given the stupidly long timescales they quote, I doubt they have done much yet. Its precisely BECAUSE the grid connection timeline and solar panel ordering timelines are SO long, that I took the risk to order both before getting planning permission.

So what other costs are coming up?

You got to love that grid connection cost right? Especially the way they do it down to the penny to support the fiction that its super competitive, when in fact your choices is of accepting the quote…or not accepting it and not being able to build a farm… In theory its highly regulated cost wise, and in theory you can do some of the work ‘the contestable work’ yourself using a 3rd party, but in practice the amount of the work that is contestable is a pittance, so it just introduces confusion and complexity for almost no gain…

There is really nothing more I can do until we finally get a decision from the planners, which I REALLY hope is ‘granted’, but would not be flabbergasted to discover there are conditions or other requirements. Honestly you would think I was bulldozing st pauls cathedral and making solar panels out of the corpses of rare badgers I crushed under a steam roller, given the way these things get treated in planning terms… Needless to say I have a LOT of VERY strong opinions on how fundamentally broken our planning system is (and it gest seemingly worse over time, not better).

I’ll state it again here: The biggest enemy of the UK meeting its net zero goals is not UKIP, or the daily mail, or the conservative party, or apathy, or cost, or technology.

Its bureaucracy.

For starters, the timescales need halving, AT LEAST. Secondly, we really need to collapse a lot of this paperwork into one. There is no need for separate planning, transport, construction and community engagement documents for crying out loud. Also we need a lot of clauses to allow smaller developments to bypass some of this crap. If your total site area is small, you shouldn’t need to do the full archaeology/habitat/flood/historical nonsense. By all means, if you are covering 100 acres with solar panels, then lets make sure all bases are covered, but for a relatively tiny site? This is ridiculous.

I actually anticipate fairly smooth sailing if we get planning. My plan is ON THE VERY SAME FUCKING DAY that we get planning approval, I want to order the battery, the mounting kits, the inverters, EVERYTHING, so that we are 100% ready to hit the ground digging ground screws in as soon as possible.

This is why I took the risk of grid & panel ordering early. Its also why I’m about to sign a lease with the farmer, and start paying rent (likely next month). I don’t want anything to stop us building the farm once we have permission. In an ideal world, the panels would get unloaded from the ship the day planning is granted. In practice, things are bound to go wrong.

I am nervous about, and very focused upon…getting planning permission for this thing. Its DEFINTELY the most risky and bureaucratic and infuriating thing I have attempted so far. Expect lots of drunken tweeting from me on the day we get it (if we do…).

My data suggests that the output from my solar array is roughly 1.6MWH per year. This is a 2.1kwp install from over ten years ago, that was recently retrofitted with solar edge optimizers to increase its output during times where some of the panels, or part of a panel was shaded.

I am currently using the octopus go tariff (designed for electric cars for my home electricity consumption. This has 2 different rates, depending on the time of day, and at the time of writing they are:

12.30am to 4.30am: £0.075 / kwh.

4.30am to 12.30am: £0.3061 / kwh.

To add to the complexity, I am on an old ‘feed-in-tariff’ which subsidized my solar install (long since discontinued, but I still luckily get it). This pays me an inflation-linked rate of £0.65/kwh for generation (regardless of what I use) and a ‘deemed export’ additional payment of £0.0185/kwh. Another way to phrase this, is currently I earn £0.67 per unit produced.

Of course, I earn that as a payment from the feed-in-tariff provider, but also this reduces my own consumption. If we assume that roughly a third of the power I produce offsets energy I would have used (as some will be peak daytime summer when I’m outside or not using much power anyway), then I can add a third of the price of a unit bought to each unit produced to reflect this saving.

So that gives me roughly £0.77 per unit produced, or given my production of 1,600 kwh per year, an income from the current solar setup of £1,244 per year. Not bad. Can I do better?

I cannot (due to shading issues) realistically add more solar panels, and I would need planning permission for that anyway, but could swapping out the 10 panels I have make sense? The output from solar panels is now a lot better than when I got mine about 11 years ago. My panels are MPE215 PS05 schuco panels. The ‘module efficiency’ is 14%. AT 12 years, the output guarantee is 90%, so they are already 10% down on the output I would expect. On the plus side, I have solar-edge inverter and optimisers, so I am squeezing the best possible output from each panel right now:

If I upgraded the panels then I would still keep using solar edge, so this benefit is not significant in deciding to upgrade. However, if I *did* upgrade it would finally be time to do the obvious, and get a solar storage battery (lithium-ion). This is something I would love, as it would reduce my electricity bills to almost zero throughout the summer (at least the peak usage…I would still use scheduled charging on the car to fill up its 85kwh battery during off peak hours. Trickle-charging the car during the day manually is just too much messing around…).

So what would the economics look like if I had battery storage and new panels?

Firstly, I would 100% lose the feed-in-tariff, as you cannot change an existing install. On the other hand I would qualify for a smart-export payment, but its trivial, and would require me to export power! whereas with battery storage I’d simply use that power to top up the car and likely export almost nothing. On a peak day, I generate a maximum of about 12kwh (perhaps 18kwh with new panels), and the car battery is 85kwh. its unlikely I would have an option to earn anything at all from exporting energy.

So it comes down to how much extra power I would generate (and thus avoid paying £0.30/kwh on), plus how much I would save by being able to time-shift the power. Actually the economics are not good…

When I generate a unit of power now, I ALWAYS earn £0.77. If it displaces peak power usage, its earning me £1.07. If it only displaces off-peak (car charging) usage, it earns me £0.84. The real problem is that with new panels, all I can ever do is get credit for the energy I would not use, so £0.30. Unless new panels were FREE and also generated 200% more than the current ones, I cannot make the economics work, even assuming that the battery is FREE, and the time-shifting and scheduling of stuff works perfectly.

The real elephant in the room here is the old feed in tariff. It did a fantastic job encouraging demand, in that I was the first person in this village to install solar, and helped encourage others to do so, and enabled the industry to scale up. However, people like me are now effectively trapped in a valley of economics, where we are basically paid too much to generate power on old panels to bother upgrading.

In an ideal world, I would be able to keep the tariff even with new panels, although I understand that might seem cheeky. I do find it pretty frustrating that I am incentivized to keep producing 2.1kwp of power instead of the 3.15kwp I could generate with new panels.

What if you don’t already have solar panels though?

Assume your usage pattern is the same as me, so your consumption of power is roughly 474kwh per month, or 5,688 kwh per year.

If you do no time-shifting of demand, that would cost you £1,706 per year. lets assume you have a suitable roof for a 4mwp installation, and can thus produce double what I do, plus 50% for increased panel efficiency. That means you produce 4,848 kwh per year, but spread in a bell curve. Leta also assume your consumption is constant, and a battery allows you to perfectly demand-shift during a given day, so no generated power is wasted. lets assume an export ‘smart export guarantee’ of £0.05 and a power purchase cost of £0.30. (I’ve assumed a similar curve of solar generation to my own setup):

So in this setup, normally your annual bill would be £1,706 but reduced down to £583.50 by having solar panels. Thats an effective saving of £1,122.90. Is it worth doing?

The energy saving trust assumes an install of this size costs £5,400. The big kicker would be the battery. I think to make best usage of it, you need to be able to store 66% of a peak days generation in the battery for usage later. So thats a 12kwh battery, which costs about £4-5000 extra. This leads to a break even point after 10 years.

However, if you assume no battery, and that you cannot load shift 50% of your usage we get this:

So now we are buying power even in summer, because we use some in the evenings, so our total energy bill is £1,025.40 instead of just £583. We saved £681 a year. Payoff time assuming £5,400 install? 8 years. This assumes unshaded south facing like my example, although your output may be higher, as I have some shading from trees outside of peak months…

So should you install solar panels? *it depends*. There are so many factors at play right now. The energy price cap in the UK is likely to go up another 50% in October. Running that through my spreadsheet means payoff time is in 4 years. WAY better. If energy prices rise even further, its super compelling.

Conclusion: if you live in the UK, Solar panels are a no-brainer investment assuming energy prices DO rise in October (hint:yes) and do not fall. Domestic battery storage remains a hard sell, although if prices of battery units themselves come down, they may become a lot better.

YMMV. Things to take into account:

• If you have a big roof and can go bigger than 4.2kwp, then do so. A big part of the cost is install & inverter. Panels are cheap

• If you have bad shading, you MUST have solar edge, which costs more, but increases output a lot.

• The extent to which you can shift demand, using an EV charger, or timed dishwasher/washing machine will depend on if you have a smart meter and a suitable tariff. (get one)