Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

My experience of having a 9.5kwh home battery in the UK for about a month

Recently, we got a 9.5kwh givenergy battery fitted in our cellar. I was very excited about it, and keen to dive into the stats, and wrote a blog post about it here.

I’ve now had it for about a month and thought it was worth typing up the inevitable impressions having got used to the thing! So here goes…

First, some context. This is in a 2.5 bedroom (attic doesn’t count really) detached house, thats very old (pre napoleonic), but has been insulated to the best of our ability. 2 people working from home, in the southwest UK. Also be aware that this was during November/December, and a pretty cold December. As I type this, there is snow everywhere…

I had some initial confusion when the battery was first set up. Day 1, they calibrate it, by basically filling it with grid energy and then discharging it, which feels horrible when you see the first thing your battery does is suck up some prime-time expensive power! Luckily this is a one off thing :D. Once that first day is out of the way, you can then choose your settings and.. to be honest then completely forget about it! My settings, because I have cheap power (75% off!) from 12.30am – 4,30am, is for the battery to fill to 96% during that time and then be in ‘eco mode’ for the rest of each day.

GivEnergy’s eco mode is basically a maximise self-consumption, minimize grid import system. So if you have solar panels, and are producing more power than you are using (fat chance for here in December), the excess gets diverted into the battery. Any power load during the day gets sourced from the battery, so you see the battery state of charge slowly trickle down through the day as its used to power the house:

On the far left is the battery filling up (purple below the line) and my car charging. Combined, the battery charge and car charger hit 9,000w! You will see a few spikes during the day which are basically kettles and coffee machines, and cooking. It looks like breakfast was a big spike load on the grid! and then later mini spikes (below 3,000w) are handled entirely by the battery, slowly draining down to about 8% by midnight. That sustained power draw from 4pm-6pm is a gaming PC and huge monitor playing battlefield V :D.

The thing is… once you have watched these charts a few times, you kind of get the hang of it, and then never really need to look at them, or go near the battery ever again. Its just a magic box somewhere in your house that cuts your energy bill by 75%. The only tweak I have made is that now its even colder, and we are cooking more and for longer, I’ve adjusted it to fill to 96% instead of my original 90%, because we need a bit more energy each day (and if I can possibly avoid any prime-time energy consumption…I will!).

So this is all very well, but what have I learned that might be relevant for people who are considering installing a battery?

Firstly, you really need to get the size of the battery right. I kind of lucked-out a bit, and ended up with the perfect size, but nearly didn’t. At one point, we were going to get an 8.2kwh battery, then a 9.5kwh, then maybe 2x 9.5kwh ones, and even had a board installed on the cellar wall to support a 2nd one, but we ended up with a single 9.5kwh which feels right. Obviously, when you think about it, all you need to do is check your energy bill for how many kwh you use on average each day… and thats the size of the battery you want!

Its a bit more complex if you have solar, because if you have a decent solar array, there may be days where you are generating more than your daily usage, and want to store some in case its cloudy/raining the next day, to maximise your usage. Remember, the goal is to NEVER export any energy to the grid, because they pay you a pittance. So there are circumstances where you might need to oversize things…

For example, if your daily usage is 10kwh, but your solar array in June/July regularly produces 20kwh, then you will be using 10kwh, and sticking 10kwh in the battery for tomorrow. If you dips in solar power are fairly sparse, you will be often faced with surplus solar power and a full battery. IF you have an electric car too, and are bothered enough to trickle-charge it with the excess, then you can of course do this. There are setups and systems that can automate this BTW, that involve cables running to the EV charger from your battery/inverter, but I found it to be prohibitively complex, especially with our EV charger about 100ft from the fuse box.

I reckon for the vast majority of people, whether you have solar or not, you probably should stick to a simple format of just buying a battery that can hold 100-150% of your average daily usage. Its not like you can precisely pick a size anyway, as our options were basically 8.2kwh or 9.5kwh or some multiple.

Something that IS worth paying attention to is the inverter. You need an inverter coupled with your battery, or batteries. Its the thing that converts the stored power (DC) back to AC so the house appliances can use it. We have a first generation GivEnergy inverter, that runs at 3kw, and the ones run at 5kw. If at all possible get the higher output one. Get the highest output inverter you can. Why is this?

Its important to understand the difference between kw (kilowatts, thousands of watts) and kwh (kilowatt hours). The first is a measurement of power as in, the amount of oomph that is running down a cable to a thing, and the second is a measurement of stored energy, ie: the amount of oomph multiplied by how many hours you can provide it, before you run out. Or think of kw as your salary and kwh as your savings :D,

In my case, we have a 9.5kwh battery, fed by a 3kwh inverter. That means that even if the battery is FULL, if I plug in some theoretical device that wants to draw power at 9,000 watts… the battery can only squeeze out 3,000. The rest will get imported from the grid. Why does this matter? It matters because British homes have kettles! and also sometimes electric heaters! In an ideal world your day to day current draw will never exceed the power of your inverter. Every time it does, you will draw the excess from the grid.

With something like charging an EV, you need to just admit defeat. Most EV chargers at home are about 7kw, and you are not going to power your home AND an EV charger with a simple domestic battery and inverter. You need to schedule any EV charging for off peak anyway. The real culprits for going over 3kw are stuff like a kettle, a power-shower, or multiple induction hobs going at once. You might think 3,000 watts is a lot, but boil the kettle and fry some bacon while someone is in the shower and you zip right over that, no problem.

So… I’d suggest a 5kw or better inverter, and probably a 9.5kwh battery, or if you use slightly more energy than me, maybe a 13.5kwh Tesla powerwall. If you have a 4 bedroom house and power-hungry kids, and can afford it, maybe you have a good case for getting 2 9.5kwh givenergy’s or 2 powerwalls, especially if you also have solar.

So there ya go. I’m a total home-battery geek, and look at my stats every day, but if you arent that into it, but just want cheap electricity, then you can just go for it, set it up once, and then never look at it again! Ours is in the cellar and I only even see it if I go down to the cellar to get something out of the freezer :D. Batteries come with apps that will soon ping you if there is an error, so you can comfortably just ignore them.

I worked out on the basis of our first month that payback time for us was 5.7 years. That will fall a LOT in march when our fixed price tariff comes to an end, and fall AGAIN in summer when we get the advantage of saving up our surplus solar power during the day. (At the moment the only financial benefit for us is to buy cheap power overnight and use it during the day). I think in the long run the payback time for us will be maybe 3-3.5 years. Thats crazy good.

PLUS! We did it as a retrofit to existing solar. Right now the govt charges zero VAT on new solar, and batteries can be included, so if you can get solar+battery right now, its an even better deal. I highly recommend it!

Inertia scaling in Democracy 4 (new feature)

I recently added some code to Democracy 4 which introduces a new configurable option for people who are really into the game. This is not ‘live’ yet but will be in the next update. I have not totally settled on a name for it yet, but I think I’ll call it something like ‘opinion inertia boost’, because that ties in with other uses of the term throughout the game. So what is it?

Inertia already exists in the game. Every effect that a policy, an event, a dilemma choice or anything else may have on anything can have some inertia applied to it. This means that instead of X affecting Y, and it being a simple equation, in fact its an equation that takes the average value of X over a certain number of turns, which is an integer called ‘inertia’. You can see the value of inertia at the far right of any of the indicators in the game that show an effect:

The inertia is a value set by me, or by a modder, and its fixed. Its basically part of the equation, and set in stone. There has not yet been any way to change this by the player or during the game.

Inertia plays a vital role in making the game both realistic and fun. In practice, if you introduce grants for business startups, it does not convert 500,000 citizens to become capitalists the next day. The impact is going to take years. people need to hear about the grants, apply for them, see their business do well, tell their friends, people have to read newspaper stories about this happening… and perhaps even more relevantly, people who were once socialists but get ‘converted’ to capitalism have to slowly get out of the habits of their previous views, and adopt new ones, even in opposition to their friends/family and peers.

I see this sort of thing happen quite a lot, and have witnessed it with both friends and relatives. When peoples circumstances change, they tend to continue to cling to their existing core beliefs and principles, but over a period of time, opinions will change. With weakly held opinions, its quick to change, but with deeply ingrained beliefs, especially those that come from family, change can take a very long time.

I’m an example of this myself. I grew up in a very working class circumstance. My mother was a trade union representative at work, where she worked as a filing clerk for a trade union HQ (different union!) so she was Trade Unionist to the power of two! My father was also a union rep. We went on exciting day trips to the labour party conference. I read the communist manifesto, and Das Kapital as a teenager.

Fast forward thirty five years and I am a director of two companies, who trades on the stock market, and has employed people and run a multinational company (albeit v small). I’ve even worked on stock market trading floors. I own a single book by Ayn Rand (which I thought was interesting, albeit pretty ranty and very repetitive). My views have definitely changed over time, and with changes in circumstances.

The point is… change of core beliefs takes time. We all think we would keep the same principles until death, but thats unlikely. Societal change is very real. You might think your views regarding being liberal/conservative or left/right are very deeply held sensible views you independently arrived at, but this is very unlikely. I thought I was right as a teenage communist.

So the big question is… how long does it take for politics and society to convert someone from being hard right to hard left, or liberal to conservative? I have no definitive answer, but its a long time. Democracy 4 limits all inertia to a maximum value of 32, for technical reasons, which is 8 years. probably not long enough…

Like all games, Democracy 4 has to balance fun with realism. Not many games have a core mechanic of it taking 32 turns for you to see the impact of your choices, especially not if you can lose the game in an election in maybe 16 turns. Thats pretty brutal. Not only does this make the game hard, it also makes it frustrating. If inertia is too high, many players will just think ‘the game is random’ and complain about the RNG. Ironically there are very very few random numbers in the game…

Plus many players will not bother reading the tutorial or looking at the tooltips. I bet a good 30% of the people who play the game don’t even know inertia is a thing, or where to find it. Most players don’t really know what they are doing, because people have 1,000 games and no time to devote to learning the intricacies. If I modelled inertia realistically, a lot of frustrated players would have no fun.

…and yet…

There are definitely players who feel that they would prefer realism over ‘simple fun’. These players are frustrated that real societal change feels so easy in the game. If they want to convert France to a Capitalist state, they WANT to have to really struggle to take its left leaning population slowly along for the ride. They WANT change to be slow, and take longer, which is why I am adding this cool little slider to the games option screen:

This slider defaults to zero, where it has no impact, and goes as high as to add a 3x modifier. At the far right it will triple the inertia values for all inputs to socialism and liberalism. This will make all policies and events and dilemma choices act more slowly on the membership of these voter groups. (One value affects membership for both socialism and capitalism, on a spectrum and the same for liberal/conservative).

I’ve written all the code, and tested it works on both new games and save games. Everything seems fine but I will do a bunch of playthroughs before I do a new update that includes this slider. I’m pretty sure that 95% of players will never experiment with it at all, but I have enough players that I think its worth adding it all the same. It definitely gives me an easy answer to anybody who comments at me telling me that this part of the game is unrealistic!

Note that this difficulty in changing the country’s views is very much a real world modern problem. Even if Joe Biden was a communist, there is no way he can convert the majority of the US electorate over to his views in a single term. Arguably all Obama managed to do, in his entire tenure, is to get the affordable health care act in place, and it comes nowhere close to being a state health service like the NHS in the UK. Even a popular US president, with control of the house & senate, has to move extremely slowly in changing what the acceptable size of the state is, or changing social policy.

Trump found it almost impossible to actually build a wall, Obama found it impossible to close Guantanamo. Blair did very little in terms of raising taxes, Thatcher did very little in lowering them. Change takes real time.

One final thing: This slider only affects liberal/conservative and socialist/capitalist. I am unsure whether it should also affect membership of the religious group. Opinions very much welcome. I don’t think it should affect most groups, as peoples membership of these is a lot more fickle and easily swayed.

I finally have a home battery!

At long last, its finally installed and actually working, and after a very long and very tedious process that I will not bore you with (much) my house now has a 9.5kwh home battery connected up and working in the cellar. Its actually powering everything in my house right now, and is super cool.

This has been a long process because just when I started to ask a company to install one, UK electricity prices went absolutely insane, and everyone and their dog suddenly wanted a home battery installation. Getting a Tesla powerwall would have meant possibly an even longer wait, and to be honest, they were quite pricey compared with what I eventually chose (a Givenergy 9.5kwh one), but even when I found an installer, and agreed to have a battery installed, there were endless delays. Initially I was going to have a 9.5kwh (latest model) battery, then it became obvious they were hugely delayed, so opted for a single 8.4kwh one, then at the very last minute it turned out a 9.5kwh one was available, and as this was the latest tech, that allowed 100% depth of discharge and unlimited cycles (basically you can fully fill/empty the battery whenever you like without affecting the warranty), so we went with that.

Getting people to come around and install the battery was one thing. Getting it actually finished was another. The installation has been a real pain, but TBH that seems to be mostly down to huge demand and chaos among all the companies doing this sort of thing right now. We had the battery installed, but dormant for about 4 weeks until a vital missing component showed up (a wifi dongle that allowed it to talk to my home network, and thus back home to the battery management system run by the battery company).

Now its all installed, it all feels like it sort of went ok though, because my ideal scenario was to put it in our cellar, which is damp, and dark and empty, and thus the perfect location. Why take up room in the house with a great big metal box when you are almost never going to have to physically go see it? I had worried that the installers would be negative about anything ‘non-standard’, but were happy to run the power cable from our kitchen fuse box outside the house, along a wall, then down through a hole into the cellar and the battery. I’m very happy with where it is:

When it was installed I asked them to set up a double size wooden board on the wall and allow space for a second similar size battery if I wanted to add another one at some stage. In practice, I doubt this will happen. The picture shows the battery (at the bottom) and above it is the inverter. Basically an inverter converts DC to AC or vice versa. This battery is ‘AC-coupled’ which means its on the ‘house’ side of the setup, and is wired in to the fusebox pretty much like anything else. It needs the inverter to convert that AC power so it can be stored in, or sucked out of the battery itself. On the plus side, if I got a 2nd battery, I don’t need another inverter, as you can just daisy-chain em. The red switch is an emergency cut-off.

Back upstairs in fusebox land, you end up with an extra widget called an EM115 that takes up one fuse slot. Its a fancy management thing that seems to be required to check everything works:

Connected to this widget is something called a CT clamp. This is a thing that wraps around a cable and tries to detect the power load going through it, and the direction of it. I already have one, used by my car charger in the garage, to ensure the charger never overloads the house grid connection. This new one is connected to the EM115 and the battery so the battery can tell whats happening with my grid connection:

This information is important because the battery uses it to do cool stuff. For example, you can say to the battery ‘Try to never export power to the grid!’, and then on a day where the solar power is high, and your consumption low, the CT clamp tells the battery that we seem to have a negative power flow (exporting to the grid) of X watts, and it therefore tells the battery to soak up X watts of power to balance it out and ensure any ‘surplus’ solar is kept in my house and not given for free to the evil energy supplier!

Whether or not this is what you want your battery to do is dependent on your circumstances. We got our solar panels 12 years ago on an early ‘feed-in-tariff‘. This means that we get credited a nice amount of money for each kwh of power our solar generates, regardless what happens to it, and we get a ‘deemed export’ of 50% of that. This means if our panels generate 10kwh, we get paid 10xFIT plus an extra 5xExportTariff. The actual export tariff is super low, so it wouldn’t be a good deal anyway, but as our tariff doesn’t measure the actual real export, we are kinda gaming the system a bit there by trying not to do any :D

For people with newer solar panels, they may actually have an export meter, and genuinely be paid per kwh they export. So why would you not do this? Because the very very best rates you get to export are insulting. I’ve seen a high of £0.07/kwh which is an insult considering that companies SELL you the same power for £0.24/kwh… Thus even if you do have an export meter, it makes more sense to keep that power in your home and use it later rather than sell it, then buy it back at a huge loss…

For people with normal jobs this is even more acute. In the UK summer your home solar will generate tons of power while you are out at work, which it sells for £0.07 for you to buy back in the evening to run your home at a huge loss. Sod that!

But enough about the economics! lets look at the real reason anybody gets a home battery – fun charts to look at:

This is one of the many views you get from the givenergy website. It also has app for your phone, obviously. This is my first day with the battery, and I screwed a lot of stuff up which I will explain. As part of its first-run ‘calibration’, the battery gets filled to 100% from the grid. Thus it was at about 80% full around midnight. I had then stupidly told it to fill to 100% between 00.30 and 4.00AM which is when my electricity is 75% off. It did this (see the top purple line going up to 100%) by importing that power from the grid. Thats the red section below the base line on the left, and the purple is it filling the battery

The red is a bit higher than the purple (well…below…) because I also needed *some* power to run the house even overnight.

I had screwed up twice because I’d told the battery to only discharge from 4.00am onwards, so between about 1.30-4am you can see those red downward spikes showing me importing power to deal with our energy demand (green upwards). Then from about 4am onwards, that disappears and we are running entirely from the battery since then (including now). Thus the battery level is slowly running down (top purple line).

The UX of the app is not amazing, hence my screwups, but I think I’m getting the hang of it now. You can see on the RHS of the chart some downwards purple and some upwards yellow. Yellow is the output of our solar panels, and for a period there it exceeded our energy usage, so the excess was dumped back into the battery. Working as intended!

You also get real time data like this:

This sort of thing can drive someone insane, because very often the numbers do not match up exactly, and you start to wonder if everything is broken. It isn’t, but you have to get your head around two concepts:

Firstly, the accuracy is not perfect. We do not have an export meter, so we are relying on some pretty rough measurements of power flows being detected by a loosely attached metal clamp on a cable. Thus you have to allow for a bit of a fuzz factor.

Secondly, the battery response is not instant, but has a slight lag. This is REALLY important, and can cause confusion. For example, say you are consuming 200w of power, and the battery is happily supplying 200w from power you saved up earlier. All is good. Then suddenly you switch a 2,000w kettle on. That power HAS to come immediately, and the battery is not set to do it, so for a few seconds, the extra 2,000w comes from the grid. The clamp detects this, tells the battery, and the battery ramps up to output 2,200w instead. Kettle finishes boiling, but the battery is still at 2,200w. The excess automatically flows to the grid. The clamp then detects that, the battery is told, and ramps down to 200w again.

That all sounds ok, but what it means is we briefly imported 2,000w from the grid, and then later briefly exported 2,000w as well. In the grand scheme of energy flows, its a minor deviation, but that is why there is not a perfectly flat line between 4am and now, with zero grid import or export. The import/export is VERY low compared to normal, but it still does happen.

If you have a smart meter in-home-display you will already be fairly familiar with this. In theory your TV will use maybe 200w for example, but you only need a helicopter to explode in an action movie, with a big loudspeaker-driving bang, followed by a loudspeaker-minimal silence, to see that the per-second power draw of almost everything is very, very variable.

I guess this is early home battery technology. Maybe eventually this sort of thing will be somehow perfect with sub-second response times. Maybe thats really hard on some components and electrically tricky. I don’t know, I’m just some guy with a battery in his cellar.

ONE MORE THING

You *can* wire a battery to be a backup situation if your home loses power due to a cut. We did not do this. Initially I had been told this could be done. I was then told that it can only be done for certain circuits in the house. I was THEN told it means adding yet another fusebox, at which point I bailed. Our kitchen already looks like a nuclear power control room.

One of the undiscussed issues with home battery as backup power is that the actual output RATE from a battery is quite low, in this case 3KW. 3KW is a lot, until you have a router, 3 wireless boosters, a TV, streaming stick, home theater unit and a subwoofer plugged in… and then turn the kettle on. Basically you run out of headroom, and things will start cutting out. Home batteries are great, and can provide a lot of power, but the big old electricity grid can deliver 100 amps at 230v and thats a lot of juice. If you want to be able to power everything, including kettle + electric cooker and also charge a car and do everything else all at once, you need some serious big-ass inverter, and frankly, powercuts here are rare enough that I decided to just not care.

I will do (inevitably) another post in a week or so, when I have long term data, and the energy bills to prove it. I’m still in the exciting early days of trying to find an excuse to go get something out of the freezer (also in cellar) as an excuse to gawp at my battery…

For those curious, the total installed cost was £5600 plus vat @20% £6720.

Optimization for fun!

I am well aware that my game Democracy 4 is not exactly slow with huge framerate issues. However, optimization is fun! or at least it should be, but in practice, getting profiling to work on remote PCs is not exactly easy. I have basically used every profiling software imaginable and still have not got one that I think really does the job well…

I have basically wasted about an hour today trying to work out why I couldn’t get the intel vtune amplifier stuff to work with event based profiling and get rid of this pesky error that was clearly nonsense about ‘not able to recognize processor… until I finally realized that I actually have an AMD chip in my (relatively) new PC so…yeah… That drove me to try out the AMD uProf profiler, which is something I had not used before.

It took me a moment to realize that this software, good though it is, does not suggest to you ‘hey if you run me in administrator mode I will show you 50x more config options’ but luckily I worked that out. My first act was a brief run of Democracy 4, starting a new game then immediately going to the next turn. In the list of functions taking up all the time (and ignoring windows system functions) I get this list:

Which is about what I would expect. The game is implemented as custom-coded neural network structure, hence the terminology. Mostly everything is a neuron, and most of the processing is where each neural effect (the links between neurons) processes its equation, and then neurons do some math on their inputs and outputs.

The inner machinery of the neural network ultimately comes down to that top item there: 

SIM_EquationProcessor::Interpret Value.

This is code that basically takes those equations in the game’s csv files like this:

StateHealthService,0-(0.4*x),2

And actually calculates a value from that. There are 2,000 voters with about 10 connections each, pre-processed on a new game 32 times, so thats 640,000 equations right there, plus all of the actual simulation stuff layered before that. In other words, that equation processer probably runs a million times on a new game, and the equation might have 5 values in it, so max case is 5 million values get interpreted when you click on ‘new game’.

Can I speed it up?

First step is to see how stable these values are any way, so I’ll do an identical profile run and check that the +/- errors on different profiling runs are small…

I think thats pretty close. I definitely have numbers here that are in the same ballpark. So now lets try some optimisations to speed this puppy up. Looking at the top function with a double-click gives me a whole bunch more data:

The function is much longer than this, but thats mostly catering to relatively rare edge cases. Looking at the bits that actually have numbers on it show pretty clearly that its pretty much all about the pesky strcmp() call. A separate piece of code has already parsed the full equation of 0-(0.4*x), so I have a bunch of char buffers for each variable, declared like this:

char Vals[MAX_VARIABLES][32];

The thing is, do I need the overhead of calling strcmp() when I am only really checking for whether the first letter is x? Sadly I cannot JUST check that, because that would prevent we having a named variable starting with an x. Lets imagine this equation:

0-(0.4*xylophone)

Obviously not very likely, but theoretically possible. If the length of the buffer was 1, and the first letter is x, then thats a hit, but the question is, will inlining 2 manual checks be faster than a strcmp function call? Lets replace that code with

if(Vals[valindex][0] == 'x' && Vals[valindex][1] == '\0')

And check out the results:

Hmmm. Actually WORSE as far as I can tell. So it looks like whether we strcmp or not, just checking the value of two bytes at that point is slow. probably because its not immediately available memory? Its notable that the code at line 232 is super fast by comparison, as its just checking a bool value we cached earlier. Maybe I should try that? When I parse the function, just keep a bool for each Value, saying if its ‘x’ or not?

Whoahh. This looks like a pretty major speedup. 326 cycles versus 1,143. What the hell? why didn’t I do this earlier? Lets look at the line by line…

This is awesome. I then tried to make this code inline, but it seemed to not make things any better. I haven’t fully explored uProf yet, but it does do cool flame graphs:

Profiling UIs are great fun :D

Solar Farm update: We finally have planning permission!

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…

This painful smile is what planning permission looks like.

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.

Thats me at the back to the left. Looks like I’m wearing sunglasses… I am not.

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…