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

Solar Farm Update: New connection plans

I’m going to try to get into the habit of more frequent updates to my ongoing solar-farm-project, because stuff is starting to happen now. Here is a brief run-down on whats happened since the last blog post on April 3 2023.

Well we had a meeting about the farm progress on 12th May, and there was a lot to discuss. We finally had the details from the DNO about the earthing requirements for the farm, so our high-voltage engineer could look at that and then design the earthing layout for us.

There was then some bad news about the inverters. We were going to use Solis inverters, but the ones we wanted were no longer available, so the plan was now to switch to Huawei inverters instead. These are Chinese, and some people have views of using kit made my Huawei but I don’t. I really don’t think there is a backdoor in them that will let the Chinese communist party turn off my solar farm, but I do think there are a lot of conspiracy-theorists that probably do :D. This change to different inverters might seem like no big deal, but its actually hellishly complicated…

Changing inverters means you suddenly have a different number of strings, and the way the panels are wired up is suddenly different. You might assume (as I did) that the panels were in nice neat rows, and there was an inverter for each row, or each two rows. No! Apparently thats not how its done, especially on undulating land. Its actually a lot more complex than that, and the positioning of the inverters and which panels get attached to each inverter is hellishly complicated, and done by some complex solar-farm management software.

Anyway, this was generally a good news meeting. Mounting frames were ordered, people booked in to do work.

There was then a LOT of emails back and forth about voltages and another meeting on 26th May. This is where stuff got super involved…

I had assumed that you always connected a solar farm at high voltage, and needed a transformer up to 11kv, at which point the DNO takes over. BUT NO. Suddenly the DNO says they have changed their internal regulations regarding what size inverters they let connect directly to them, and it had gone from 50kw to 200kw. Our inverters are about 110kw, so they were suddenly chill about us effectively giving them nine cables from 9 110kw inverters at low voltage (about 410v I think).

This is a BIG DEAL, because it vastly changes who pays for what, and whats included. Suddenly we arent doing ANY high voltage cabling, or switchgear, and we wont need a transformer at all. This saves a LOT of money in terms of connection offers. Apparently I will get a new connection offer tommorow, and the old one will be cancelled.

In theory this is good, but I wouldnt be surprised to find that the lower connection offer is offset by all the other materials and labor price increases that have happened since we started. Sure, its GOOD news to have a number actually come DOWN instead of up, but I’m not getting too excited by it.

Its hard to convey just how complex a project like this is. The change to the offer would mean that we can move our (much smaller) substation closer to the one for the DNO. That means the site layout can be slightly smaller, which means less fencing (which would be cheaper!). However, it also totally screws up our earthing design, because we now have different stuff, in a different place, at a different voltage… arggghhh. The one bright spot is that apparently moving our substation will not be a planning issue. Thank Christ.

Anyway, the truly exciting news is that a ground survey was done 2 days ago, and the ‘setting out’ engineer will visit the site this week, I think wednesday. Thats the very last step before people show up to build an access road and start building stuff with concrete bases and installing ground mount frames and the security fence. This is all getting very close!

The current plan is for setting out on 31st, then the fencing, then access road. 26th June is pencilled in for the day they start building the ground mount frames. I will nip up there when that happens and take a look at it all, and take a stupid number of photos. Its looking quit likely that we get energised this year, and start generating power, and maybe (gasp) earning revenue this year!

Is the age of big tech growth over?

Not just as someone who works in tech (as a computer games programmer, and previously, an IT support guy), but also as someone who has invested in the stock market for 20 years, I’ve definitely got used to the idea that the ‘tech titans’ are the lords and masters of the modern world. It certainly has seemed so from a financial point of view, with companies like Apple and Microsoft achieving insanely high market caps, and mind-boggling revenues. When people talk about making big money, they often talk about working for fat salaries at a tech company, or cashing in super-lucrative stock options, or even just being sassy enough to have bought Apple, Microsoft, Facebook stock really early.

Especially in the US, ‘tech-worker’ has been synonymous with money. People with non tech jobs in the San Francisco bay area have long bemonaed the super-wealthy tech workers impact on the cost of housing. Tech workers were so elite, that they got bussed past the remaining poor people directly to their super-high-tech and luxurious offices. At work, thet would be pampered with free food, expert chefs, sushi-on-demand, massages at your desk, huge bonuses (obviously), yoga retreats, amazing health care coverage, and premium coffee. It was like living and working in some star trek future paradise…

But it might, just might be coming to an end, in all sorts of ways.

One of the most interesting developments in tech recently was elon musks buyout of twitter. I have no time for, or patience with the various angry rants about the man, but what I want to talk about is the immediate and dramatic firing of so many employees at twitter. To the mainstream tech media, this was indeed, ‘nasty and brutal and dangerous’, and obviously there was a huge swathe of recently fired twitter employees who were happy to predict the imminent explosion of the western world because they lost their jobs. This is predictable, and not very enlightening. Last time I checked, the world still exists, and twitter is still up and running.

What I find interesting is the divide between many mainstream media reports of the potential catastrophe around firing 50% of the staff….and both the reality, and the barely-heard discourse from some experienced developers who took a different view. Those views are often shared in private, between friends, because sharing any opinion other than ‘firing people is awful’ online is an invitation to horrendous abuse…

Nevertheless, I count myself among those people who shared musks view that it was clear that a LOT of developers working at that company were clearly adding little to no value. In fact, if you have ever worked on a large project with a large number of programmers, you will be aware of a point where adding extra coders actually makes things slower, and worse. With twitter it felt like this had happened years ago, but the hiring kept going. As a long term twitter user, I would struggle to find ANYTHING that was added to the platform in the last decade. There was rumours of longer tweets, which was apparently something akin to the manhattan project and all 7,500 twitter staff could not collectively implement this, let alone an edit button…

The very short time since the twitter takeover has given rise to a huge number of new features. Subscriptions are now a thing (and I subscribed), monetization of content, and premium-paywalled content is now a thing. Super long tweets are now a thing, as is some simple formatting. It turns out that you dont need 7,500 developers to implement a few basic features to an app. Who knew?

Whats interesting to me, apart from twitter as a case study, is that so many companies almost IMMEDIATELY followed suit, and laid off a huge chunk of staff. All over the world of tech, those big companies started firing thousands of developers. Its like Elon has been used as a human shield, absorbing all the hate for layoffs, which have allowed senior management to actually do what they knew needed doing, and firing the least productive staff.

In itself, thats interesting, but just maybe a phase in the continual growth of the power of big tech companies. Firing developers whose productivity is close to zero will cut costs, boost profits but not change the relative power of these companies. However, I suspect there may be bigger, more structural changes coming that will reduce the power of the tech sector in general, and not just the FAANG crowd. AI may shake-up the market and re-arrange which companies are on top, but I think the whole tech market may be heading for a correction. Maybe those tech companies have seen it coming, and is why they were so happy to slim down. Maybe their internal predictions for the future of tech growth are a lot lower than they let on?

There was an interesting story recently about photobooths in south korea. We even saw some when we were there recently. Its a craze, which looks like it may stick around, where groups of friends cram into a photobooth (like passport photos) and take actual old-school real photographs in silly poses wearing hats and with props. Its something people do with a group of friends. Why is this a big threat to big tech? Its because its prioritixing something that is anathema to the tech companies: actual physical activity in the real world, and its taking off in famously tech-friendly south korea.

They say that young people no longer desire possession, but desire experiences. I think thats true. The one exception has been the phone, which has become many peoples most important and valuable possessions, but as more and more revisions come to the latest mobile phone, the feature gap between this year and last years model shrinks even more. I have a samsung galaxy S8. It is absolutely amazing, and does everything I can imagine ever needing. I’d like a longer lasting battery, but not enough to upgrade…

I have a friend who refuses to own a smart phone of any kind. I can send him a text, and thats it. He is happier that way. He is about 12 years younger than me. I have another friend who refuses to be on social media of any kind, even asks people not to post pictures of him. I doubt these people are total outliers. The shine of social media has worn off. Stuff like cambridge analytica, the widespread problem of cyber stalking and online abuse has meant that people are very aware of the downsides to always being on social media.

Because I am old (53 I think?) I can remember before any of this was a thing. My life has taken me from a big chunky (rented) TV with 3 channels, and an expensive home land-line rotary-dial phone, to an age of VR, AI and smartphones. The technological transformation has been absolutely mind blowing. However, taken over a much shorter timescale, I’m not sure whats got better lately. In fact, it feels amost like tech is degrading and getting worse. My new laptop (the old one self-bricked itself due to software after under 2 years) has a one terrabyte SSD (insane), but has software bugs meaning sound is muffled and stuck at 50% volume. Thats brand new out of the box. Utter trash, coded by idiots, probably spending more time at the yoga retreat than learning to write audio drivers…

Tech is losing its sheen. I recently bought this new laptop (about £800) and a new pair of sneakers (£93). I am way more pleased with, and excited by the sneakers than the laptop, and I am a fucking computer programmer. This is weird, this is a change. I can totally see how happiness with ‘real-world’ stuff somehow feels more ‘real’ and ‘wholesome’ than any advance in tech Advances in tech just feel like meaningless numbers. Oh look, a 16MP camera, and a 2TB hard disk. 64 GB RAM Whoop-do. Who fucking cares? a 4K TV… why? whats next? a 32K TV? really?

Why does this matter?

As a stock-market investor, I take this stuff seriously. I spend a lot of time looking at trends, and data and considering what the future brings. Recently I was hunting for stocks and found two companies (Dicks Sporting Goods and Academy Sports and Outdoors) that had insanely low price-to-earnings ratios. This basically means that investors dont think much of the future for those companies. A P/E thats super high implies you expect earnings to climb dramatically, and is appropriate for a fast-growing tech startup. A low P/E implies stagnation, and boredom.

There is a whole host of tech companies with insane high P/Es and a slew of real-world companies with insane low P/Es. This is an opportunity. If I’m right, and people are falling out of love with tech and re-allocating their furure spending towards the real world, then there is a massive opportunity to buy those low P/E companies now and watch the stock climb. I’ve already done this with those 2 companies, and I’m now doing it with the toy company ‘Jakks’. I’ve also got my eye on the company that makes ‘crocs’ footwear. Make no mistake, these companies look boring, but that may be where the value is. I sold some nvidia to buy Jakks.

I have no idea whether my own experiences and views can be generalized, which is why I find the South Korea photobooth phenomena so interesting. Its also why I find the healthy market for live music so fascinating. Crowding together with tens of thousands of people to witness a live event is the complete antithesis of tech. We should all be at home, alone, sending skypes and whatsapp messages to our friends ffs! not actually in the real world with people!

On a related note, I found a recent book interesting. It was about people losing the ability to focus due to social media, but one specific section in there was especially interesting. The author mentioned that it would be trivial for social media apps to have a feature to make it easy to tell us when our friends were nearby, maybe in town the same time as us, so we could arrange an impromptu meetup. If I’m in a coffee shop and it turns out a buddy is in the shop 3 doors down, wouldn’t it be cool to let us know so we can say hi? (optionally!). The thing is… social media companies do not WANT us to do this. All the time we are separate and alone, we use social media, and see ads, and generate data and content, for free. They simply have no way to monetize real world friendship.

For a long time, we have been so dazzled by the shiny features of technology that we have thought of nothing else, but in the same way that electricity or cars were at one point amazing new things to obsess over, maybe ‘tech’ will just become another part of life, such as plumbing, or heating, or home appliances like washing machines. Maybe we will relegate a mobile phone to the same status as a microwave. Why get a microwave 14.0? it still just cooks food right? If we DO this, then the currentl market valuations for a bunch of tech companies are going to collapse. Dont be caught holding speculative tech stocks when the music stops.

Cliff’s ultimate guide to Korean Drama TV (kdramas)

It all started with watching ‘parasite’. We loved it. So much in fact, that I looked at what Korean TV dramas were available on Netflix. That got us hooked, and now I would say probably 75% of my TV viewing is Korean dramas on netflix. I’ve watched a LOT of them, and they are long….. and some are better than others. Here is my much delayed ultimate guide to how to get into korean dramas.

NOT SQUID GAME

I’ve never watched squid game. I don’t like dark, or violent or ‘harrowing’ TV. If you loved squid game and want more of the same, I cannot help you. The kind of drama I like is very very low-stakes. Think downton abbey with noodles. There are no exploding helicopters or torture scenes. Although some of the dinner-table arguments in some kdramas are a sort of mental torture I guess…

THINGS TO WARN YOU ABOUT

Do you have Misophonia? Its a fear/hatred of the sounds of people eating, specifically slurping. If so. Just stop reading here. Its culturally totally accepted for people to make loud slurping noises when eating and drinking in Korea. Its expected. I’ve sat through hours of people slurping noodles noisely. You have been warned.

Does workplace bullying trigger you? If so, you may also want to quit now. There are constant themes of workplace bullying in Korean dramas. I dont mean passive-aggressive emails, I mean people physically assaulting subordinates in an office and yelling abuse in their faces. Super common. Its kinda shocking.

There is no sex and almost no violence. Thats likely a positive but some people will find Korean dramas laughably tame. I’m sticking with my ‘downton abbey with noodles’ theme. The EMOTIONAL power of the best of the series is exceptional, but I am yet to see an exploding helicopter.

COMMON THEMES

KDramas do some weird things that western dramas just DO NOT DO. For example, if someone smiles in some of the lighter dramas, and its supposed to be cute, don’t be shocked to see some added emojis and cartoon graphics appear on screen. Its a thing. Also, don’t be surprised if, the first time we see a good looking young man, he is walking in slow motion with his own theme song. Yup, thats a thing too. Oh and there will be an enormous amount of bowing, of drinking soju, a lot of people printing documents and shredding and scanning documents, a lot of late night drinking in bars that are seemingly tents, and a staggering amount of discussion of school homework.

KDRAMA #1: CRASH LANDING ON YOU.

People who have only watched one KDrama apart from squid game have watched this one. I almost skipped it, because the premise was so stupid: Fashion designer and daughter of billionaire accidentally skydives into North Korea’. Seriously? Although apparently this is more common that you might think. Anyway… this is a really good one. Its a romance, but its the most ‘action’ of all the dramas listed here. There are actual chases! on a motorbike! someone fires a gun!

CLOY (as its known) is a typically epic story about the repercussions of a wealthy families daughter ending up in North Korea. Its a very clever intertwined romance that involves a bunch of people, multiple families, a lot of history, a cover-up and conspiracy, corruption, and lots more. You might *think* at the start that its a lightweight comedy, but its actually got more depth than you think. Its also got a superb cast.

CLOY plays heavily with the hilarity of a wealthy fashion celeb who finds herself stuck in a peasant village, where only 4 different state-sanctioned hairstyles are permitted, and everything she tells people about her life is dismissed as ‘southern propaganda’. The North Korean soldiers who find her are often hilarious. CLOY got some grief for not depicting North Korean life as harshly as it maybe should have, which is fair, but its a comedy and a romance, not a documentary. Its long, but worth the effort. I’ve watched the whole thing twice.

KDRAMA #2 SKY CASTLE

Do you think parents put too much pressure on their kids to do well at school? HAHAHAHA. You might think that, but unless you are an upper-middle class South Korean mother, you are absolutely kidding. This drama shows you what REAL pressure on kids is like, and this is a common theme in many kdramas. South Korean kids have a staggeringly high suicide rate, and when you watch this series you will understand why. Oh. My. God.

Like all the best kdramas, the first few episodes of Sky castle make you think you know how its all going to go. ‘Ok, so its about all these elite families and the lengths they go to in order to get their kids to the top of the class right?’ But it goes way further, and into way more into depth than you expect. Characters that you think you know all about very definitely turn out to have more depth. It also has some really superb performances, and is very, very emotional. I don’t have kids, and I’m massively affected by watching this. Its maybe a bit long, and some of the more lightweight plots, to do with the day jobs (mostly as doctors) of the parents can seem a bit ‘meh’ compared to the fairly dark and serious stuff, but I massively recommend this. It probably has the most jaw-open OMG moments of any kdrama

KDRAMA #3: EXTRAORDINARY ATTORNEY WOO

Not for everyone. Its unusual. EAW is about Koreas first attorney who is diagnosed as autistic. I REALLY like it. It handles it very well, although the lead character is probably a bit of a media-cliche of someone with autism. On the surface, again like all kdramas, its a simple premise: Young attorney Woo starts her first ever job, and learns to navigate the work environment, and make new friends. However, over time, you realize there is a lot of backstory and bigger, more serious plot also playing out in the background.

The thing that really makes this special for me is the way in which they portray an autistic character as being openly, proudly and specifically autistic. There is none of this ‘shes a bit different’ or ‘thats just how she is I guess’ coded bullshit. She even introduces herself as autistic to the jury. Its really nicely done. I warn you that its one of those ‘wacky’ kdramas that is not afraid of cartoon sound effects and other silliness. Whenever Woo ‘cracks a case’ she gets visions of dolphins and her hair is blown back the wind. Yes really.

Woo also has some really great performances. Specifically, her immediate boss does a brilliant job of navigating from arrogant and work-obsessed lawyer who hates the idea of woo in the office, to understanding, to friendship, and eventually to becoming a really likable character. Unlike the other shows listed here, Woo is very episodic. Each episode in a case, and the over-arching drama/romance is secondary.

KDRAMA #4 MY MISTER

This one is SO HARD to describe without it sounding boring, or unfocused. It is however, excellent, and probably has the best acting out of all these ones listed here, plus some great writing. The main star was also in Parasite, as the rich man, if that helps at all. Its really hard to explain the plot… but basically its about a family of 3 brothers, and how they are coping at a certain point in their life. One had a business fail, and is now unemployed and living back with the mother. Another is a once super-cool, but now failed movie director, also stuck at home with the mother. The third, and the ‘star’ is working as a structural engineer for a massive company, and it seems like the plot is basically going to be about an attempt to force him out of his job…

My mister is LONG, and pretty dark, but its well worth the effort. It genuinely makes you feel for the characters, and you get to know so much about them. It has a unique mood, thats very carefully crafted, and really draws you in. Some of the characters are better than others, and the villains evil sidekick is *probably* funny on some level in Korea, but he just comes across as an over-the-top buffoon. Where My Mister really shines is the chemistry between the two stars. You *think* that this is going to be some sort of office romance between them… then you think ‘hell no, its a corruption/blackmail/stalking thing?’ and then your perspective on it changes again and again.

My Mister has a big cast, and it doesn’t exactly race by. There is a LOT of drunken banter, a lot of slow moody scenes of people walking home in the dark, a lot of scenes of people loading and unloading paper into photocopiers… but its all awesome. What My Mister does really well is the philosophizing of the main characters. These are not people just slinging out snappy one-liners. There is a lot of deep introspection about life, what matters, whats important, emotions, and relationships. Its probably the best written kdrama in this list. Its also big on office politics. Which leads us to…

#KDRAMA #5: MISAENG

Dont ask me about the titles. Who knows how this happens… Anyway, this is an office drama. Like all Korean dramas, the focus of every single employee in these massive conglomerates is 100% on how they can screw over people in another department. Its amazing that ANYTHING gets made in Korea. All of the staff are constantly fighting with other departments. Its almost comical.

Misaeng is basically about an intern at some big company. He is unusual in that he has very few qualifications, and has thus got he job through ‘connections’ (a common angry theme in kdramas). He is a one time professional baduk (Korean ‘go’, basically) player, who couldn’t make it full time, so suddenly has to refocus and get an office job. Sounds pretty tame?

Misaeng was one of the first series we watched, so I was a bit shocked by how long it is, how AWFUL the workplace environment is for interns in a korean office, and all the other culture shock stuff, like the extreme, extreme deference to superiors at work (not at all unusual for everyone to stand and bow if the manager walks into the room). I also found myself constantly thinking ‘What the hell does this company even DO?’, but all of that is secondary to the relationships between the people in the tiny department it focuses on.

I guess ultimately misaeng is about friendships at work, and how people rely on one another, and get to know one another. Its amazing watching it a second time, because you see your first impressions of almost everyone are so wrong. You end up REALLY rooting for the manager of this small team, and really caring about them when things dont go their way. Be warned: if watching a billion hours of people answering the phone and writing reports and fetching coffee is going to kill you, then probably don’t get started with this one :D.

KDRAMA #6: LEGAL HIGH

This one is DEFINITELY an acquired taste. Its super weird, but for some reason I found it absolutely hilarious. It REALLY piles on the wacky sound effects and crazy camera tricks, but it does it with such style… Its basically the story of a lawyer who has a reputation for never, ever, ever losing a case, and who is famously obsessed with money (or is he?). Due to a hilarious translation, his nickname is ‘monster pervert’, but you have to just mentally ignore that, because its clearly gone a bit wrong there…

Anyway, I LOVE the main character, he was obviously born to play this role. He excels at pulling the most amazingly smug expressions every time he inexplicably wins a case and things go his way. His assistant, a man obviously styled on Batman’s ‘Alfred’ is also good value. Some of the other characters can be over-the-top and annoying, but its worth it for those scenes where Ko Tae Rim goes into one of his rapid fire nonsensical monologues that win over the jury.

OTHER KDRAMAS

Trust me, these are the best 6. I’ve watched a load more, including Startup, Strongest Deliveryman, Our Blues, Revolutionary Love, Crash Course in Romance and likely more I cant remember. If you want something closest to a western drama in style, its probably Crash landing. If you want excellent writing, its My Mister. For light hearted fun, Legal High or Attorney Woo. Sky Castle is tough to watch but worth it. Misaeng will make you glad you arent an office worker in Korea.

Solar farm progress update: Pre-installation

So, it turns out there has not been a proper solar farm update since this one, back when we finally got the planning permission. It probably feels like nothing has happened since, which is more accurate than you might think, but stuff is changing much faster now, so time for an update!

For anyone new to the blog, I own a small company that is building a 1.2MWp solar farm in England as a side-project to making video games. 1.2MWp is tiny by solar farm standards, but it will power 300 homes, so its not *that* tiny. This is the first time I’ve ever got involved in any sort of ‘infrastructure’ project, so I’m learning as I go along…

I knew back in October when we got permission, that nothing was going to happen straight away, because any construction site that is in that part of England, in winter, in the rain and the mud and the rain and also in the rain… is basically untenable. I can not remember the exact number of large truckloads of equipment we need to get to this field, but I know its more like 30 than 20. Put that together with all the manpower that has to get there, and its just going to be an absolute mudslide of horrific proportions. When I first visited the site, the landowner met me on a quadbike, and I can see why…

(Imagine this…but with a thousand billion times more rain and mud)

Anyway, there was a lot of other stuff that needed doing before we actually stick things in the ground, so there has actually been some non-visible progress. Most of the progress was, sadly, in things I didn’t even know we needed.

The contractor who will build (and likely operate/maintain) the solar farm basically builds an array of low voltage (about 400v) solar panels, all of the inverters and the cabling to a substation. Thats basically all they do. They know how to wire up a LOT (3,024) of solar panels at a voltage of about 400v. Thats considered low voltage. The actual UK power grid at this size, tends to be operating at 11,000v (11kv) or 33kv or even higher. That means you need a transformer that steps up the voltage to 11kv, and switchgear that handles all that stuff. You then need to cable it from your substation to the DNO substation, which is where their responsibility begins.

It feels weird to me that this means 2 substations, but apparently it does. It also means that you need a high-voltage expert to design and handle all of the 11kv stuff, which goes beyond ‘ouch that hurts’ and right up to the ‘all that was left was the flaming boots’ level of danger, so I guess its no surprise you need a 3rd party expert for that stuff. Also I discovered that big transformers are full of oil. Who knew?

So…stuff has now got more complicated because the new structure of this project is now:

  • Positech Energy (my company)
  • The site construction contractor
  • The landowner (farmer)
  • The Distribution Network Operator or DNO (Grid people)
  • High Voltage Consultant

No doubt during construction a bunch of other 3rd parties will be subcontracted to the construction contractor, but thats their problem. Also, eventually there will be an insurance company, plus the people who buy our electricity through a PPA (Power purchase agreement). Hilariously, that may happen through a PPA broker, so there may be yet another party involved. Are you starting to see where your electricity bill goes yet? :D

Anyway…so we now have a high voltage consultant who I deal with directly, but who has to liaise with the construction company and also the DNO, and this involves hilariously complicated email chains where everyone is waiting for everyone else until I step in and yell WHY IS NOTHING HAPPENING, but hopefully in a politer tone :D.

So…moving on from the fact that we now have a high voltage consultant, lets talk about all the other sudden expenses and complications. Ladies and gentleman, I introduce you to the excitement of pullout-tests. Apparently, you have to do pullout tests. Who knew? This is basically paying some engineering experts to go bang some metal posts into the field at a variety of points, then do their best to pull them out again, and measure how much force is required to pull them out. They use special machines and gadgets:

You get a rather tedious number of photos like this, and the eventual TL:DR; of it is that ‘its fine’ which is good to know, albeit a very unfulfilling way to spend £6,795. Yes really. You can buy a very nice guitar for that. Why are pullout tests needed? well they determine what kind of ground mount kit you will need to keep the panels in the ground. Why so important? well solar panels are actually pretty light, and catch the wind like crazy, and we have over 3,000 of them. We are basically anchoring a giant expensive sail to the top of a hill in the midlands. If we don’t secure these puppies nicely, we are just one storm away from them all turning up in Liverpool one day.

Anyway, after all the pain and stress of paying for pullout tests, comes the new excitement around earthing studies. Yes earthing studies. Did you not know solar farms need to be earthed! haha, you fool. Yes of course, we all knew that *loud coughing*. Its to stop a big lightning strike pulverizing the whole farm. Did I mention we are sticking 60 tons of solar panels on the top of a remote field? Anyway, in order to work out HOW to earth the farm, you need to know the resistance of the soil, which apparently, is a thing that varies.

A lot.

Anyway, thats of course another expense, and its all very depressing, and it takes time. Not only that, but TWO completely different companies carry out earthing designs for separate parts of the installation. The DNO (grid people) design the earthing for their substation, and our HV contractor designs the earthing for our bit. Its totally separate. This seems nuts to me, and ripe for optimisation, but I’m not an electrical engineer so maybe there are reasons for this.

Anyway, it means you get sent exciting diagrams like this:

I think we all understand this right? *louder coughing*. It also means you get a design for how all the fancy underground earthing stuff will be arranged, which is apparently generally in a grid pattern, presumably because you are earthing a LOT of stuff, and a single earth rod stuck in the ground isn’t going to cut it:

Oh, in other news I actually have the final quote for the install of the farm. I’ll give a proper breakdown once the farm is constructed, but you will enjoy the hilarity of reading about when I got the quote at 6PM on Friday, with a VERY ambiguous sentence in it, that led me to believe the farm was going to cost £450,000 more than I anticipated. I did not sleep at all Friday night, and was *relieved* on Monday when this was clarified.

Oh how we laughed

The final hilarious piece of news is that due to changes we had to make to the plant layout between getting planning permission refused, and then granted, I have 200 more solar panels than I need. I am still being charged monthly to store them, and this is not fun. I THINK I might be able to stick 8 of them in my driveway to replace my old 12 year old ones, but I’m not sure about that yet. The others will likely be sold to the construction company, at cost (still a net loss as I’ve stored them for 6 months+).

Anyway… the short version of this blog post is that there is PROGRESS. We are anticipating making the first 30% payment to the construction company today, which will mean we can plan actual install dates, and actually order the ground mount kit, inverters and other stuff like cabling. We will use 15km of DC solar cable, for example. Thats a lot of cable.

The good news is that stuff looks like its starting to actually happen now. I have been told that the cutout-switch has already arrived to the town next to the farm, and some other equipment used by the grid connection company has been ordered already. This is a very *good sign* as it means the grid connection will happen this decade, at least.

TL:DR; Gamedev is easy. Building stuff is hard.

Economics of solar batteries (big and small)

I’m lucky enough to be the proud owner of a 9.5kwh battery in my cellar. Its a GivEnergy battery (A UK company, although the actual battery is predictably made in China). Its AC-coupled, which means it sits on the ‘house’ side of the fusebox/consumer unit. We got it installed about 5 months ago and its been super awesome. Not flawless by any means, but its just so cool as a gadget for someone like me.

There are many reasons to get a home battery. Its a cool gadget, its also an incredibly strong way to reduce your energy bills (we basically run our whole house 24/7 on off-peak electricity at 75% off), and its also a great thing to partner-up with solar panels to ensure you use all that free power and don’t go exporting it to the evil energy company for a pitiful rate. I have to admit, although I was fully aware that we exported a lot of power on those days we were out, or we were not running much stuff, I had totally underestimated the impact. I’m currently running a big desktop PC/Monitor, router, wifi boosters and a bunch of other stuff, all from solar, on a cloudy day in march in the UK, AND filling the battery slightly…

Obviously the real reason to get a home battery is because you get to obsess over charts and stats:

I’m going to talk a bit more about the economics of the battery though, rather than the coolness of it, or its usefulness in balancing the grid and helping enable more renewable energy.

The economic bonus of my battery is it lets us buy off-peak electricity that costs (currently) £0.12 per kwh as opposed to peak power which costs £0.43 per kwh. In other words, each unit of power we use saves us £0.35. We use roughly 600kwh per month, but I reckon half of that is for the car, and can be done off-peak through charger scheduling regardless of the battery. So that leaves 300kwh a month or a saving of £105 a month, or £1,260 per year at current electricity rates.

There is an additional economic benefit though, which is that we are self-consuming all of our export. To look at how we manage this, I just need to look at the total solar->battery flow for the last month, which is about 40kwh. Thats energy that would previously have been wasted (exported to the grid, but not metered, so the amount doesnt matter). Thats another 40 * 0.43 so £17.20 a month, or a total of £206 a year.

So the income from our battery, at current prices, is 206 + 1260 = £1,466 a year. The installed cost for the battery was £6,720. So the payback period is 4.5 years. Thats really not bad, given the battery will definitely outlast that. This is also with a pretty rubbish old array of terrible 12 year old solar panels. So it seems like the economics of home battery storage are pretty good.

However…

Now lets take a look at grid-level storage, and the size that I was considering. For those new to my blog, I run an energy company that is building a 1.2mwp solar farm here in the UK. Originally we were considering battery storage, but dropped the idea. We were originally looking to add a 500kwh, later increased to 583kwh battery, in a shipping-container enclosure that was AC-coupled to the farm. We are export-limited to 900kw despite peaking at 1.2kw, so this would be a good way to do peak shaving. I blogged about how that works in detail here.

So why are we not doing it? Basically its the economics. They just do not work, for that scale, at the current time, for a variety of reasons. The main one is that the costs have gone up, but also the cost of larger storage systems have gone down. It looks like economies of scale are massively at work here.

From what I understand, a 583kwh battery unit like the one pictured above is basically deployed as a kit. You get a lot of equipment, including pallets full of batteries, and a shipping container enclosure for all the gear, and then its assembled on site to create a finished, grid-connected 583kwh battery. The installation of this is about £28k out of a total installed cost of roughly £370k.

Lets pick apart the finances of this!

Firstly, a 583kwh battery is the same as 9.7 Tesla model 3 standard range batteries. A brand new Tesla model 3 standard range in the UK costs £43,000. 9.7 of those cars costs £417,000. That is MORE than the grid battery…but Jesus Christ its not MUCH more, and the 9.7 cars come with stuff like wheels, doors, touchscreens and…other car stuff. There is NO WAY that the cost to Tesla for making/buying the batteries in a model 3 are anything close to as high as people are being charged for a grid connected battery.

Whats going on?

Actually, the economics seem to be the case that grid-connected utility storage is being manufactured in a grossly inefficient way, and hugely overcharged for, especially by companies not called Tesla. Lets take a look at the real core of the problem by looking at a battery in a Tesla:

The actual batteries are the little cylindrical cells. They are being slowly changed to be a different configuration, but the same design principles apply: pack the batteries in with as efficient a volume-utilization as possible. Note that its actually much more safety critical in a car to prevent battery fires than in a shipping container sat in a soggy field, so if anything, this is the ultra-conservative and inefficient Tesla battery pack. Also…its a car, so weight REALLY matters (whereas with stationary storage we absolutely don’t care about weight), so thats another constraint. What we are looking at here then, SHOULD be the really inefficient way to do things.

But how are things done for grid scale utility batteries? Well… let me show you :D. This is a lithium ion battery for grid storage:

Thats an 8.1kwh battery. Not enough? It doesn’t matter because we can put them in groups in a rack!

Thats still not enough though, so we can then put the racks in a box!

And so it goes on, with what seems to be a Russian-doll approach to stacking boxes inside boxes inside boxes, until the amount of casings, handles, surrounds, spacers, racks, shelves and other non-battery components becomes ridiculous. Worse still, it seems that a lot of these are still being *assembled on site*. This is, as I am sure you must be aware, ludicrously inefficient.

This is the Tesla Megapack:

Its still racks-in-a-box, for now, but its not built on-site, or in a ‘room’ where you can walk down an aisle. its a big solid block of batteries (plus supporting equipment) that is manufactured like this at their factory. The whole thing is shipped as a single already-connected block, that you then hook up to your grid connections. No pallets, no wasted space. No lengthy install.

This is just a lot of tech-geek inside baseball until you realize the economics of it. The best way to find out the *real* price for these things is to look at recent installs. There was a recent one in the UK: https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/europes-largest-battery-energy-storage-project-opens-in-uk-using-tesla-megapacks/ with 196 megapacks for £75million. That comes out at a per-MWh of installed battery cost of £222k. Thats 42% cheaper than the quote I got for a 583kwh pack.

So the answer is simple right? Just ditch the battery provider you got a quote from and use Tesla? No. The megapack STARTS at 3MW. Thats a £666k installed cost, on top of the solar farm. It *might* make sense if the output of the grid connection was higher, and the farm itself was larger, but nobody would couple a 3MWH battery with a 900kw limited 1.2kwp farm. It would just be idle too much of the time to justify the expense.

We are still in the early days of grid-connected storage. Its accelerating like absolute crazy right now, so we are getting there…but there is a lot of change happening. As an investor in green-tech, I cannot see any other grid storage company surviving after the next 2 years other than Tesla. (The megapack is not surprisingly sold out for the next 2 years). The grid-storage business is VERY price sensitive. You cannot just shrug your shoulders with a 42% cost difference…

So how does that leave me? Well it leaves me building a solar farm with, for now, no battery storage (although with planning permission to add it later if the numbers change). I would love to revisit it when BESS prices drop, and definitely will. I think we are going to see a real push to make those systems cheaper, and thats just based on design optimization and economies of scale, not even considering better battery chemistry or any tech breakthroughs.

For home storage though, its a laughably good deal. If you can afford a home battery, get one.