I wonder if that will remain the case. The input costs for farming are increasing (seed, fertiliser, energy), the output is becoming less predictable (flood, drought) and the grants from DEFRA which are meant to smooth things out have dried up somewhat since Brexit. If farmers are offered a guaranteed income for a field, I suspect they'd take it.
I don't think that would ever commonly be viable or at least not for a long time. EV's are a lot more than batteries and are proportionally stupidly expensive.
If the electricity net arbitrage was worth the degradation of the battery then .... companies would do it themselves and just build the batteries for cheaper at scale.
>A UK energy company already has a Vehicle to Grid tariff.
And is that actually worth it to anyone who does the math?
An optimistic 161 pound saving compares to how many of my battery cycles for example? My car costs 50-60k so battery degradation is not nothing.
The arbitrage difference between filling your battery cheaply and discharging when prices are high is greater than any theoretical wear on your battery.
Even better if you are being paid to charge your battery.
The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour. That's enough of a buffer to spin up gas turbines for example, so you can actually shut them completely off.
>The battery is already a sunk cost. Doesn't matter how expensive the battery was if it's already sitting on your drive.
My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k.
Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost.
Some will still take it but this seems just like a more deceptive version of those uber driver that get a pricey car and then find out that combined with maintenance, degradation/devaluation and other hidden costs they don't actually make that much driving around.
>I did a quick fag packet calculation and even today 10% of everyones EV battery would be enough to cover the grid for an hour.
I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there.
You can't discharge those to 0% shouldn't charge them to 100%, many won't be charged fully (or connected)
+ If I need to leave in the morning like most I don't want to necessarily be dropping charge into the grid.
>My Hyundai Ionic 6 rolling battery costs 50-60k. Spending a cycle of it's battery is not a discardable cost
Problem is we don't have good data on actual costs. So we don't know if we're talking about something substantial or something hypothetical. Absent that data I think my comment is fair.
>I presume you deduct more than half of the rolling battery capacity out there
No. We are talking about 10% of battery capacity so your battery at 80% would only need to go down to 70%.
A problem we have in the UK at the moment is that we have gas turbines running even if not needed just incase the wind suddenly drops. It takes (or can take) about an hour to spin up a turbine from cold. So a battery supply that could cover that hour would mean we could use a lot less gas. Most of the time it isn't even used, and if it is, most probably won't use that full 10% and once the gas turbines have spun up it could recharge the batteries.
To link it back to the earlier comment, even if the maths is bad for EV as battery storage, you can still use it as battery of last resort. It would be expensive, so ev owners would still be up on the deal, but there would be a system on place to actually use them when actually needed.
Part of the reason why we have high electricity costs (here in the UK) is that we peg the price to gas generation, on the face of it people complain about that but the higher price allows investments in renewables to make sense on an RoI PoV, effectively it's a subsidy to build out renewables at a higher rate than would otherwise be the case.
Electricity prices are high in the UK but there is a net benefit to it at least some ways, as always the devil is in the details, all the details.
Texas has some different choices in their electricity markets but they use the same pay-as-clear marginal pricing system that the above poster thinks is a secret UK plan to subsidise renewables. In reality it is the standard way to set the market price of commodities.
Texas famously had massive spikes in electricty prices and a near failure of the grid because of their electricity market structure, so it's not all sunshine and rainbows.
That's why I said kinda. Texas is part of the United States. The United States was the group that got uppity.
If 2 European powers had a war over a territory that is now part of a third country we would still describe the war as being between the 2 original countries. Even if other territories that weren't part of those nations at the time now are.
But yes, on the other hand we are talking specifically about Texas so maybe you're right.
On the 3rd hand the chance to get superior with the colonies should never be passed up.
That would be wonderful. But that hasn't happened yet, so i'll point out that whatever our current energy strategy is, it's failing miserably and wrecking the economy. For some reason other countries seem to have it figured out much better, so forgive me for not falling over in excitement over the fact that some war in the middle east is costing us a billion less then it might have.
Between Brexit and the aging population, I don't think joining the rest of the world in poisoning the atmosphere for the future faster is going to improve the UK's situation. There are much, much bigger fish to fry than energy policy for improvement-per-unit-effort.
The UK relies heavily on tourism. Tourism is disrupted by global instability. Climate change and fossil-fuel-catalyzed wars cultivate global instability. And the UK doesn't have the land or people to compete on the global stage in manufacturing exports (not that they do bad work, just that the scale doesn't exactly pan out. Not unless people are really keen on telling the tale of two cities again).
Best policy is likely to focus on domestic affairs (how to keep the country stable and solvent as the population shifts towards more and more retirees) and maybe look into rejoining that massive free-trade sector right down the block that the country so short-sightedly left a short time ago, since it'd really open up the tourism and trade markets.
Other countries are not likely spending much less on the transition, it's just that they're paying for it more in tax and less in the electricity bill. The UK's strategy here basically means there's now a huge amount of investment in renewables even without government subsidies. And the nature of renewables and relying on gas in the meantime (which has pretty much always been setting the price of electricity, it's just gotten even more expensive recently) means that there's a relatively more painful period of investment before you get to the cost benefits of a nearly entirely renewable grid.
The UK previously didn't allow small plug in solar panels (the kind that you just plug in to a mains socket) due to, I believe, safety reasons. This has changed within the last few days https://energysavingtrust.org.uk/solar-roadmap/
There is a real safety issue with plug-in solar panels and plug-in batteries. Things go wrong if other loads are on the same circuit, which is almost unavoidable with a plug-in system.
Consider a circuit in a home, designed to carry 16A like a common EU/UK circuit, protected by a 16A breaker. Then plug in solar or a battery that delivers just a small 10A. Now in case some other thing on that circuit draws 26A, the breaker doesn't stop it and the circuit is overloaded.
If that same solar was installed as a fixed setup on its own circuit with no other loads on it, it would be safe and protected by the 16A breaker in the switchboard. It's the combination with other loads that causes issues.
My understanding is that is why they are limiting to 800w (~4A) at least in the UK's BS 7671 Amendment, which they consider well within the designed safety margins.
I think that's the reason why the total allowed panel power is only 800W, any more than that and you have to get it properly installed. At least that's ~ the way it is in Austria, it's also pretty easy to check whether you have ~800 or way more hanging on off your balcony.
Ah yes, the good old "let's eat into the safety margins". This is why our motorways no longer have hard shoulders. OK, so cars break down less now. What justification is there for eating into electrical margins? The wiring in people's houses isn't getting any younger. And we still use the ridiculous ring system even in new builds in 2026.
Plus it increases equity because this primarily opens up solar for those in rented accommodation and apartments/flats who otherwise couldn't access it. Personally that feels well worth pursuing if it's deemed safe.
Great, but electricity is really quite dangerous and eating into the safety margins seems very short sighted. I've seen all kinds of horrors in home wiring. This might seem fine in a world where all wiring is completely up to standard, but in the real world it's done by busy electricians or clueless DIYers. The safety margins are there because in a real installation something will probably be not quite right. It's very common to find wires buried in insulation (the insulation installers don't know or care about electricity), wrong size breakers in use, old/worn out breakers/RCDs, loose connections, the list goes on...
So the danger comes when you plug the solar into a wall socket but there are other devices connected to the same fuse of circuit breaker. So...
Instead of the solar having a plug that goes into a wall socket, why not have a plug on it that screws directly into the fusebox ? Then you know that it is the ONLY device on the circuit.
It hasn't changed... yet. The media noise is because the government has announced that they were reviewing current rules with the aim of allowing "balcony solar" by the end of the year.
I believe it’s only legal in Utah so far in the US: they legislated it last year, and apparently half the country is expected to pass a copy-paste version in their next sessions
I guess I consume most of it. There are 4kWh of batteries connected to the panels. I set my dishwasher and my washing machine to run when production is high.
so you have a ±2k eur battery on top of probably 1.6Kw solar modules costing about 1k eur, attached to balcony and generating about 5kwh/day? And probably with very nice sun conditions because otherwise you'd need more solar.
Now let's take french household prices per kwh of 25ct/kwh. It means at 5kwh/day consumption the bill would be 450eur/y. So a 3k investment in this case would pay for itself in 6-7 years.
For a german household with highest prices in EU payback would be in about 4y assuming 40ct/kwh
But realistically many will not even buy a bess not being able to capture all solar output and many will have worse solar conditions. I'm not sure balcony solar in Germany generates even 1% of total solar production in the country despite streamlined installation process
The batteries where 800€, the panels about 400 and the inverter I think around a hundred (all from Amazon). All the stuff I needed to attach the panels to the balcony and the cables where surprisingly expensive.
That seems mad, given the volume of traffic they're working - even without emergencies. My local GA field is single controller, and that's VFR, grass runways, averages 40-50 movements/day.
In the US, airplanes can be cleared for landing while the runway is occupied (you can be number two, three, etc. for landing and still be cleared). It's different in other countries, where you can only be issued a landing clearance if the runway is clear or anticipated to be clear before you land (e.g. the plane before you is already exiting the runway).
The way it's supposed to work, the ground controller first verifies that there are no traffic conflicts before clearing vehicles to cross an active runway.
That is exactly my point. What visual aids do the ATC controllers have at their disposal to decide if the runway is free for an emergency vehicle to pass?
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