London has high solar ambitions. The city is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. To reach this, the Mayor aims to install 1GW of new solar by 2030 and 2GW by 2050.
London has high solar ambitions. The city is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. To reach this, the Mayor aims to install 1GW of new solar by 2030 and 2GW by 2050.
More and more of us are becoming aware of the urgency of the need to decarbonise our lifestyles. The latest warning from the IPCC gives us only 10 years to cut global emissions in half, or risk catastrophic damage to our climate. Whether you’ve gone solar or not, you may be thinking about how to reduce your carbon footprint. But where do you start?
The new year kicked off with the introduction of the Smart Export Guarantee (SEG), which came into law on January 1st. It’s the long awaited return of a scheme to ensure solar PV owners are paid for the power they send to the grid, ending the policy void that’s existed since the Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants last March.
According to the SEG, energy suppliers with over 150,000 customers must offer an export tariff with a rate greater than zero. The SEG is available for customers with an MCS-certified renewable energy system under 5MW and a smart meter.
With zero as the minimum, at the very least you can’t be charged for being relieved of excess solar power. However, suppliers don’t have to give you very much for it. So how much are they offering in practice?
Another year has gone by with Tesla roof tiles as popular as ever in the public imagination, yet still mostly intangible. But that could all be about to change. Elon Musk has announced Solarglass, the latest iteration of his solar tiles with promises of improved technology and scalability. The company is aiming to ramp up to 1000 installations a week in America, so what can we expect?
The solar manufacturing industry is devoted to trends - from bifacial to PERC - always seeking ways to maximise energy generation. One technology that’s seen a meteoric rise in the last few years is half cell solar panels (or half cut solar cells), on track to become near ubiquitous across PV modules.
When researching solar PV, you may have come across the phrase ‘tier 1 solar panels’. It’s used as a selling point by some manufacturers and installers to demonstrate the reliability of their products. But is that really the case?
We’ve recently done some modelling of the performance of solar tracking systems, but this can only tell you so much. What about how one would perform in the real world? Luckily we can answer that by looking at a solar tracker that we installed a few years ago...
Is it possible to get free solar panels for businesses? A lot has changed since solar first started gaining popularity, with prices falling around 50% in the last decade and many of the initial subsidies like the Feed-in Tariff closed to new applicants. But there are still opportunities for companies to benefit from financed solar systems, the most promising of which are Solar PPAs.
We hear more and more about Blockchain technology. The technology creates a transparent public ledger that records series of transactions, facilitating a fast, low-cost, trusted transfer of value without the involvement of traditional intermediaries.
Already used in the financial sector, it’s only a matter of time before Blockchain hits the energy sector in a major way, particularly with the explosion of micro-generation of electricity, the ending of solar subsidies, and the advent of smart meters.
With Octopus Energy claiming to have paid customers to use excess electricity at night on four occasions in the last 12 months, real time peer-to-peer trading of electricity is surely just around the corner. Other potential applications include authentication of renewable generation and trading of emissions permits.
