The other thing it made me is angry at the political morass that these things seem to be in.
At a technical level I understand the ‘base load’ arguments, but we are throwing away _so much energy_ that’s just there for the taking by not having these everywhere. On most days, our house (in Western North Carolina) gets enough energy from the sun that we net-export to the grid - and we have an EV! There’s just no need for the massive amounts of carbon we are spewing into the air - the energy is just falling onto us!
In the future, providing we’re still around, we’ll look back at a time when we could’ve been getting all our energy needs from just the sun (and wind etc.) and shake our heads in disbelief at those who fought against the idea that we should even think about efficiently using it so viscerally.
As far as I know, they never cracked the European market, so if you’re interested in working on that, I’m currently available for hire! Info in profile :)
Like many UK houses, we have gas central heating too. I guess if we had a battery too (more investment) then we could switch to using electric oil-filled radiators, though they would not heat the whole house. And we could install a hot water tank.
I guess for new builds there is a real opportunity, but for an existing household I'm struggling to see how it works - and I want it to!
At this point, I do not understand how anyone can possibly believe that the people advocating for this stuff are thinking in terms of economic (as opposed to political or social) returns. This stuff makes no economic sense and is already bankrupting the country.
Also, there is a legal requirement for new builds to have this now, this is with a massive shortage of housing, with a government that is a government of the "people" but has just put out the same housing targets as the last one and is running 75% behind annually. The scale of subsidies being given to these industries is probably tens of billions, green energy subsidies are now 5x larger than industry profits...this makes no sense, even with sky-high electricity prices (to be clear, it is consumers who are ultimately paying for this...we pay higher prices so that a lawyer somewhere can prattle on about leading a "green revolution" that is lining the pockets of donors).
This ROI calculator looks reasonable: https://ukcalculator.com/solar-panel-roi-calculator.html - note that it subtracts the install cost for you, so any case where the final figure is positive is profitable. But of course that depends on whether grid prices go up or down in the next decade ...
I think a big part of the push to install heat pumps now is that it is understood that electricity production is in dire straights, taking into account that the transition to EV requires a lot of electricity.
For an 800W balcony system your background house usage is likely to be enough to self consume most of it.
You'd wouldn't be able to run even a small oil heater except maybe in peak summer.
It's a good match for working from home as it's a small amount of power spread over daylight hours.
At the same time, many people will just use a solar calculator or watch or yard lights etc, oblivious to it all.
Show people a solar powered laptop, a solar powered phone, or a solar powered tablet, then they will be impressed.
Remember the craze about solar powered car competitions?
permacompute + solar would make for quite the $100 laptop competition.
> my answer is that the payback is imediate,
So if I pay $35k for an install, I get a $35k check the first time I connect it to the grid? Pretty sure it doesn't work that way. But it would be a nice subsidy from the government if they were really motivated.
I guess you're saying you start to feel good and validated to have spent the money by seeing _some_ savings every billing period. It's hard to argue with feelings of course, but that's not not the original concern. People want to know how long is it going to take: 1, 5, 10 years or ... never (if panels degrade or break before it will never pay off) to pay off their investment.