The U.K. government on Tuesday introduced new rules requiring developers to install heat pumps and solar panels in all new homes across England, in policymakers’ latest response to the economic fallout of the Iran conflict.
U.K. ministers say the Iran war and the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market reinforces the need to leverage clean power as an energy security tool.
The Future Homes Standard — a set of new-build regulations for England from 2028 — will establish requirements to ensure homes are built with on-site renewable electricity generation, the majority of which is expected to be provided by solar power.
The rules will also see homes built with low-carbon heating, such as heat pumps and heat networks.
The government added that plug-in solar panels, which homeowners can install on balconies, would be available within shops over the coming months.
Rare UK w
Hey ChatGPT, make me two dozen Facebook pages with Union Jack flags and names like “I love the good old days” and fill them with oil industry propaganda.
Then create about 500 accounts with English sounding names and reply to those with comments about Ed Miliband being useless, and how much you miss the smell of coal.
SOLAR PANELS COOK 5000 BIRDS PER YEAR AND ARE UNSUSTAINABLE BECAUSE OT TAKESATERIALSTO BUILD THEM PLEASE DO NOT LOOK INTO HOW MUCH MATERIALS OIL TAKES TO USE.
I fucking hate the anti-progress Facebook bots on every fucking post and news article.
Oh no, I typed this in the wrong box, how do I delete?
Hahahahaha this got me way harder
All while taking money from the US to station in their bombing runs. Interesting.
Juuuuust as planed! This is EXACTLY what I thought would happen! I am so so wet right now…
The government added that plug-in solar panels, which homeowners can install on balconies, would be available within shops over the coming months.
We have those balcony solar systems here in Germany with several millions of installations. Let me tell you: They do work. They are great. They are cheap. And they will help to keep your energy bill down and have a ROI of only a few years. They are called balcony solar, but you do not have to install them on a balcony. If you have one, great. But you can also put them somewhere in your garden or just onto your wall or even on your roof. They are just normal solar panels with a small inverter that you just plug into your normal power socket.
For numerous reasons….Why wasn’t this put in place decades ago?
Fundamentally, the reason is capitalism. Money is power, so under democracy, the state is for sale. Labour ministers met fossil fuel lobbyists 500 times in first year of power, analysis shows.
How does capitalism inevitably lead to fascism?
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
Seems wasteful not to cover one whole roof with panels (possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely) and connect them to one big inverter to power four homes. Splitting the needed amount of panels and inverters for every house wastes lots of installation work and makes every roof uglier.
Seems wasteful to require solar panels on homes shaded by trees or aligned the wrong way.Why would you do that? It’s easier to install solar for one home than for multiple homes at once. If you mash together multiple tenants and homeowners into one energy system, you start having a lot of additional problems. They have to finance the installation together, they have to do contracts about who gets what amount of power when, they have to do billing, and so on. If you have your own solar system on your own roof, that’s easy. Everything else is simply not happening. So for example, what happens when one homeowner doesn’t want to have solar or can’t afford it?
“Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely” tells me you’ve never been to the UK…
Why not? look at all the sheet metal roofs in the picture!
Those are probably roof tiles.
The comment you were replying to was almost certainly being sarcastic, least not due to the exclamation mark instead of a question mark.
That too is a sign of Britishness! :)
Is the material relevant here? My point is, if the whole roof is covered by panels, you don’t need the redundant roof under the panels anymore.
Real answer is that solar panels themselves are barely structural, commonly relying on a steel or aluminium frame for support, they don’t offer any insulation and are easily damaged.
Ceramic roof tiles are a far better material that’s already widely used, so they mount the solar panels to the wooden frames with holes through the tiles themselves, maintaining the insulation of the tiles and allowing for any damaged solar panels to be easily replaced.
and makes every roof uglier.
Tbh, solar panels are not the ugly factor in thenpicture you posted.
So, whose roof is going to get drilled all over the place risking leaks in the future? Yours? Also, individual installation costs are lower, as you wouldn’t have to lay lines linking the houses, making and closing trenches, etc. One big inverter is a single point of failure. Again, in your house, or build a shed to house it?
What are you talking about? It’s a solved problem to install solar on an European roof. We have millions of installations without any leaks. Those companies do know what they are doing and have been for decades. And people have installed stuff on their roofs for centuries.
Everyone’s roof is getting drilled, says the new requirement - I’m suggesting reducing the drilling. Of course the three without installations would compensate the one carrying everything for them.
All houses are linked by the electrical grid already, no new trenches needed.
Heat pumps, solar panels and passive house thermal performance should have been code a long time ago.
And batteries. Arguably batteries would have the biggest impact out of all of those; turn every household into a virtual power plant and the grid can self balance, especially during peak usage.
The government is also dragging its feet on V2G which would allow your EV to act as an additional giant battery that can feed the grid and your home when usage is high, then top it back up overnight.
There’s been a big storm in the UK, so wind is generating fuckloads of energy right now, to the point where energy providers are having to pay people to use electric - all that cheap power could be filling up batteries instead.
As a home owner I’d be thanking you too as I really can’t make ROI on solar within an acceptable timescale where TOU tariffs make it alot easier with a home battery (I’d caveat not a given for some use cases).
This is coming from someone that has had solar pv for almost 2 decades now.
Politicians do not have any interest in policies that will cost money now and give benefits after they’re out of office.
This is the way forward.
Imagine productively responding to a problem instead of flipping out, throwing up your hands and then doing nothing?
Wild.
Nah how about i pay you a billion dollars not to build wind turbines on my coast.
I accept cashier’s checks from all major banks.
I could not as well. But as I wanted to build double the generators, I’d settle with two billions for doing nothing?
Literally doesn’t help with the problem right now though.
Yes it’s certainly good to have decent standards,
The US under Trump:
I thought about writing something like “it’s ironic that Trump might inadvertently save the world by forcing everyone else to react to his attempts to destroy it,” but I don’t want to give him even that much credit.
You don’t get it. All this is Trump 5D chess (or old folks home bog standard checkers, I don’t remember which) making a deal to steer the world into renewables. Deal maker in chief.
“Beautiful, clean coal!”
A sensible policy, honestly. It’ll help Britain become more independent from the Middle East and other petrol-heavy states.
You would THINK all of the most xenophobic people on this planet would be more than gung ho about eliminating our dependency on other countries and their resources, but apparently not so much. Probably because they know they can start a war and make even more money.
It’s about more than dependency. The petrodollar is key to US/Western hegemony. Unless renewables can give the US/West a similar assymmetric advantage over the rest of the world, the ruling class here is going to hesitate to embrace it.
US hegemony is partly based on the petrodollar and they work hard to keep other countries hooked. The Euro is partly meant to reduce European dependence on the USD. It is a lot more complex then US = Western in this case.
Every damn time there is a global oil shock the right wing voters are shocked and outraged that US prices go up too. They think the US should somehow be immune because we are net exporters. They don’t get that it’s the oil companies that are the net exporters, not the US populace.
By the way, Germany just raised the power limit for plug-in solar to 7 Kilowatts, and apparently tries to give incentives to using batteries.
I don’t think that’s quite true. You can have up to 7 kW panels, but only feed in 800 W - the rest has to go into batteries.
that’s way more power than needed to feed 800W out 24/7, what happens with the rest?
Consumption at home for freezers, fridges, computers, EVs and so forth.
Gotta spend it somewhere. Charge some batteries or else dump it into a load cell.
It’s the maximum that is allowed for plug-in solar, you still have to calculate if it’s useful, or if it would be better to install a normal system.
They should require all new communities to have a large scale battery for the area as well. There are a bunch of options that could help power the community if something goes wrong, and the solar could top up the communities battery as well.
It should be more affordable having 1 for the area vs 1 small one for each house.
Also every new substation could have a battery added.
Decentralizing everything like this would be huge for national security.
I still like the concept of using a hydroelectric water storage as a physical energy store-no messing around with batteries that degrade over time and require massice circuitry to prevent them from becoming hydrogen generators.
Pump water uphill or into a raised tank when the power demand is low, and in peak hours you let the water fall through a turbine to create an instant on-demand powersource where the only maintenance is ‘simple’ turbine generator.
Its definitely a cool option where practical, but batteries will fit almost anywhere and take a tiny amount of space compared to this. Where its practical though its a cool option.
Most substation could pretty easily hold a large battery and you could plop a handful down on any empty lot anywhere in a city and have megawatt hour level storage.
The downside of the pumped is it doesn’t provide instant grid balancing like a battery would as its a much slower option.
Also you have to maintain the pump and the mechanism that let’s the water out when needed, its not quite as low maintenance as you think, and the whole mechanism itself needs power. It probably needs a gas/battery backup to open the gates in a power outage to generate power for the outage.
My thought along the lines of “where practical” is that it can be used as a reservoir for fresh water as an added function, especially in high elevation areas or renote rural areas where having direct mains pressure water isn’t viable.
In the event of a true grid level power outage it would require staff to physically open pump valves, the same way a regular hydroelectric power station or potable water pumping station would, I wasn’t thinking of the system being entirely automated.
It’s not an infallible system, absolutely. The same way battery storage isn’t a perfect solutuon. This is just a more stable and reliable source of power than battery storage, which degrades in the course of around 5 years in the case of batteries like LiFePo4 or other Lithium ions.
A water pumping or hydroelectric station which can survive for multiple decades with regular maintenance, using already existing technology and infrastructure (there are a lot of companies that produce very robust pumps for the petrochemical industry that wouldn’t lose out on too many contracts if they supported the idea, and in a lot of places where it makes economic sense to build, there’s already water infrastructure that could handle if not benefit from additional water storage, not even mentioning the potential for more semi skilled jobs keeping the sites operational. )
You’re a little off on your 5 year for battery, its more like 15-20 years for grid scale LFP batteries and they still have ~80% power after that.
If they can find spots by existing water reservoirs that does seem like an ideal location.
Edit: Also newer Sodium based batteries are even better than that, but they do take more space than LFP. They might exceed 10,000 cycles which could be 25-30 years and the tech is very early.
Ahh my bad, I’m running off my knowledge of the lifetime of batteries we use at work and extrapolated out, the industries are a little less lenient on how long they can be used for (despite being functionally usable, insurers love to say “nah, swap them out, they’re safety critical.” So we send them off to get recycled/reused elsewhere)
Glad to hear the tech’s improving
Are the batteries you use smaller and in a high cycle environment? Like are you fully discharging and recharging it multiple times a day, like our older cell phone batteries? That can definitely wear them quicker, but ya that’s not typical for grid scale which would be closer to just a cycle a day.
Kinda lame about the early recycle (reuse would be better) but ya if they are that saftey critical I can see insurance being very conservative.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad policy, but this is something that is going to have long-term impact more than short-term.
It’s called striking while the iron is hot. Bravo!!
