On: Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?

[drcongo]

The same author wrote the blog post that was on the front page here recently about the plummeting cost of solar [0]. I really like his posts, readable by someone like me who is way below layman on the subject, but I think also pretty interesting to someone with experience in the field.

[0] https://climate.benjames.io/solar-off-grid/

[dfawcus → drcongo]

Yeah, but that is pretty much an irrelevance here in the UK.

We don't even get that much sun in summer, today sunrise was at 0842, sunset at 1540 - so not even 7 hrs of daylight. Even then it was a very dull day.

So in the period (winter) when we most need power, local solar is essentially useless.

Local wind may be better, but the economics for it don't really work - requiring 100% gas turbine backup, and high costs due to intermittent use of said turbines .

[edent → dfawcus]

Sorry, that's not true. I have (non-optimal) solar panels in the UK. I generate 100% of my annual electricity usage from them across the year.

In summer, I can easily get over 20kWh per day - against a daily usage of 10kWh. I release all of my data at https://gitlab.com/edent/solar-data/

Today, in the dead of winter, I got 2.8kWh - https://bsky.app/profile/solar.bots.edent.tel/post/3ldqqrvkw... - a not insignificant amount. My battery charged overnight, so I only drew about 4kWh from the grid during the day.

You can read all about how well solar works in the UK on my blog https://shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar/

[olejorgenb → edent]

> My battery charged overnight, so I only drew about 4kWh from the grid during the day.

You are in large part confirming what GP is saying, no?

The 100% annually is of limited use when it's so skewed. Sure having local batteries are a good thing but also costly.

[drcongo → dfawcus]

The author is in the UK and covers most of that in the article.