From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
In 2020, the World Bank published this report on the potential of solar power:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/energy/publication/solar-photovoltaic-power-potential-by-country
It was quite a detailed analysis, taking into account not just sunshine itself, but also the impact of air temperature, terrain horizon, and albedo, as well as module tilt, configuration, shading,
soiling, and other factors affecting the system performance.
It was measured thus:
PVOUT is the amount of power generated per unit of installed PV capacity over the long term (the specific yield), measured in kilowatt hours per installed kilowatt peak (kWh/kWp).
Global map showing practical solar energy potential after excluding for physical, environmental and other factors
Out of 230 countries assessed, the UK came in at 229th. Only Ireland fared worse!
Nevertheless the idiot Miliband wants to triple solar power in the UK to 47 GW in the next five years.
According to BEIS Levelised Costs, CAPEX for large scale solar is £410/kW, which works out at £19.3 billion.
Output would be 45 TWh a year, and operational costs would be £10/MWh, ie £450 million a year.
Over 15 years then, the total cost would be £26 billion.
We will still need a full fleet of CCGT plants, with all the costs associated. The only extra cost we would incur if there was no solar power would be for fuel.
DESNZ projections say that natural gas prices will be around 70p/therm between now and 2032, at current prices – that’s £24/MWh.
Assuming 53% fuel efficiency, the fuel cost for a CCGT would be £45.28/MWh of electricity produced. On 45 TWh a year, that’s £2.0 billion, or £30 billion over 15 years.
On the face of it, solar power could save £4 billion, but these costings don’t include cost of capital. A return on capital of 10%, for instance, would cost £1.9 billion annually.
On top of that are storage costs, to manage variable output during the day, and avoid the need to throw away surplus electricity at times of peak output and low demand.
When everything is taken into account, there is no case for solar power.
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So a search on Foggy Season in London seemed appropriate:
London is often foggy in the winter, especially during late autumn. Fog is more likely to form when the air is cool and the nights are long. Google
Not to mention that London is 51° North
“London is often foggy”
Nonsense. Who told you that? Sherlock Holmes?
I’ll take your word for that.
Round where I am in the East Midlands of England it is often dull, grey and misty or foggy during the non-summer months. In summer just grey and wet. We’re at 53’N so even shorter days than London.
It really is rarely foggy. The 1950s were quite a time ago, now. And that was smog.
The last really foggy day was in December 2019. You can do the maths – if you want.
Solar is, without a doubt, one of the most expensive and useless “Free Energy” schemes…only outdone by Orbo
Here in Vermont, US, right now it is overcast and no wind.
We are at 1000 ft elevation and our flag is limp
ISO-NE, our leftist, woke New England grid operator is telling us wind and solar qualify as dispatchable electricity.
What kind of horse manure is that?
How can you dispatch solar at night?
We are so screwed by the elites who own the highly subsidized wind solar tax shelters, and fly private planes to DAVOS, COPs, and their various estates
The elites use their Corporation Media foghorns to brainwash and tell us poverty and high prices and high interest rates and stagnant real wages, and deprivation are for our own good, because we are saving the world
What kind of horse scheisen ist das?
Sounds like it might be time for some civil disobedience. Wasn’t there some one time in another state up in your neck of the woods?
Way down south here in CT (of third highest electricity prices in the US fame), the local politicians are finally beginning to feel some heat.
About a third of residential power bills arises from a so-called ‘Public Benefits Charge’, which the (vast) majority Democrats maintain is due to a 2017 deal to keep the Millstone nuclear power station from shutting down.
I could be wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the real reason a well-run, fully depreciated nuclear plant couldn’t be competitive in NEISO probably had something to do with high subsidies for renewables.
Enormous Subsidies have a way of
affectingskewing the Bottom LineThe higher the subsidy the greater likelihood of us all getting skewed
I haven’t had to drive with fog lights on for years, and I’m in the East Midlands. You also need to consider the presence or absence of rivers and canals. Certainly the main A road near where I live is adjacent to waterways and is the location where I last had to use fog lights.
Same here in Southampton , cold wet grey most of the winter . I have solar lights in the garden they come on for 10 minutes in the winter . Solar energy much better suited to somewhere like Spain .
It’s also well suited for calculators.
And recharged Batteries which don’t have a time of Peak Usage Demand coincident with maximum recharging time requirements
Suited at night in Spain?
Take off your rose-tinted glasses
They are a blight on the Spanish landscape, 24/7/365
Russia is using a floating nuclear plant well above the arctic circle to provide heat and electricity to an entire city, where, in winter, there is no sunshine for several weeks.
It is building several more such plants, not because Russia lacks coal, oil, and gas, but because it makes sense.
The London Fog ads.
Wasn’t the famous London fog more London smog? 1950’s clean air act and all that.
I live 60 miles from London. Not often really foggy but misty and overcast yes.
Anyone know if there is a much higher resolution version of that map ?
I found this link. It’s similar but expands (zooms) reasonably well
https://cdn.buttercms.com/VFMdulBZQ2m1tvcGyhTA
zoomable version here, with data by country:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/map?c=11.695273,8.261719,2
Thanks 🙂
Mad dogs and Englishmen…. but not in England.
At this latitude solar is nothing more than a pointless signal of dubious virtue. Utterly useless. But some still have a bridge to sell:
“…there’s a mistake in thinking solar farms only work in the south. Although the amount of solar energy we can produce is dependent on daylight hours and sunlight, with improvements in solar technology, solar farms in the north of the UK can work just as well as in the south. At Windel Energy, we want to be sure that, wherever you’re located in the UK, solar power is available and effective.
…
Longer Summer Days in the North Compensate for Shorter Winters
Power Storage Solutions Provide All-Year-Functional Performance
Solar Power Is Ideal For The Northern Areas
https://www.windelenergy.co.uk/solar-farms-and-latitude-how-solar-power-thrives-in-the-uk/
So on that longer summer’s day remind yourself that that is your compensation for freezing in the winter and remember that some battery installations tend to favour BBQing and toasting whatever is close by over providing back up juice to the grid.
There is a marginal use-case for solar in the UK, in that during the summer wind tends to be lower than during the winter, so the inverse correlation gives a more stable supply.
Whether we’d be better off just burning the coal used to make the panels instead is a different question.
“marginal use-case”
It’s a waste of time, effort and money. We know what really works. Why pretend?
Perhaps but only with sufficient costly storage to make the power gathered in Summer available in Winter. Otherwise there’s no real compensation between seasons. Just a method of generation that has the strongest potential to produce useful energy from 10am until 2 pm in the Summer and significantly less potential to do so in the Winter. In fact the Winter capacity factors would require over Three times installed capacity to have Winter generation meet the original summer figures during the few days solar produces anything in winter at all. Which would, of course, mean that Summer Potential also triples with even more useless energy.
Hence “marginal”.
Every point on earth’s surface has the sun above the horizon for half the year, and below for the other half (ignoring mountains and other shadows). That said, the higher the latitude, the less the sunlight is effective for a fixed orientation panel, which almost all of them are. Another huge factor for ineffectiveness is the atmospheric distance to interrupt the solar rays, and the presence of clouds, water vapor, particles, ice, etc. in that path. For all of the above, it seems to me that the UK is, indeed, the worst well occupied place on the planet for effective use of solar panels.
When the sun is low on the horizon, even short objects cast long shadows.
Because of these long shadows, rows of solar panels have to be mounted further apart in order to avoid shading each other. That means fewer solar panels per acre.
That’s in addition to the problems you mention.
I cannot verify it is literally the worst, but that is irrelevant. It is beyond bad enough.
“Every point on earth’s surface has the sun above the horizon for half the year, and below for the other half”
Sorry, that makes no sense. Did you mean to say “day” instead of “year”?
On average, every point on Earth has Sun above horizon for 50% of the year.
It would have been clearer if I had said: “the sun is above the horizon for half the hours in the year”.
That’s why the go to Benidorm..
Batteries lose as much as 50% deliverable capacity at cold.
At hot, internal self discharge rates go way up.
“solar farms in the north of the UK can work just as well as in the south”
Of course that comes from someone trying to sell you solar. Just as dishonest as “free with your paid subscription”.
Do you think Windel can bag some of that, I need it for my roses.
Where I live in Wisconsin we get almost twice as much sun as the average in the UK and solar energy is still not viable. We get about 2000 hours per year of PV useful sun but we use electricity for 8760 hours per year. I’ve done the numbers and without subsides, a solar system cannot payback its capital plus operating plus maintenance costs within its projected life time. Sure it would cut my utility bill and increase the bills of others on the same grid without PV. And, yes, I might even come out a bit ahead by taking advantage of subsides. But when it eventually fails I’d have to deal with removal/disposal. I have a realtor friend who tells me PV systems are of little or no value when selling in our area.
Yesterday I saw a building with sixty panels on the roof. But here’s the thing – I’m in southern Australia (38° South) and the panels were on the south facing slope at around 22° to the horizontal. As an aside, you hardly ever see south facing PV panels hereabouts. If we assume that capacity factor of panels installed on north facing roofs in this area is about 30%, panels on the south side must have a fraction of that. Some claims suggest south rates at around 75% of north, but these claims are almost universally rose-tinted-glass-half-full. Whatever the case may be, the installer made out like a bandit and whoever paid for those panels has made a suboptimal investment decision.
Ha Ha, maybe the installers were from the UK and followed the instructions to the letter.
“Place the panels on a south facing roof at an angle between 20 deg. and 40 deg.”
In the small print, it will say. “the angle will make little difference to the panels performance if dirty. To help performance dust off and wipe clean panels daily.
You’re one of those people who wants fire hydrants to have water in them. Renewable fire hydrants are all the rage in LA.
Please correct that headline. Worst not worse.
Good catch.
Wind power collapses to less than 1pc of UK electricity
Wind power collapses to less than 1pc of UK electricity
I had to look twice to see who was the author since I assumed it was written by Captain Obvious.
Anywhere north/south of 40 degrees starts getting into the questionable ROI area just from Sun angle and lack of Sun during the 6 months between equinoxes. Plus if you live in a climate prone to overcast skies, even worse. It does appear however the easy monies sucked out of the climate scam has peaked and we are all headed back down to reality.
“we are all headed back down to reality.”
Some may well be, but most definitely not ‘all’.
“Gusts of up to 80mph may bring disruption but also a surge in cheap wind power after days of near-zero output”
…
Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week but is expected to give way to gusts of up to 80mph, alongside heavy rain and snow, on Thursday and Friday.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/22/weather-bomb-expected-to-cause-cut-in-uk-energy-prices
Pass the Vodka.
“Hey honey, its windy, best get the year’s laundry in the machine”
After you de-ice the blades.
Don’t the turbines have to be shut down if it’s too windy?
Cut in energy prices? The cost is still 112 pound per MWh.
A surge in wind power such that they gave it away free for two hours today to reduce their penalty payments!
Skeptical Science disagrees –
Of course this “rebutal” is a joke
https://skepticalscience.com/sabin33-12-do-solar-panels-work-in-cold-or-cloudy-climates.html
The data is correct but for the private individual who uses 2nd hand kit for low costs and self installs then the high cost of electricity in the UK makes it financially work. The fashion conscious Greenie consumers do not like bright aluminium framed panels despoiling their roofs and upgrade to black framed ones, the bright aluminium framed ones get virtually given away as the cost for the installer to take them to landfill is too high.
Wouldn’t aluminum frames be recyclable?
Aluminum requires electricity to recycle.
It has to stand iin line behind EV recharging.
But first you have to detach them from the glass and silicon bonded to them, as a small % of the panel its not high enough to make the economics work. The glass is also stuck to the silicon wafers so it also makes no sense to try to recover. It works for me as they still work at 95% output, its the throwing them away in the first place that is so stupid, they work as designed but aesthetics is not good. How green is that.
When I rewired my home( 18 years ago) and replaced all the aluminum wiring with copper I took it to a recycler and got enough to pay for 90% of the copper.
“When everything is taken into account, there is no case for solar power.”
From rational (technical, and overall cost at national level) points of view, that’s true. But rationality doesn’t enter into it. Early adopters in the UK benefitted from very generous payments (courtesy of the rest of us), those payments have reduced but the big solar sites we see from the road are just subsidy farms.
The planning applications keep on coming!
One of the latest is for ‘Lime Down Solar Park’ comprising 5 solar array sites with a combined area of 2,835 hectares in Wiltshire, South West England.Perhaps a tad more realistic than applications further north but I wonder how the locals feel about it. Yet more agricultural land being taken out of operation.
The British government seems to have a particular dislike of farming and farmers, and is always dreaming up ways to take agricultural land out of production. Quite bizarre for a country that has been a net food importer since the industrial revolution..
I made $0.35 off my 880 W mini array yesterday! I can feel the Bora Bora salt air already.
More importantly, it finally reached 760 watts output, 86%. Woohoo!! i wish it could be -17F every day.
Humor – a difficult concept
— Lt. Saavik
Ironically, yesterday at middday, solar was producing 3% of the UK’s electricity, compared to 0.7% for wind – very still conditions. We needed a lot of gas (and wood pellets shipped from Louisiana.)
Louisiana recently was covered with ice and snow.
Not sure how quickly you can get pellets or gas.
They use solar powered hair dryers.
But perhaps the only mitigating circumstance is that today’s solar panels only need daylight not sunshine.
Extraordinarily, even leading climateer George Monbiot admits that solar power is a waste of time in the UK because of the UK’s high latitude. It’s in one of his books, I think How Did We Get Into This Mess.
btw, the UK is a lot less foggy now than it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mono-crystalline solar cells are inherently inefficient at converting sunlight into electrical energy. Even “sunny” Australia has a low average large-scale grid solar CF of 16.26%, not much different from UK or Europe at 10-11%. In “sunny” Perth Western Australia, my December home solar efficiency was only 23%.