Aaaand they’ve let me down a third time so I’ve told them to bollocks. Looking for a new installer.
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Stratford Energy might venture out as far as you?
Been interested to see the relative approaches of the UK and France’s grid production.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
While it’s cloudy and still, nearly half of the UK’s electricity is produced burning gas. In France 80% is nuclear and 18% is hydro. And their demand is a lot higher than ours.
@TMC what are your electricity prices like in France /kWh?
Honestly no idea - the wife did most of the setup for that sort of thing what with it all being in French. Will see if I can find a bill and decipher it for you though.
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Agile was busting my balls with its rates, so just signed up to this tariff
Six hours at 5p/KWh. Six!
You have just signed up for 15.33 daytime leccy for an extra two hours a night of cheap.
The normal tariff is 13.45 and otherwise the same.
I suspect it’s going to be more expensive to use the former, when you could just use the latter and charge more often overnight?
We don’t need six hours, as we just use the four and charge more often.
No it isn’t. Not anymore. You’re on the old rates.
And I have solar + battery. Which I can offset with my 5p (+round trip loss rate.)
What proportion of your expensive rate is covered by the battery?
Usable battery space is 6.6kWh and I use between 15-20kWh/day, but any solar I get in the day covers usage and tops up the battery too.
So in spring-autumn, I should only be using 5p rate leccy, or none at all, since I’ve had quite a few days where my grid use is <5%.
Winter is going to be a lot more interesting - I’ll probably charge the battery to 100% most nights and see what happens.
tl:dr the battery provides a decent buffer but even more would be good.
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August has been officially rubbish for solar. We haven’t even broken even in production terms.
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I wonder how this will go. The principle of people driving home and plugging in, providing energy to the grid from 6pm-10pm before slurping it back from 1am is great. Probably a few technological and financial issues, I imagine…
Charge at work, sell it back at home. Nice little earner.
Yes. One of the biggest problems associated with the move away from fossil fuels will be that the whole energy load will then have to be borne by the electricity supply system (unless we can make hydrogen viable). We don’t have the distribution infrastructure in place for that.
David McKay mentioned in his book that the use of car batteries as a distributed storage system might ease the problem somewhat. There’s also been talk of aged vehicle batteries i.e. ones that have insufficient capacity for long-distance driving but still enough capacity to be useful in the short term, being hooked up to the grid for a while before finally being scrapped.
Just been to the hydrogen test facility in Gateshead that is mixing 21% hydrogen into existing dwellings in the village near my mother’s and 100% into two newly created homes with others being built to replicate the different stock of housing back to Victorian period. There is still quite of bit of testing to do . They are looking to produce the hydrogen on site in the next year (it’s dropped in to the existing gas network via bottles at the moment, there are a lot of manufacturers on board using the test facility. It’s definitely coming it’s just to what extent. The blurb is without changing anyone’s appliance s they can safely pump the 20%+_ hydrogen into the network nationally and reduce carbon nationally by 7-10% . The future is to up it to 100% .
Some pictures
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Are they adding anything to the pure hydrogen to colour it as I thought the flame was pretty much invisible in normal light?
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It seems someone’s thought about that and decided not to
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Blue hydrogen or green?
It’s green.
The other difficulty in small trials is adding the odour ( which is in itself is harmful)