Five years ago today, we installed solar panels on our house in London. Solar panels are the ultimate in "boring technology". They sit on the roof and generate electricity whenever the sun shines. That's it. This morning, I took a reading from our generation meter: 19MWh of electricity stolen from the sun and pumped into our home. That's an average of 3,800 kWh every year. But what does that actually mean? The UK's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero publishes quarterly reports…
I think it’s not enough to simply calculate based on electricity use, generation, import and export in your home. PV setups contain considerable amounts of grey energy in the panels and especially the batteries, and on top of that most of the tech is made in China nowadays which has very carbon-intensive electricity.
I think it’s not enough to simply calculate based on electricity use, generation, import and export in your home. PV setups contain considerable amounts of grey energy in the panels and especially the batteries, and on top of that most of the tech is made in China nowadays which has very carbon-intensive electricity.
Some reading on that (note that the articles are from 2015, but AFAIK the issue hasn’t fundamentally changed):
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power/
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/05/how-sustainable-is-stored-sunlight/