This is an amazing policy. Very simple, very effective. It comes at a time when Labor is trying to push more housing and Octopus energy makes these panels very economical for the average UK home buyer.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
864 points (98.9% liked)
Uplifting News
14836 readers
434 users here now
Welcome to /c/UpliftingNews, a dedicated space where optimism and positivity converge to bring you the most heartening and inspiring stories from around the world. We strive to curate and share content that lights up your day, invigorates your spirit, and inspires you to spread positivity in your own way. This is a sanctuary for those seeking a break from the incessant negativity often found in today's news cycle. From acts of everyday kindness to large-scale philanthropic efforts, from individual achievements to community triumphs, we bring you news that gives hope, fosters empathy, and strengthens the belief in humanity's capacity for good.
Here in /c/UpliftingNews, we uphold the values of respect, empathy, and inclusivity, fostering a supportive and vibrant community. We encourage you to share your positive news, comment, engage in uplifting conversations, and find solace in the goodness that exists around us. We are more than a news-sharing platform; we are a community built on the power of positivity and the collective desire for a more hopeful world. Remember, your small acts of kindness can be someone else's big ray of hope. Be part of the positivity revolution; share, uplift, inspire!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
well with reform UK replacing conservatives, solar panels might be deemed too woke in the next couple years
By 2027? Why not now? These things have never been cheaper. Mandate batteries as well, LiFePo is cheap as hell and it would save so much money it's stupid not to.
Educated guess:
-
To allow the supply chain to adjust so we don't cause a sudden shortage skyrocketing the price of solar, making homes more expensive to build or delaying construction
-
A lot of new build are basically copy pastes of the same design, so companies have time to properly adjust designs for them and not just haphazardly slap them on to existing ones which could cause problems
-
Red tape and Bureaucracy. Updating laws and regulation takes time, then there's risk assessments environmental planning, maybe adjustments to the grid layout on new estates.
Building takes years. You have to subdivide, plan for utilities, stormwater and traffic, permit the buildings, etc, and suddenly invalidating a bunch of stuff midway through the process they just picked a date 2 years out to avoid the legal and administrative nightmare of yanking existing permits and making them re-design.
load more comments
(2 replies)
We many times lament when the government overreaches. This is the kind of Trojan horse that enables the government to overreach.
One might think, this seems innocuous and beneficial, so go ahead, right? You have to ask yourself, how is it moral for the government to, with the threat of violence, force every home to be built with solar panels? Because that's the implication.
If I'm a small business, and I build a house without solar panels, is it right that I be bankrupted or/and be put in jail?
I heard our glorious leader will be making an upcoming EO mandating all homes be retrofitted with coal-burning stoves.
Oh say can you see
load more comments
(1 replies)
Just in time for their $66M studies into dimming the sun!! 🥴
A few decades late, but needed nonetheless.
If Reagan had had a hint of forward thinking he wouldn't have un-installed Carter's solar panel. It was among the FIRST solar panels installed for any residence in the US and it was mentioned as part of his farewell speech.
/c/unexpectedUSAmerican
England churning out those new homes at the rate of one every five or six years, so it's not as late as you'd think.
Whatever happened to “solar shingles”? There were supposed to be a couple of companies making them, but you never see them on houses.
As far as I understand it they are just a worse solution than mounting standard solar panels on a roof. More expensive, less efficient, thus only gonna get used for aesthetic reasons.
Kinda like solar roadways and some other on the surface cool sounding but in practice niche technologies.
They are more expensive and less efficient. Very few people use them.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Now harness the power of gravity and rain. 🙈
You hang a tub from a rope outside. The rope is connected to a set of gears with a super high ration. Connect the gears to a generator. When it rains, the tub will fill with water and will add to the energy going into the generator. Reset it by draining the water from the tub when it touches the ground, and then putting the tub back in the original position.
While solar power is great and possibly the future, I sure hope they fully thought this through. A lot of areas with large numbers of solar panels are struggling to manage overcapacity. Solar energy produced is not always sent to the grid but wasted, as there is often not enough grid-scale storage capacity to absorb it. I'm no expert, but I wonder if mandating smart in-home sodium-ion batteries which intelligently charge and discharge based on grid capacity wouldn't be more effective.
Really, solar panels are just one solution of a home energy system.
Governments should be looking at regulating microgrids for all homes where solar, stationary battery storage, electric vehicle storage, and even diesel/gas generators or geothermal contribute.
As you say, if you don't have a means for local storage and the grid is maxed out, your panels are wasting away their free energy by self-consumption.
Sodium-ion batteries will absolutely seize a portion of the market share, but I don't think we'd want governments restricting building requirements to specific technologies. The analogy in solar panels would be governments restricting home requirements to polycrystalline silicon, when you have other 1st Gen PV types (monocrystalline), 2nd Gen (thin film CdTe), and 3rd Gen (thin film perovskite, organics).
Microgrid controllers would do the smart dis/charging that you're talking about, as well as automatically dis/connecting from the grid and shutting on/off critical loads.
Sunlight hitting a roof without solar panels is also often not sent to the grid but wasted. In fact, I'd say that more solar energy is wasted on roofs without solar panels than with.
People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid. When, increasingly often, they have a choice of either shutting the system off and wasting this energy or sending it to the grid at low or even negative rates, this becomes a problem. The expectation of "my solar system will pay for itself in X years" might become "my solar system will never break even". At least that's an issue in some places with high PV density.
You're allowed to use the solar on the roof before buying from the grid which will save you tons on most days. The UK grid operates on marginal pricing so if you buy from the grid the highest price provider dictates the price.
This essentially means that you pay the peaker plant nat gas price for electricity where every MWh hits pretty hard on the bill. To recoup the investment in the UK, especially with the interconnectors inside the Eurostar tunnel, is pretty easy and a decentralised grid allows the UK to skip building a lot of power lines for energy that's used locally.
People who install solar on their roofs usually expect to recoup some of the costs by sending energy to the grid.
Not under this law. This whole article is about solar panels being mandated by law, regardless of whether or not the installer thinks they can profit from them. Keep moving those goalposts, though.
I’m just pointing out an issue with residential PV which, when I first heard about it, surprised me. I hope it does not surprise the people making these laws.
Imagine if, some years from now, seasonal solar oversupply might become in the UK and the people with these by law mandated panels face the choice to either manually switch off their systems or pay to send their solar energy into the grid. It sounds stupid but this seems to be happening in places with high PV density.
And btw you’re getting me wrong, I am a big fan of residential solar. I've got a small system. It’s just, at scale, apparently more complicated than covering every roof with panels…
load more comments
(1 replies)
This is a top comment
missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.
The downside is that when they have too much they turn it off. This is a wonderful problem to have. Your own damn article said it encouraged them to go harder ramping up the storage. It's more cost effective when there's more storage on the grid. Totally insignificant non problem, meanwhile the earth is on fire.
We actually have a growing amount of gravity battery capacity in the UK, currently a drop in the ocean around 15GWh, but I believe 200% of that is currently in construction.
IIRC the same article I read about this suggested we could make use of all the old coal mines, retrofit them to become gravity batteries relatively cheaply and gain magnitudes more capacity than we have today.
load more comments
(4 replies)
The UK is no where near the point of having too much power through the daytime. Today was pretty sunny, better than average day especially for time of year. At mid day there was still 5.8GW of fossil fuel use and 3GW of biomass, so about 8.8 GW of CO2 production. Or to put it another way of the 32.5 GW of power needed solar contribute 3.41GW.
There will come a moment where there is an issue where more storage is required to use that power through the evening and night or negative power pricing but its not the issue yet there still isn't enough renewables to make it through a day without burning gas even on a windy sunny day so promoting more Solar and Wind is still necessary to get to netzero for grid power in 2030.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(23 replies)
view more: next ›