More Than Four In Ten New Homes In England Built With Solar Power
The title of this post, is the same as this press release from Solar Energy UK.
These two paragraphs add some more detail.
The introduction of more stringent rules on energy efficiency for new homes in England has driven a surge in solar panel installations.
The proportion of new homes and buildings that come with solar photovoltaic panels included has risen by more than three times in the last twelve months.
It certainly appears that solar is now an essential part of a new house.
The article calls it a dramatic jump.
That is a dramatic jump compared to only 5,731 of 44,310 newbuilds sporting solar panels in the last quarter of 2023 – only 13%.
Will the next product to be installed in houses, be batteries for individual houses?
I’m certainly thinking of one to complement my solar panels.
Drax To Get £24m In Green Subsidies For Pumped Hydro
The title of this post is the same as that of this article in The Times.
These three paragraphs give details of the subsidy.
Drax will bank £24 million in green subsidies from energy bill-payers for its pumped hydro assets, ahead of a revival in the energy storage technology in Britain.
The FTSE 250 constituent, which also operates Britain’s largest power station in North Yorkshire, has secured contracts to provide 434 megawatts of capacity from its pumped storage and hydro assets, the largest of which is the Cruachan power station near Oban in Scotland.
The contracts cover energy to be delivered between October 2028 to September 2029, at a price of £60 a kilowatt a year.
This will arouse the anti-Drax lobby, but it should be born in mind, that according to Wikipedia, Cruachan can provide a black start capability to the UK’s electrical grid.
This is Wikipedia’s definition of a black start.
A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station, a part of an electric grid or an industrial plant, to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.
After the Great Storm of 1987, we were without power in my part of Suffolk for two weeks and I suspect there were several black starts in the South of England.
I suspect that power from interconnectors could now be used.
Drax is expanding Cruachan from 440 MW to 1 GW, which will be a large investment and surely increase its black start capability.
So in this case the future subsidy could be considered something like an insurance policy to make sure black start capability is available.
The Anonymous Widower 