Uplifting News

Educated guess:

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wasn't Elon pushing solar shingles/roofs a couple of years back?

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.

missed opportunity for the grid to have battery backups of sorts.

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.

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.

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.