The U.K. government on Tuesday introduced new rules requiring developers to install heat pumps and solar panels in all new homes across England, in policymakers’ latest response to the economic fallout of the Iran conflict.
U.K. ministers say the Iran war and the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market reinforces the need to leverage clean power as an energy security tool.
The Future Homes Standard — a set of new-build regulations for England from 2028 — will establish requirements to ensure homes are built with on-site renewable electricity generation, the majority of which is expected to be provided by solar power.
The rules will also see homes built with low-carbon heating, such as heat pumps and heat networks.
The government added that plug-in solar panels, which homeowners can install on balconies, would be available within shops over the coming months.
Seems wasteful not to cover one whole roof with panels (possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely) and connect them to one big inverter to power four homes. Splitting the needed amount of panels and inverters for every house wastes lots of installation work and makes every roof uglier.
Seems wasteful to require solar panels on homes shaded by trees or aligned the wrong way.“Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely” tells me you’ve never been to the UK…
So, whose roof is going to get drilled all over the place risking leaks in the future? Yours? Also, the increase in installation costs is less, as you wouldn’t have to lay lines linking the houses, making and closing trenches, etc. one big inverter is a single point of failure. Again, in your house, or build a shed to house it?
This is the way forward.
Heat pumps, solar panels and passive house thermal performance should have been code a long time ago.
Politicians do not have any interest in policies that will cost money now and give benefits after they’re out of office.
The US under Trump:
I thought about writing something like “it’s ironic that Trump might inadvertently save the world by forcing everyone else to react to his attempts to destroy it,” but I don’t want to give him even that much credit.
Imagine productively responding to a problem instead of flipping out, throwing up your hands and then doing nothing?
Wild.
Literally doesn’t help with the problem right now though.
Yes it’s certainly good to have decent standards,
Nah how about i pay you a billion dollars not to build wind turbines on my coast.
I could not as well. But as I wanted to build double the generators, I’d settle with two billions for doing nothing?
I accept cashier’s checks from all major banks.
A sensible policy, honestly. It’ll help Britain become more independent from the Middle East and other petrol-heavy states.
You would THINK all of the most xenophobic people on this planet would be more than gung ho about eliminating our dependency on other countries and their resources, but apparently not so much. Probably because they know they can start a war and make even more money.
Every damn time there is a global oil shock the right wing voters are shocked and outraged that US prices go up too. They think the US should somehow be immune because we are net exporters. They don’t get that it’s the oil companies that are the net exporters, not the US populace.
It’s about more than dependency. The petrodollar is key to US/Western hegemony. Unless renewables can give the US/West a similar assymmetric advantage over the rest of the world, the ruling class here is going to hesitate to embrace it.
By the way, Germany just raised the power limit for plug-in solar to 7 Kilowatts, and apparently tries to give incentives to using batteries.
I don’t think that’s quite true. You can have up to 7 kW panels, but only feed in 800 W - the rest has to go into batteries.
that’s way more power than needed to feed 800W out 24/7, what happens with the rest?
It’s the maximum that is allowed for plug-in solar, you still have to calculate if it’s useful, or if it would be better to install a normal system.
Gotta spend it somewhere. Charge some batteries or else dump it into a load cell.
They should require all new communities to have a large scale battery for the area as well. There are a bunch of options that could help power the community if something goes wrong, and the solar could top up the communities battery as well.
It should be more affordable having 1 for the area vs 1 small one for each house.
Also every new substation could have a battery added.
Decentralizing everything like this would be huge for national security.
That should make home ownership more affordable.
I’m not saying that it’s a bad policy, but this is something that is going to have long-term impact more than short-term.
It’s called striking while the iron is hot. Bravo!!
What makes this news even more significant is that the UK produced large amounts of oil from the North Sea around 1980 - 2000 . These reserves are gone.
No, they aren’t. We still produce oil, and whether or not to permit drilling to exploit known reserves has been an ongoing political issue for the last couple of years. At current rates of production we’ve got about 11 years of proven reserves and an estimate of another 20 or so unproven. If we were to bump production back up to our historic peak output in 1999, divide those numbers by 4.5 (so two and a half years proven - not long, but enough to set up a lot of solar)
