{"id":7685,"date":"2017-08-09T16:50:33","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T15:50:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7685"},"modified":"2017-08-09T16:50:33","modified_gmt":"2017-08-09T15:50:33","slug":"uk-solar-potential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7685","title":{"rendered":"UK solar potential"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"954838_204501379701698_1765426126_n\"<\/a>What is the UK solar potential?\u00a0 That is what I’ve been asking myself over the last few weeks as I have written some of the recent blog posts.\u00a0 I revisited Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air<\/a> by the late great David McKay (who my brother knew quite well).\u00a0 He says the theoretical upper UK solar potential is 1260GW (actually this is the quantity of capacity needed to produce 50kWh\/day\/person).\u00a0 He reckons this is 5% of the UK’s land area and regards this as almost inconceivable.\u00a0 But is it?\u00a0 Quite a lot about McKay’s book is out of date.\u00a0 Offshore wind power and solar costs and capacity are much more favourable than he envisaged.\u00a0 Also population has risen so getting to that figure is actually more difficult.\u00a0 Getting the actual theoretical UK solar potential is actually quite challenging but I found a recent blog post that suggests that all our needs could be met with just 1% of the land area.\u00a0 So who is right?\u00a0 Lets have a look at the maths – I’m writing this with a completely open mind and I am going to be very conservative.\u00a0 I have made the assumption that we will use domestic roofs and commercial roofs only.\u00a0 Actually most of the UK’s capacity is in fields.\u00a0 I don’t have a huge problem with that but think that 5% would be excessive if this was where the systems were.\u00a0 Other non-domestic building types have really yet to take off as far as solar is concerned.<\/p>\n

Domestic<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing we need to think about is power output.\u00a0 In the UK I have assumed an average of 750kWh per 1kWp of capacity.\u00a0 This is on the low side but takes into account using non south facing roofs.<\/p>\n

The next thing is to think about the roof size.\u00a0 The Energy Saving Trust have done some work on this.\u00a0 They say the most common size of installation (2015) was 4kW which takes just under 29m2<\/sup>.\u00a0 I find this surprising since I see very few installations of this size.\u00a0 I am going to assume an average of 2.<\/p>\n

How many domestic roofs are there? The BBC say 25 million in 2004<\/a>.\u00a0 However 17% are tenements or flats.\u00a0 Although putting PV on some of these is not impossible and there are such systems its definitely more complicated so I’ve assumed none do.\u00a0 This is 20.75 million<\/p>\n

Put it all together.<\/p>\n

= 750 x 2 x 20.75 x106<\/sup> = 31125000000kWh.\u00a0 A huge figure.\u00a0 However its more helpful to think in terrawatt hours (TWh) which is the country scale consumption unit in a year.\u00a0 Divide by 1000 puts it in MWh and then by another 1000 puts it in GWh finally another division by 1000 puts it in TWh.<\/p>\n

so this by my reckoning gives us 31.25TWh a year. \u00a0 This is a lot of electricity but not more than 10% of current yearly demand.<\/p>\n

Commercial<\/strong><\/p>\n

How about “commercial*” roof space?\u00a0 DECC (now renamed) suggested in 2014 there is 250,000 hectares of south facing roofs in the UK (funnily enough this is about 1% of UK land area).\u00a0 This is 2.5 x 109<\/sup> m2<\/sup>.\u00a0 Divide this by 29m2<\/sup> which give you the number of 4Kw systems you could fit on this roof.<\/p>\n

Again put it all together.<\/p>\n

2.5 x 109<\/sup> \/ 29 = 86206896 x 4kW.<\/p>\n

This would generate in a year = 86206896 x 4 x 750 = 258620688000kWh.<\/p>\n

Again divide by 1000 three times.<\/p>\n

= 258TWh.<\/p>\n

Adding these two figures almost gives what we do use now.<\/p>\n

So at the moment we could meet all our needs (almost) in theory<\/em>.\u00a0 McKay was right meeting a large amount of our future needs from solar would be a struggle when you take into account heating and transport without putting a lot of stuff in fields.\u00a0 However I would add the commercial roofs do not include other directions of which East and West work pretty well, this could almost triple the above figure (think about it).\u00a0 In addition PV modules are are getting steadily more efficient.\u00a0 On an individual system basis this is just significant but with well over 100 million panels would help somewhat.\u00a0 No one is suggesting that we should try to run our entire energy system off solar.\u00a0 That would be crazy and lead to a huge number of problems however solar can make a huge contribution to our energy scene and we have really only just scratched the surface of its potential.\u00a0 Please feel free to correct my maths or method<\/p>\n

* includes government buildings such as hospitals MOD etc.<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is the UK solar potential?\u00a0 That is what I’ve been asking myself over the last few weeks as I have written some of the recent blog posts.\u00a0 I revisited Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air by the late great … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15,176,1],"tags":[177,51],"class_list":["post-7685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-peak-oil","category-practical-low-carbon-living","category-solar","category-uncategorized","tag-solar","tag-solar-energy-payback"],"yoast_head":"\nUK solar potential - The oil lamp - shining God's light on peak oil<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7685\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7685\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theoillamp.co.uk\/?p=7685\",\"name\":\"UK solar potential - 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