The Climate, Environment and Energy Thread

[LP]

I think you should revise that statement. At least if you are referring to your typical residential solar panel install.

The reason that they are about 5kw, is that is about the real estate available on your average house.

True there is a limit to the capacity based on the available area, but that's not the reason why capacity has stalled at 6kW.

Firstly, for many years 5kW feed in was the legal cap, this was to prevent the grid being overloaded by changes in cloud cover.

Secondly, because houses typically require about 2 - 3kwh on average there is no motivation to deliver higher capacity, they are already a factor of 2 or 3 above the daily average, which over about 3/4 of the year is enough, add to that the assumption that batteries will become better and cheaper and can store the surplus, and that the energy efficiency of households will improve reducing the consumption. Hopefully, we all have liquid fuel cells on on premise hydrogen generators that can store energy during daylight hours and hand it back overnight.

When feed in tariff were higher, there was some motivation to install bigger systems, but now the feed in tariffs are much lower and the ROI exceeds the average life of the installation.

Add to that, I bet it won't be long before fridges, ovens, dishwashers, washing machines, all sorts of appliances come with built in smart battery systems, storing the energy they need during daylight hours to function overnight. This modular lower cost option seems to be the better way to approach the problem than large monolithic cells. It would also naturally adds capacity to overcome the vast majority of blackouts.

When i got mine 10-odd years ago, we got 3.3kw simply due to price, but was an upgrade on what the standard install was at the time. If we maxed out our roof space, we 'New technology' will come in terms of KERS and the like. Recovering energy, thus using less energy by comparison.

Regalrdess of KERS and other technologies, they can only work in the difference margin between 100% efficiency and real world efficiency. It's not much, the biggest potential gains are to come from thermal efficiency / management where the bulk of the loss occurs in inductive systems like motors, electromagnets and switching(mechanical or solid state). A lot of the waste energy is lost heating stuff we do not need heated, but even so it's typically less than a 10% or 15% gain to be made in older systems, and in many modern systems it's less than 5%.