For numerous reasonsβ¦.Why wasnβt this put in place decades ago?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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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.
Why would you do that? It's easier to install solar for one home than for multiple homes at once. If you mash together multiple tenants and homeowners into one energy system, you start having a lot of additional problems. They have to finance the installation together, they have to do contracts about who gets what amount of power when, they have to do billing, and so on. If you have your own solar system on your own roof, that's easy. Everything else is simply not happening. So for example, what happens when one homeowner doesn't want to have solar or can't afford it?
"Possibly replacing the sheet metal entirely" tells me you've never been to the UK...
Why not? look at all the sheet metal roofs in the picture!
Those are probably roof tiles.
Is the material relevant here? My point is, if the whole roof is covered by panels, you don't need the redundant roof under the panels anymore.
and makes every roof uglier.
Tbh, solar panels are not the ugly factor in thenpicture you posted.
So, whose roof is going to get drilled all over the place risking leaks in the future? Yours? Also, individual installation costs are lower, 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?
Everyone's roof is getting drilled, says the new requirement - I'm suggesting reducing the drilling. Of course the three without installations would compensate the one carrying everything for them.
All houses are linked by the electrical grid already, no new trenches needed.
This is the way forward.
Heat pumps, solar panels and passive house thermal performance should have been code a long time ago.
And batteries. Arguably batteries would have the biggest impact out of all of those; turn every household into a virtual power plant and the grid can self balance, especially during peak usage.
The government is also dragging its feet on V2G which would allow your EV to act as an additional giant battery that can feed the grid and your home when usage is high, then top it back up overnight.
There's been a big storm in the UK, so wind is generating fuckloads of energy right now, to the point where energy providers are having to pay people to use electric - all that cheap power could be filling up batteries instead.
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:
You don't get it. All this is Trump 5D chess (or old folks home bog standard checkers, I don't remember which) making a deal to steer the world into renewables. Deal maker in chief.
"Beautiful, clean coal!"
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.
US hegemony is partly based on the petrodollar and they work hard to keep other countries hooked. The Euro is partly meant to reduce European dependence on the USD. It is a lot more complex then US = Western in this case.
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.
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?
Consumption at home for freezers, fridges, computers, EVs and so forth.
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.
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)