Community Energy Literature Review

Plans to capture solar energy from “solar farms” in space and beam it to earth were reported by Pallab Ghosh in a recent BBC news report (Ghosh, 2022). The article anticipated approval of a three-year feasibility and economic study aimed at eventually sending gigawatts of power to earth from space to help address future energy shortages. A few days later Olivia Allen reported that ESA, the European Space Agency, had approved plans for further research into Space Based Solar Power, SBSP (Allen, 2022). The project, known as SOLARIS, “will carry out research with the aim of developing huge orbiting satellites fitted with solar panels that can collect the sun’s energy and wirelessly beam it down to Earth.” Allen traces the concept back to the 1970s, but regards the technology as only now close to what is needed to realise the idea. Orbiting solar panels would receive continuous sunlight and so provide continuous power to receivers on earth, transmitting energy over a distance of 36,000km...

It is no doubt safest to assume that any correlation between an increase in solar generation in the UK and declining consumption of electrical energy from the grid is no more than that; nevertheless, a correlation is suggestive, and it could be instructive to pursue it further. To do this we will need to know more about solar installations in the UK. Ofgem, the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets for the UK, publishes data on the total FiT PV installation capacity for each year. https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data-portal/total-installed-capacity-kw-installation-type Capacity in kW, as of 30 September 2017 is given as follows (here rounded to the nearest thousand). Community                                       287,000 Domestic              ...

A Community Energy Group is investigating whether there is a clear relationship between the decline in the annual electrical energy delivered through the national grid and the increasing energy delivered by FiT registered solar PV installations.   (FiT = Feed-in-Tariff, the government subsidy). An article by Adam Vaughan in The Guardian dated 30 Jan 2018, notes that the UK electricity demand has fallen by 9% in the past seven years. An analysis of official figures by campaign group Sandbag found the UK fall between 2016 and 2017 was one of the biggest in several years, marking a striking divergence with the rest of Europe, where demand rose. (The UK’s power consumption fell nearly 2% from 355 terawatt hours to 348 TWh, while it rose across the EU as a whole by 0.7% from 3,239 to 3,262 TWh.) Vaughan suggests that a slowing economy, mild weather and the growing use of energy efficient appliances may be significant factors; he mentions the growth of renewables, but does not gi...