Edward Woods Estate : solar panels on southern elevations

Our beady eye on planning applications has noted the seemingly innocuous application 2022/00504/CLP for removal of the arrays of a total of around 1000 solar panels across the southern elevations of the three tower blocks alongside the A3220, that form the Edward Woods Estate on the edge of the borough, but also ‘the largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’.

The panels have recently been assessed as a high fire risk, and the plan is to remove them all, without replacement.  Just a few hundred metres from the Grenfell Tower, this is another aspect of the ongoing cladding scandal, with added spice.

We’re fans of renewable energy, (this website is 100% renewably powered by way of a miniscule example), and it was good news seeing such huge arrays installed here in Hammersmith just a decade ago, and now equally disappointing that the greenest borough, can’t find a way to economically replace or remediate them by reducing the risk to acceptable levels, especially in the current energy crisis, in visible support of a very public climate change strategy. We’d like to understand if there are any implications for other buildings with such PV panels, including small residential – read on…

The situation helps highlight more arcane yet significant structural problems in the energy market, which we expand on below, and which despite all the recent column inches on the subject, have not been talked about in mainstream media. Your reward for reaching the end of the article is an insight into why you’re still regularly paying the gas price for wind or solar power.

Edward Woods was ‘The largest building-integrated renewable energy array in London’, the solar part of the project costing around £1m a decade ago. To put it in context, this scale is equivalent to about two years of the entire borough’s Solar Together buying scheme applications (and rather more than actual installations), a scheme which is being promoted by the council at the moment.

Perhaps a significant lesson is staring us in the face?  As the climate change team say below, they’re focusing on other interventions instead, namely insulation and boiler replacements which are a more effective use of limited funds, especially on buildings taller than 18m with new post-Grenfell constraints. Take your cue, and look at this offer from the council to provide free Ecofurb Plans to help you identify what’s best to do in your particular circumstances, which can otherwise be a challenge to work out, as we mentioned before.

We approached Cllr. Wesley Harcourt, cabinet member for the Environment, for comment. The council’s climate change team responded with the statement in the blue box below.

Such a detailed reply is greatly appreciated, though it seeds more difficult questions. After further enquiries, the team separately advised us of an aspiration to redeploy any remaining usable panels to less stringent locations.

The council was, however, unable to answer the specific question about what new regulation prevents deployment of solar panels on such blocks, and we were unable to identify any specific prohibition in our own joyless researches into the revised “Approved Documents”, other than the general requirements mentioned above. Sadly these documents remain as only ‘guidance’, containing hundreds of shoulds, woulds and coulds in a Very British Fudge, which is no way to run a regulatory regime as Dame Judith Hackitt describes. Google provided a number of examples of compliant (with A2, S1-d0) building-integrated PV systems – many in Europe – but they may not be cost effective of course, and that may well be the clue. However, remaining questions are:

• 

  Example of typical solar panel certifications

  How did Building Control let panels be installed that are classed as the lowest of the low – fire classification E, “high contribution to fire”,  just 10 years ago?
  We couldn’t find any this bad, even searching the Internet Archive using this 2011 list.  We’d like to see what they did install, and learn from it.
  In 2012 there were plenty of PV fire safety requirements, type approval requirements and standards in force for the internal and external materials of such panels, that would not result in overall classification as low as E, most of the certification list shown date from 2002-2010, which themselves reference fire safety tests including BS 476–3 (2004), IEC 60695-1-1, and ASTM E162-02a (2002).  They are not tinder !

• What are the implications for fire safety of similar panels on other buildings – does this affect residential installations of the type that are being promoted, or previously promoted?
• The original planning application states that the payback for these 1000m² solar photovoltaics “…is longer than the life expectancy of the PV products, normally considered 25 years…”. Note the magic 25 figure, probably connected to warranties that some manufacturers offer, though many are now a rather more credible 10 years.  Payback was calculated at 35 years at the time, because each building only generated £12,363 p.a. – it may be more or less now.  But an actual lifespan, 25% of the payback period according to Arup’s report, is rather concerning.
• The industry standard efficiency reduction is less than 1% p.a.  After a decade, these should therefore achieve more than 90% of their specified output.
• If panels may not last, should the council still promote such schemes with a stated 25 year life? Remember the scandal of the early energy saving light bulbs? It seems that the industry is struggling to wean itself off the “25-30 year” claim (which the LED light bulb industry gradually did), perhaps because installers demand it, rather more than it being regularly achievable or enforceable with caveats over such a long period.  It seems prudent to scale these claims somewhat if you’re doing a serious long-term payback calculation yourself.
• The original small wind turbines which were part of the scheme were unsuccessful and were scrapped soon after installation, suggesting further problems with oversight.

If the council has “signed off £600M”, it might reasonably find a way to afford to replace the panels and make a notable contribution to renewable power in the borough (more effectively than individual householders with small solar installations). Or even fix a bridge.

Lessons learnt

Railings. Lord Beaverbrook’s wartime railings. People were encouraged to give them up for the war effort for morale-building reasons, but nobody seems to know where they went – it wasn’t into the war effort – and there are even apocryphal stories of dumping in the Thames estuary.

One feels perhaps a little of the same going on here, possibly shaming the unwary into an unexciting investment unless they have very specific domestic conditions, given current UK solar economics (Solskam, like Flygskam?), or worse, wasting the opportunity cost, plus appetite for spending on something that really would make a significant difference – like boring old insulation, which is what the council are themselves now doing.  Is it so boring?  Perhaps not, read this, and for low earners, check the green homes grant administered via the Energy Saving Trust.

Under the current UK regime, much as we’d like solar to be cost-effective plus green, renewable energy generation is best suited to bigger players, who can select and control their sources of supply, can work at significant scale with huge turbines at sea or on windy hills, or solar arrays in fields, and most importantly can sell all their power, all the time, at market rates. 

Solar generation vs. demand throughout a sunny day

Residents risk being carried along on a wave of laudable, but flawed optimism, solar making little financial or even environmental sense in the current UK residential setting, with the “Smart Export Guarantee” now reduced to the shameful levels of 1.5p (EDF) to 7.5p (Octopus) per unit. This Times article has a recent survey plus an explanation of the market & regulatory failures that have caused such pitiful rates. This Channel 4 Dispatches programme lifts the lid on more government naivety, with the dogma of its Ofgem regulator continuing to pretend that energy supply is a market, whereas in reality it has few, if any, aspects of a proper market, leading to multiple supplier collapses, and why the losses will be paid for yet again by consumers.

There is a school of thought that suggests the rates were cut to pander to the energy companies during the coalition government, but there’s also an environmental school that suggests solar in the UK is one of the least effective ways of spending the ‘green pound’ – taxpayer’s or otherwise – which is why they were cut. Take your pick, they are where they are.

Even with today’s eyewatering electricity prices, it doesn’t add up financially unless you can somehow use most of what’s generated yourself, especially in daytime when solar output peaks, as shown. Typical UK homes average 300-350W (about a panel’s worth, or 3000 kWh/year), as the figure adjacent illustrates, the “base load” is perhaps half that, a lot of which is your fridge.

A stumbling block in the domestic environment is that any professional installation has to be large enough to be commercially viable for an installer, which with cheaper solar panels, currently means it’s often too big for your own domestic use, unless you can sell or store. Energy storage to use the daytime peak can unravel the green economics once you start exploring the lifespan, environmental impacts and fire safety risks of batteries – that’s a whole other article! Surely that situation should improve.

EV charging cables across pavement
[Photo: Hampshire cc]

One of the few effective green ways to store energy domestically is to heat hot water, but there’s only so much water needed, and it’s not a very efficient use of electricity given typical PV efficiencies of 15-20% compared to 90% for direct solar thermal on your roof.  EV (car) charging is another aspiration, for much of Hammersmith’s housing with minuscule amounts of off-street parking, (and none in the large number of flats being built) trailing wires across the pavement is the only (and thoroughly unsafe) means, though has been observed several times around the borough!

We’ve suggested before that energy suppliers should be allowed to energy-swap your surplus to be used elsewhere or at another time sans batterie – perhaps even for on-street chargers – as a way to even things out; the restitution of a decent Feed-in-Tariff would be an alternative.  In Utah, the grid will store your solar surplus like a battery, and give you back 90% of it when you want it. Now there’s a thing.

You are regularly paying the gas price for wind or solar power

We can’t complete the picture without briefly touching on UK regulatory market distortions (specifically the Merit Order Stack of the UK wholesale electricity market settlements system) that despite best intentions, has the unintended consequence that you, the consumer, pay the highest marginal generating cost for all your electricity, calculated every half hour, regardless of the way the majority of it is actually generated, “green tariff” or not. Hence you are regularly paying the gas price for wind or bulk solar power, further detail is a subject for another time, probably in the hands of an economist. Fixing this and the now miserly “Smart Export Guarantee” at the stroke of HMG’s pen would go a long way to mending the seriously broken energy market.  Time to write to your MP about such perverse distortions.

March 2023 Update

The council granted itself permission, and removed the panels. Happily we’re told that “the climate change team managed to organise the collection of the panels by a third party who are currently undertaking the necessary tests in attempt to re-use them rather than recycle them”. The residents are now being consulted on the replacement cladding.