Jeremy Harris

The battery price will be whatever the market drives it to be, and at the moment Tesla seems to be calling the shots, with the lowest price per kWh per year of any of the readily available systems. The government can't change this, but they can introduce a regulatory environment that allows domestic scale storage to be included in the market for energy. They may need to copy the FIT model, and provide a mandatory incentive scheme to kick start it, but, depending on the value to the market of having a fairly large and widespread microstorage capability to call on then it might just be viable. The key will be whether the sums can add up within the lifetime of any storage system. Realistically, no battery storage system is going to last much beyond about 10 years, so that means that consumers will need to at the very least recover that cost in that time, by a combination of reduced grid consumption plus revenue from energy sold back to the grid. The main change that's needed is a way to manage the tariff system - if consumers have to pay full retail price for excess energy from the grid to charge their battery packs up, to then sell back that energy to the grid for peak shaving at wholesale price, then it's clearly a non-starter. Consumers will have to have the ability to buy in excess generation energy from the grid at less than wholesale price, and sell it back at a price that makes economic sense for them to invest in battery storage. There seem to be a lot of obstacles that stand in the way of making this work, and because of the fragmented, muti-tariff, nature of energy supply, it seems that only government could set some sort of consistent standard, and create the regulatory framework, to make this work. One problem is that the major beneficiaries are not the suppliers, at least directly, but the DNOs and the grid. Getting something that will allow a microstorage scheme to work is not going to be straightforward or easy, given the number of interested parties.

Recent experience from others here seems to suggest that Rationel are often pretty keenly priced and good quality. That's something that has changed in the last three years or so, as when we got quotes Rationel were around the same price as some of the higher-end companies. We also found a wide variation between suppliers for very similar specification windows, ranging from around £24k down to around £8.5k, (all installed price, with cills). Top price when we were getting quotes was Internorm (who also had the longest lead time), Munster Joinery were the cheapest, but I'd hesitate to recommend them, as they are a complete PITA to deal with.

Yes, there was a lot of industrial R&D funded from the back of generous government contracts back in the time I was referring to. That all came to end by the early 80's, when there was a big shake up of government spending and the contracting process. Until then cost plus contracts were pretty normal, which gave industry funding for R&D. These were replaced with firm price contracts, which resulted in stronger competition and reduced contract prices, but at the cost of removing the "hidden" government funded industrial R&D.

No, as the RHI won't give you enough return to cover the massive increase in installation cost required to comply with the rules. An MCS install for our ASHP was going to add around £1500 to the cost, and a DIY install isn't eligible for RHI. Add in that for a low energy house the RHI payments will be small (in our case less than £80 a year for 7 years) and the RHI makes no sense at all. We'd have paid around £1500 more for an RHI eligible installation of the same system that we have, but received a total of around £560 back over 7 years - not the strongest economic argument in the world!

Pretty much every successful spin off from universities seems to have come about as a consequence of individuals with a strong entrepreneurial spirit plus private investment. I'm not convinced that central government initiatives have really contributed a great deal, other than helping to provide the enabling mechanisms for universities to get funding from the private sector. There were some instances back in the 50's and 60's, maybe even into the early 70's, where direct government funding did result in marketable innovations. Many of these came from the government owned energy sector and the defence sector - ones I'm familiar with are LCD displays, thermal imaging bolometers and MEMS, all of which came out of RRE Malvern (sadly a research establishment I helped close down...............).

The key will be to appeal with some evidence that is directly applicable to the exact wording of the reason for refusal in the Decision Notice. If the planning officer was inclined not to agree with the Highways Officer's ruling, then you may well find that there is a let-out in the wording of the Decision Notice that helps steer the direction to take for an appeal. An appeal can only be made with evidence, it won't win if it's just an opinion from the applicant, and it needs to focus tightly on all the reasons given for refusal in the Decision Notice. It would help a great deal if you can provide evidence of the visibility splay requirements and statements as to their applicability from your local planning policy. These cary from one local authority to another in most of the UK, but are usually online. Have a good read of them, compare them to the reasons for refusal in your Decision Notice, and look for ways to rebut the latter. Evidence could take the form of photos taken from the normal visibility splay centre point as defined in the planning policy. Ours were initially defined as angles to set distances up the road either side from a position 2.4m back from the edge of the highway, in the centre of the proposed access, for example. Use a camera lens that approximates to the same field of view of the human eye to take these photos, and make that clear (as a guide, a 50mm focal length lens at 35mm film equivalent is close to the human eye normal field of view). Gather whatever evidence you can on traffic density and speed for the category of road. There may well be some evidence available fro unlikely sources - our old village did a comprehensive "speed watch" programme, which recorded speeds and traffic density as part of an initiative to get traffic calming measures installed, for example. If you can't get evidence for free, then you could try to get the Highways Officer to make a site visit and give an opinion. As a last resort, employ someone to do a traffic speed and density survey, and try to use that as evidence.

I think I got the arithmetic right. The GSHP option was going to cost about £4,000 more than the ASHP we fitted in the end. The running cost saving would have been around 10%, so about £25/year. £4,000 / £25 = 160 years. Happy to be corrected if I've made an error. I semi-agree, but everyone needs to do their own sums to see whether or not that argument holds true. The capital cost of installing direct electric water heating, using something like a Willis unit with a standard immersion heater element, would have been around £80 to £100 at the most, saving over £1,900 on the cost of our ASHP. Assuming a COP of 3 for the ASHP then our bill would increase from around £250 to about £750, but then adjusting for the reduced unit cost of running direct heating on E7 (not a good thing for an ASHP, as it means running it at night, when it's colder and when the noise may be more noticeable) the direct electricity running cost comes down to around £375 to £400 per year. The £1900 capital cost difference between direct electric heating running on E7 and an ASHP running on a standard tariff would be enough to pay for about 10 years worth of running costs, as a very rough estimate. It would be reasonable to guess that 10 years may well be around the life time of an ASHP, so for us it would be a finely balanced economic argument either way. There is certainly a lot to be said for the simplicity and reduced maintenance cost of a direct electric system, however we also use the ASHP for summer cooling, so there is an additional benefit there.

Welcome. At the moment, as you probably know, domestic battery storage isn't usually whole life economically viable, in that the cost saving from the stored PV energy over the battery lifetime will exceed the cost of grid electricity. The Powerwall 2 is the most cost effective at the moment, but even that can't deliver a whole life cost saving, in that the capital investment cost cannot be recovered through the life of the unit by the saving in imported electricity cost. I looked again at this recently, and reckoned that it was currently very tough to get below about £0.20/kWh for the actual stored energy cost through life with the available domestic scale storage products, although that's a lot better than the situation a few years ago. What the government seem to be trying to do is to find a way to incentivise domestic, as well as commercial, battery storage, not to save consumers energy cost, but to reduce the peak demands on the grid. There is a monetary value, as well as a strategic value, to grid peak demand shaving for the people that manage the grid and distribution networks, and it seems that government want to find ways to encourage consumers to play a part in this. The current domestic scale battery storage systems are not designed to help the grid, they are designed to help the consumer, even if they don't quite make economic sense, in terms of whole life cost. What the government seems to want to do is allow distributed battery storage to deliver power to the grid during local peak demand periods, something that current systems cannot do (because of the regulatory constraints, primarily). To do this, they need to put in place a means to reward those that invest in such battery storage systems. The current FIT contracts seem fairly secure, and aren't likely to be torn up, as the judiciary stand between government and the consumer, and I'm pretty sure that the contracts could not be unilaterally rescinded. Index linking could probably be changed, I think - there are precedents for this with pensions, where the government arbitrarily changed the index link from the RPI to the CPI, to the detriment of lots of pensioners (me included!).

Sadly there is no such thing as precedent in planning, so the fact that one house was allowed three years ago has no bearing at all on your application. Unfair, perhaps, but it's in the rules and cannot be argued with - it's probably the one planning principle that is pretty much inviolable. The best bet will be to get evidence that there may be a reduced, or even no, requirement to comply with the normal rules for visibility splays. This means hard evidence, in the form of actual measured traffic density and speed normally, plus you will need to talk directly to the highways officer, as it will be him/her that will have to inform the planning officer that an exception can be allowed. I have most of the correspondence from the debacle over our site, although second hand, as it was the previous owner that spent three years getting planning permission, with access being one of the main problem areas encountered. The first year or so was wasted, as far as I can see, by the previous owner just putting forward changed plans, without addressing the actual problem of the visibility splay requirements. Once those were acknowledged, he got a traffic survey done, then spent several months negotiating with the highways officer, who eventually agreed to relax the rules. There was also an omission made by the planning officer when passing the application in the end, in that the highways officer defined reduced visibility splays, from a point in the centre of the drive exit, but for some reason these were not included on the plans and so never made it to our own panning approval, which was a stroke of luck for us.

We have an MBC slab. The only prep done to it by our tiler, before laying around 45m2 of large format travertine, was to sweep and vacuum the concrete and apply a very thin PVA sealing coat to it. Ours didn't need any levelling, as it was within a few mm of being dead flat, and we have the travertine running flush through four doorways from room to room. We have no expansion joints, and they are not needed, as the slab has steel reinforcement and so won't crack. The slight difference in the coefficient of thermal expansion between the concrete and the travertine is accommodated by using flexible tile adhesive. The flooring has been down a couple of years and is still as perfect as the day it was laid. In terms of cost, I think we paid around £20/m2 for labour, and around the same again for the travertine. Add in the cost of adhesive and sealant and the total cost came to around £45 to £50/m2. Not sure where the calcium carbonate is going to come from with a normal cured RC35 concrete slab mix, either.

The visibility splay requirements can often be a show stopper, as the default position is to stick to the letter of the planning regs regarding them. Existing properties are not required to comply with these rules, but new builds are, so you can often find that building a new house right next to an existing one falls foul of needing a far more onerous set of visibility splays. There are ways to argue for a reduction in the required length of these splays, though. They are based on standard traffic density and speed for the class of road that the exit from the drive connects to. Our build is a good example of a deviation from the standard rules, for example. Our drive was a sticking point for planning for three applications, but in the end a traffic survey showed that the density of traffic on the unclassfied lane was much lower than the average for this class of road, and that, because of the narrow nature of the lane, plus several blind bends, traffic speed was very much lower (11mph was the typical speed recorded). After the highways officer had made two site visits, read the reports on actual traffic density and speed, he agreed to waive the requirements for visibility splays completely, provided that the drive exit was positioned exactly where he mandated it had to be, which not only allowed planning permission to be granted, but has also given more freedom for the position of boundary fences and hedges.

As above, MVHR always cools a house when the outside temperature is lower than the desired temperature, but it cools it a LOT less than if normal ventilation is used. As a general rule, in addition to the much better overall ventilation and improved air quality that MVHR gives, it will recover at least 80% of the heat that would otherwise be lost from conventional ventilation, like trickle vents, leaving windows open a bit, extractor fans, etc. That's a big saving. In our new build around 70% of the total heat loss in winter would come from ventilation heat loss, if it were not for the MVHR.

Yes. When I was programme managing the defence research programme we tried to copy the DARPA model to run competitions for innovative ideas, with seed funding to demonstration of concept level. I don't know of one single idea that went on to be used, or developed into a product. There was a lot of interest, but almost all from large companies, so much so that we had to set up a second challenge that was restricted to SMEs. That experience makes me very cynical about government intervention in innovation. Government should stick to what it can do reasonably well when it tries, and that is to try to put in place all the required enabling infrastructure, or at least create a regulatory environment where this can be done. That paper does contain some good stuff, buried within the stuff that has clearly been promoted by government lobbyists, like standardisation of electric vehicle charge points. The current situation is ludicrous, with competing companies offering subscription services and incompatible payment systems. The connectors are pretty standardised (with the exception of Tesla) but even so there are three connector types, that are mutually incompatible. The current scheme means it costs me a minimum of £5 to charge my car at a public charge point, and for that I get about 4.5kWh, so I'm paying over £1 per kWh for the electricity. Given that I can charge at home (when the sun isn't shining) for about £0.14 per kWh, then there is a very strong disincentive for me to consider using a public charge point now. I doubt I'm alone, either, as I now see the local public charge points empty a lot more often than when the cost was a flat rate of £20 a year for a subscription.

Our structural slab (the whole house sits on it) is 100mm thick with A142 fabric, plus a narrow, deeper, reinforced ring beam around the edge. PIR is a lot better than EPS, typically 200mm of PIR = 300mm of EPS, in terms of thermal resistance. 150mm of PIR = 225mm of EPS, not 200mm.

Welcome, As above, it really comes down to economics. A GSHP might be a few percent more efficient than an ASHP, but the installation cost is likely to be at least double, probably triple, the cost of an ASHP if doing a DIY installation. A fair bit of the cost is hidden, it's things like the much greater volume of antifreeze, and the ongoing cost of replacing that every few years. GSHPs are also inherently more complex, with an additional brine pump, plus brine heat exchanger, filters etc. When looking at the whole life cost, the tiny efficiency advantage can't usually recover the additional capital cost through life, so overall a GSHP may cost a fair bit more over the life of the unit. In terms of ecological cost, then again the ASHP wins, not so much because of the energy used, but because it probably has a smaller impact on the local environment. As an example, our house is fairly low energy (it's not a certified Passivhaus, but would easily meet the Passivhaus requirements). In winter we need a few hundred watts of heat to keep the whole house at around 21 deg C (the floor area is 130m2), and in general our ASHP fires up for about an hour or two once every two to three days to charge up the slab and keep the house at an even temperature. IT might come on for an hour or so every day in really cold (sub-zero) weather. The ASHP cost £1700, including delivery, and took me around half a day to install. The total installation cost was under £2,000. The cheapest GSHP I could find cost around £4,000, and even with a DIY installation would have cost another £2,000 to install, more if I'd opted to use vertical borehole collectors. In winter we use between £0.20 and £0.30 worth of electricity per day for heating and DHW pre-heat, for around 100 days, so the cost is around £250 (ignoring our PV generation contribution to that cost). If we had a GSHP, it might be around 10% more efficient at best (bearing in mind that things like the brine pump increase the energy use over and above the basic COP difference), so a GSHP might save us around £25 a year. To recover the additional £4,000 cost of the GSHP, without accounting for the cost of antifreeze replacement, would take 160 years.................

The problem is that she wasn't presented by the BBC as an economist, her introduction just said that she was, quote, "an expert in energy policy". I would imagine that many listeners would have heard that and thought that it meant that she understood the fundamental principles of our energy generation and transmission system. Having read that paper (linked above, and the source of the news story) through a couple of times, I'm not convinced there is anything very solid in it at all. There are clear implications that the authors are using the usual politically-driven phraseology to cover up what they are being driven to suggest (almost certainly by the energy industry, who are seemingly increasingly concerned about the volatility of the market). Use of terms like "empowering", when applied to consumers, pretty much always means " we are saying this to cover up the fact that you're going to be shafted", for example. With regard to the media-quoted "£40bn saving", then what the paper actually says is this: "A study for the Government estimates the benefits of a smart energy system to be £17-40bn to 2050", not far off @Ferdinand's "£1Bn a year for 40 years", but is most probably around half that, I suspect.

I'm used to journalists playing fast and loose with the laws of physics, but I really didn't expect a professor from the University of East Anglia to state, on air, something that seemingly implied that the grid defies the First Law of Thermodynamics, or heats up a great deal to lose excess energy. During an interview on The World at One on Radio 4, she was asked what happened to all the energy generated by solar panels when the grid didn't need it. Her answer "It just dissipates". I know some academics can be on another planet sometimes (no offence intended, but I worked for the MOD's Chief Scientific Advisor, Roy Anderson for a few years) but I really expected a more reasonable answer from someone who was presented on the programme as "Prof Catherine Waddams, an expert in energy policy at the University of East Anglia". The exact words were: Interviewer: "What happens to the energy that is produced by people who have solar panels?" Prof Waddams: "Well, it gets brought back into the grid, ermmm, but if it can't be used then it can't be used and so it just dissipates" Rarely have I been so annoyed by someone purporting to be an expert in the field talking an absolute load of twaddle, on air, to hundreds of thousands of people. What the stupid woman should have said is that if the grid doesn't require more energy, then the solar panel systems reduce their output automatically, so they generate less energy, as that is what really happens. Solar panels are no different to any other generation system in terms of reducing generation capacity as required. Wind, solar, hydro, coal, gas, oil, even nuclear (on a slower timescale) generation can all be throttled back during times when the grid has enough supply, if they couldn't then the grid would be inherently unstable; it is a fundamental requirement for all grid connected generation.

They are regulated now, but the regulation only applies if you abstract more than 20,000 litres per day. I suspect this will stay as it is, as the hassle involved in trying to charge private borehole owners would be massive, plus there would be no way usage could be reasonably metered (it takes around an hour or so to lift the pump and pipe and drop another one down the hole).

The document this story relates to seems to be this one: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2017/07/upgrading_our_energy_system_-_smart_systems_and_flexibility_plan.pdf From what I can see, the primary driver is as I mentioned earlier, the desire to peak shave the grid. The terminology adopted seems to be Demand Side Response (DSR) and the major benefits seem to be from business electricity users (not that surprising). There isn't a lot of detail about the domestic side, other than a hint that we may have mandatory half-hour settlement (variable rate tariffs dependent on grid demand), which would imply mandatory smart meters (I can't see how half-hour settlement could work without them). There is a crude precedent for variable rate domestic electricity tariffs in France, where for some years they have adjusted the tariff charged at certain dates and times, with consumers being informed by TV and radio well in advance of these. I remember some friends who used to live in the Loire valley making sure to switch the TV over to a French channel to note the dates and times when the rates were were going to be high some 15 years ago.

It makes me grateful that we have a borehole supply..................

I'm pretty sure you have no say in whether a smart water meter is fitted, as I gather they are being made compulsory in some parts of the UK. Because the thing is outside your boundary, it's also outside your control; the water company can pretty much do what they wish as long as they meet their obligations under the law. The main downside is that smart water meters are intended primarily as a means of introducing variable rate tariffs. The intention of some water companies is to vary the tariff during periods when water resources are limited, as both an incentive for people to use less water and a way for the companies to retain their profit margins whilst selling less water.................. The latter point might be one you can argue against, as it would seem to need a change in contract terms. Whether or not that would be enough to stop the fitting of a smart water meter I don't know.

I owned an Acorn Electron, just before I splashed out and bought a BBC Master. It ended up in the skip when we moved to Scotland in 1992, I think, as by then I'd bought a 286 PC with a (at the time) wonderful EGA monitor...............

Arguably the BBC Micro helped massively in the educational sector, but it was a dead end in terms of the original technology incentive, in terms of helping to create a UK personal computer industry. The "wrong" choice of processor was one reason, but frankly it was a lottery trying to guess which architecture would "win", a bit like the VHS versus Betamax thing. ARM was way after the major government indirectly invested in the BBC Micro, and although it could be argued that this indirect investment in Acorn helped them to develop the later RISC architecture, I'm not at all convinced that it wouldn't have happened anyway. Acorn ended up going broke and being taken over, IIRC, and probably the only worthwhile remaining asset was the IP in the RISC architecture, I suspect. Even that had a pretty rocky road to eventual success, and that success is largely due to the drive and investment from Apple when ARM was first formed.

Government can be effective as an enabler, to mandate infrastructure changes, for example, but investing in battery technology makes very little sense, as the chance that this tiny investment will produce any significant improvement is miniscule. If government chooses to incentivise home energy storage as a way of better managing the grid load patterns, then that makes a great deal of sense. Industry can't easily do this, given the current energy supply model we have, so if there is to be wide-scale change then it needs government intervention. The problem is that the government doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to schemes like this. The FIT scheme sort of worked out reasonably, albeit with a great deal of market uncertainty and profiteering from a few dubious businesses who set out to game the system, but some of the other schemes, like the RHI and the Green Deal, are just mad. I'd be happy to consider investing in home battery storage IF the scheme makes sense in terms of the balance between the benefit to the grid and the benefit to me. Right now, home battery storage makes no sense at all; anyone who invests in it will end up paying more per unit of energy than they would if they just relied on a grid connection. Bring in a scheme that makes it slightly better than whole life cost neutral and I'd invest, really to get the benefit of energy supply reliability as much as anything else.

My money is on Elon Musk, or someone very like him. Governments are bloody awful at driving innovation; history shows that it is often a single, highly motivated, individual that is prepared to take the risk and put in the effort to bring about a major innovation, or, in some cases, just a simple accident. I can't recall a single UK government sponsored innovation programme that has delivered anything really worthwhile.