Category: solar

So yesterday was the big day and we finally switched on our solar farm! The site is not 100% finished, with a lot of tidying up to do, but for the first time ever, the 3,024 solar panels on the site are finally generating power and feeding it into the national grid. Overall, it will provide power for 300 homes, which is pretty good. That might sound a lot if you are reading this in the US, but UK per-household electricity consumption is actually quite low. Yesterday was a big big milestone, but not the total end of the project. We do not have the monitoring logins set up yet (but the power is being logged by the meter), and we do not have the final construction bill, soi I cannot tell you if/how profitable it might be yet. But here are the switch-on day details:

Annoyingly, I live hundreds of miles away from the site, so we have a four hour drive to get there (including a short breakfast/coffee stop where I recharge the EV). Because switch-on was booked in for 9.30AM, that meant a very early start, and then a long drive in darkness and eventual sunrise. That did mean that the project manager was onsite at sunrise and got some really nice pictures:

Because you have to arrange someone from the distribution network operator (DNO) to come and ‘witness’ the site energization, you have a hard deadline, because they are busy and not flexible. My wife had to come back from holiday a day early to make the date. It also meant that this was a HARD deadline, and everything had to be ready. I had assumed we would comfortably meet that, but when we arrived on site there were about 9 vans and a bunch of people still running cables and connecting stuff. This was pretty scary because the DNO will not wait all day, and there is every chance some initial test fails, or something is wrong. There was a lot of pacing up and down. Also the site manager was beyond stressed. Obviously a good time to just take photos :D.

Because everything was being tested, it was a good time to poke around and look at how everything works. The DNO substation was open and being worked on, which is a rare chance to see inside it. We will probably never see inside this box again, as it is owned by the DNO, and is their responsibility, and only they have the key! The insides are basically some big fuses and switching stuff and a transformer. This is where the power gets converted from about 400v to 11,000 volts to go out into the grid. This box is also where the (now underground) cable that connects the farm comes into the site. You can see that a lot of cabling goes down through the floor and then runs underground out to where it eventually goes back up above ground onto power poles away from the site. There is other, much thicker cabling on the LHS that goes to our big green switchgear box.

Here is the big green box I’m talking about with both doors open:

The left hand door goes into the main room that has all the switchgear and is where all of the phat cables from the inverters enter (from under the floor into that concrete trench, yet to be filled in with earth. Thats the bit that has the fire suppression system in it, and the big cooper bars which are live when energized (see previous blog post). The room on the right hand side is basically the meter and CCTV room. Its got the incoming supply meter (to measure how much power we have imported to site overnight to power minor stuff like CCTV etc) and the outgoing meter, which is the one I care about, and is remotely read to work out how much power we are generating. It also has the wifi router for the CCTV and other CCTV related equipment. Here is the meter stuff:

As I recall LHS is the power supply (import) meter, middle bit is CCTV related and RHS is the important export-tracking meter. I guess what most people are interested in, including me, is where is the big button with ACTIVATE SOLAR FARM written on it, with klaxons and so on. The answer to this seemed pretty vague, and thats in part because we connect each of our inverters through to the DNO substation, rather than there being a single cable or a single switch. The closest we get to it seems to be this button, and ironically this isn’t even my finger, its the project manager pointing at it :D

Also you would imagine there is some big ceremonial ‘moment’ when its activated, but I think such things are only really staged for TV. Basically each inverter got switched on, and then the DNO people check that nothing trips or goes wrong, and then they switch everything on, then switch the power TO the site off, just to check that when that happens, the site correctly switches itself off in reaction (just like home inverters do).

In practice this means there is a lot of nervous pacing while DNO people and ‘my’ people switch things on and off and then give the thumbs up to each other, and then eventually they come over and get you to sign a piece of paper, and declare that its all approved and energized. Any disappointment at the lack of champagne and fireworks is just matched by relief that it happened.

What I do NOT have yet is live (or indeed delayed) monitoring of the site. That should be set up at the start of next week, at which point I will exhaustively investigate all the options and data and write long blog posts about it :D. I definitely felt extremely relieved at the point at which everything was declared live, although frankly the site manager seemed even more relieved than me. I thought he might feint/explode. It was also cool that the landowners were taking a break from looking after their 1,200 sheep (OMG) to come witness the final energization of the site.

It feels almost surreal that its connected. There is other stuff to do, but no matter what, I now own (entirely! no financing!) my own solar farm. It has a peak output of 1,243 kwh (output capped at 900kw), will supply 300 houses, and has over three thousand solar panels. It is the ultimate geek toy. My stupid-ass DJI drone failed me (software awfulness for which I blame google 100%) on the day, so no decent drone pics, but it was untidy and a bit cloudy anyway. As a result I may well frame one of the sunrise pictures to sit above my monitor in my office :D.

I hope you enjoyed following this epic saga of many years. Its not 100% over yet, but this is a huge milestone. I celebrated after the 4 hour drive home with a glass of bubbly, and luckily my celebration-purchase (a chunky watch) arrived as I was typing this blog post. I feel much less stressed, but the true smugness of owning a solar farm has not kicked in yet :D.

I just had another meeting about the solar farm. We are now talking in very confident and believable terms about the date to actually switch on the farm, which is absolutely amazing after the last fifty billion years oft development. Amazingly, humans continue to exist on Earth and the solar system has not been swallowed up by an expanding star and yet my solar farm may get energized. (Obviously an expanding sun would be, in the short term, great news for PV generation…

This week is an exciting week because the overhead line that initially was supposed to save money and make life easy, but actually ended up causing chaos and delays… is actually being buried this week. This is a 5 day process, because what is involved includes the burying of some new line, recovery of the old line, and the actual proper live connection of the high voltage part of the site (this is the DNO’s territory and problem). This should all be completed by this Friday, which is also the day I am next visiting the site to see how things are. I don’t think THAT much visible will have changed since my last visit, but that was a while ago so its good to have a final walk-around before the next visit which should be switch-on.

Now in theory, as maybe 80% of the site is built out, and the site gets actually connected to high voltage national grid connections on Friday, you might think that we could switch on 80% of the site while we finish the rest, but thats a logistical headache. The removal of the line lets us drill the piles for the last few mounting tables and final inverters, and then connect the last few hundred panels, but all those new panels need connecting to the earthing, and the final inverters need connecting to our switchgear (all at relatively low voltage, about 400V), and doing all of that while the rest of the site is live sounds like hell…

On a huge site, like a 50MWP site, it would be absolutely worth the hassle, because of the opportunity cost of not being connected, but on our site, its just not worth introducing complexity just for literally one month of generation for 80% of a farm in a wet cloudy September…

Anyway, there is still a bunch of stuff to do that you don’t think about, like the tree planting (a condition of our planning application), and a lot of incredibly tedious paperwork to claim REGOs (Renewable generation certificates you get for producing green energy that er traded like a commodity). Honestly if someone like Elon Musk saw the bureaucracy and inefficiency behind the REGO system he would explode, but it has to be done as they are worth about £12/MWH.

The REALLY exciting part though is the arrangement of the power purchase agreement which I expect to sign tomorrow. I will go for either a 1, 2 or 3 year fixed price for each megawatt hour of energy the site produces. The actual calculation is a real paid, because there is the raw traded price per megawatt hour (about £70/MWH) and then the ’embedded benefits’ (about £20/MWH for my site) which are payments for being good enough to generate power where it is needed, and not put a strain on the main transmission network…and then the REGOs (about £12/MWH).

The embedded benefits stuff is interesting. If you think of electricity like traffic, then you have local roads, A roads and then Motorways (highways). As anybody who has built a road will tell you (We did!) the cost per mile goes up a LOT as your road gets bigger. So if generation requires an upgrade to a major transmission line (motorway) its stupidly expensive. If you can generate power that never leaves the local roads, and in fact therefore puts less pressure on even the A roads, then there is value in that, and you get compensated. To put it another way, building a small local solar farm helps supply a rural(ish) community, and puts less pressure on the connections to and from that community. In practice, my energy will certainly never leave Shropshire, and will probably never even leave the local town within Shropshire. I’ve made the job of managing the transmission network easier!

Anyway, for reasons that escape me, it seems that you lock in power purchase agreements for 1-3 years, but the price fluctuates on a DAILY basis, so you have to sign the deal the same day (before 4PM) that you get the quote. So at some point tomorrow I may well make a financial decision that affects my business for a few years. Still, I’m playing the long game here. I might lose money for 15 years then suddenly reap the rewards of madly high prices. Who knows. Doing this stuff is not for the meek. I’ll probably have pics to share on Friday!

Is it depressing that I am actually pleasantly surprised that wordpress handles direct uploading and embedding of video clips? It should be a pretty trivial endeavor in 2024, but I’m apparently shocked to find it working :D. Anyway, here is a video taken by some contractors on the site as they worked on the cabling and site substation.

In terms of progress… well not a lot, despite it being HUGELY SUNNY right now, my farm remains unconnected, earning nothing, due to the insane delays and bureaucracy. There is some good news, in that finally the insane list of delays and excuses got exhausted and I was given an actual firm date for when the overhead line (so small you will barely see it on the video) gets taken down and buried. This is the hugely expensive work that has to happen before we can fill in those pesky gaps in the rows of panels, and then actually do the final bits and pieces before the big ‘energisation’ of the farm when it goes live.

That date is <DRUMROLL>

SEPTEMBER 9th.

There is actually a few days of work associated with all this. The schedule looks like this:

• 9^th September – Deliver materials to site
• 10^th September – Install 2 x HV poles ready for shutdown
• 11^th September – make off 2 x 11kv pole terms
• 12^th September – make off any stay and make sure everything is in place ready for shut down
• 13^th September – Shutdown to loop in new substation

So from the 13th September onwards we will be in a hopefully minutely planned and seamless period of work to install the last frames and panels, and wire those up, plus connect the final bits and pieces, final fencing, and so on before we can switch on the site, just in time for mid-October’s total lack of sunshine. Oh the irony. However, that means a switch-on this year is almost guaranteed!

I will definitely be going to the site to see what is going on during that week, probably on the 13th, and obviously I’ll be returning to see it switched on. I might go back in-between those dates as well.

Some actual progress has taken place in the meantime, but its been slow because frankly there has not been any hurry given that the line-move was delayed so much and then there was insistence on a pointless 8 week delay on top of that. We are currently finishing our substation (mostly a switchboard) and the inverter to substation cabling (underground), and then there is something called ‘tails’ that needs doing, and we need to install the meter to read the generation, and also any power we import to run equipment overnight. The only interesting picture I have of all this is these big phat rolls of high capacity power cable:

So its sort of good news, in that there is progress and then end is in sight. I have not yet signed a deal to sell the energy from the farm (a power-purchase agreement), as its a bit early to do that. Also prices tend to rise as we head towards winter so a late signing probably benefits me. I’ll be considering that around late August/September.

Something interesting is that lithium-ion battery storage costs continue to fall. I had decided not to add a battery but may be able to revisit the economics of that once everything is running. I’ll definitely want a full years data from generation before I even consider it though.

Amazingly this is the first update of the year, and its May. This is absolutely ridiculous beyond words, but I might start getting really ranty and angry if I get drawn into it, but suffice to say that for absolutely zero justifiable reason, nothing dramatic has really happened on the site for months.

Its all due to paperwork. basically the energy company (the people connecting the farm to the grid, at vast expense, all billed 100% to me) decided that they needed a sub-lease from me to put their substation on the freeholder (farmer’s) land. This is fine. I have a lease agreed over a year ago now with the farmer. They want their substation on my leased plot. Fine. Go for it. They tell me that they will write the lease, and they have proposed a signing agreement of £1.

Yes £1.

But ok, whatever, I have basically no say in this. They write the lease, I read it, and agree and sign it within 24 hours. Then we move on. Meanwhile, unconnected to this, I get a nice diagram showing how the farm is wired:

And then…apparently the energy company are not convinced I have the right to sign a sub lease. they demand to see my lease with the freeholder. I say fine, I send it. They then claim there is no evidence the lease is valid because we didn’t register the lease with the land registry. That means I have to hire a lawyer (for the first time in my life, after 27 years of running a video games company that trades globally), to fill out some paperwork with the land registry. I do this, and it takes weeks, because the lawyers don’t believe who I am and demand identity documents ad-nauseum, despite it being a matter of legal public record that I am the director of the company.

Oh well…

Anyway, I do all of this, and they then say that they don’t believe the freeholder is who he says he is either. AFAIK this freeholder has owned the land for decades (probably generations), and lets remember at this point that there is NO DISPUTE about the terms of either lease between any party. They insist on me printing an A3 copy of a map, in color, with my signature on, and physically mailing it to them. I have to find a print shop to do it. I do this. They then want the freeholder to travel physically to a lawyer to prove his identity. There are then other complications which I won’t detail, but at every possible turn, I am delayed, ignored, then handed yet more impossible and ridiculous demands.

They charge me about £5k in “extra legal costs” associated with the pain of me not personally having recruited another lawyer. This is ridiculous, and you can only begin to imagine my rage. I make multiple angry phone calls and send a battery of very angry emails. Meanwhile, we are heading towards summer, but nobody cares, not the energy company, and certainly none of the many lawyers involved.

Unrelated, We put a fence up around the site:

I phone the energy company lawyer to complain, when I’m told some bureaucrats need to physically sign pieces of physical paper that needs to be sent by courier, which might take another week. I insist that if its not done immediately I will physically get in my car, and make a 4 hour drive to their office, pick up the paper myself and fucking drive it to the home of the person who needs to sign it, and sit on their doorstep until they do.

I think they are finally understanding what I think of this process. Of course meanwhile, we hurtled through the 1.5 degrees barrier which was the tipping point for global catastrophic climate change, and UK farmers start to warn people they cannot grow food now. Nobody seems to give a damn.

But woohoo, we have dug some trenches and put some ducting in, ready for the AC cabling that goes from the inverters to the site substation, which is MY substation, where all of the AC stuff gets wired together ready to be handed over to the DNO, who then use a transformer and step up the voltage. Here are the very rare pics of actual progress:

So yeah, there have been no updates because of all this. Words cannot express my anger, despair and frustration at this. Its absolutely insane. Do not ever, ever EVER complain to me that your energy bill is too high!

I am hoping to eventually get a DATE for when the overhead line is moved, for which I will travel to the site to witness, seeing as though it cost more than my first house. I will exhaustively take photos of this event that I have been trying to arrange for almost 3 years.