Britain could never have too much sunshine. However, the opposite is becoming true in terms of solar power. Over 875,000 homes already have it. More electricity is arriving in the grid than the system can accept.
Things came to a head in Oxspring, a town with a population of approximately 1,200 in Yorkshire farmland. When solar engineers arrived to install more panels they found the system had no spare capacity. They knew the solution was to ‘time shift’ the power.
The Oxspring Paradigm and the Sunshine Solution
The original idea was to heat the boilers in English homes. Later, solar suppliers realized they could expand their market by adding panels to collect more sunshine.
They engineered a solution whereby the oversupply fed back into the grid. This generated income for the homeowner and because of this partly paid for the household system.
However, all this really achieved was to shift the energy storage problem back to the grid. We have a way to go to solving that, although Elon’s Powerwalls are able to accumulate small amounts. Energy storage company Moixa decided to get into the action. It installed its proprietary energy storage systems free in 30 homes in Oxspring.
Birth of a Virtual Sunshine Power Station
“In northern Europe,” the company explains, “sunshine produces the most energy when you don’t need it at midday.”
It wants its customers to store the surplus in batteries. Since it makes more sense to use it at night, when the electricity is more valuable.
The individual amounts of sunshine power are tiny compared to Britain’s total energy demand. Moixa already has 600 batteries in homes across the UK. Imagine if the other 874,400 solar panel owners did something similar. We could have a virtual solar power station in our hands. The magnitude of it could make sunshine skeptics think again.
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