Transcript
The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.
Matt Nally
For part two, we’re going to look at the I suppose the process and benefits of installing solar on different buildings. So I suppose Should we start with what a good process looks like around solar installation or identification, all that type of stuff?
Nic Cory
Yeah, of course, I’m thinking sort of, particularly in commercial property here, if I kind of tackle that. First. The very first stage is to identify the opportunity, as we talked about in part one, and actually, when you’re looking at one building, it’s quite obvious, you know, you look at a building and it’s got a big south facing roof. Great, I kind of know it’s going to be suitable to bother looking at a design process, where you’ve actually got, you know, 10s, or through 1000s of properties, you’ve got to start whittling down, which are the ones I want to look at and which ones am I going to get to worry about later. So that identification phase for one property is very easy for portfolio becomes a little bit trickier. You then have to move into the design process and actually say, what, what type of system what size of system can the building sustain? And, and also then what does the the occupant need, and solar PV is still very much reliant on, clearly being able to save the energy that you otherwise would have consumed. So it depends on your energy profile, and sizing it correctly is what determines a good installation versus one that actually has just been thrown on the roof and might not be the best financial carbon payback. So that design process and that specification process that goes along with it is quite bespoke, we do have a, you know, we’ve got a bit of bit of our technology that looks at that. But that’s where the manual review comes in, and the specialism where you need to go through that design. In the UK, we then have to go through the permissions process. So you’re probably familiar with with planning permission, actually, planning missions for solar PV is quite easy, they’re within permitted development for the majority of sites, as long as you you stick within certain design rules, we have to get permission from the grid, from the local grid, to connect to the to the electricity system in the area. That is the process at the moment that is kind of holding everyone up. And there’s sort of lots of media reports about how much you sort of sat in backlog. And that’s just down to the state of our our grid and the fact some of it, some of it’s quite holding, needing upgrade. But that permission process can take three months. And that’s that’s quite a while.
Matt Nally
I’m interested in what about the grid being out of date? is stopping people connecting into it? Is it just the ability to hold the capacity? Or is it something else?
Nic Cory
It’s the fact that if you’re putting PV on the roof, even if you as a consumer, say, I’m going to be using all the power I’m generating, what if you’re close, what are the weekends, you’re going to be pushing that power back into the grid, and the grid has to be able to take that power coming back in, you know, our systems were very much designed to allow you to take out the power not to push it back in. So the level of faults that PV can can have on a system needs to be tolerated within that local grid. And that is this of the overriding restricting factor on rolling out PV across the country really interesting.
Matt Nally
I suppose the National Guard are working towards that, or where they’re appropriate to do you know about that side of it?
Nic Cory
They certainly are. So in the UK, we’ve we’ve got a sort of slightly devolved system with with DNS in different areas, different dinos are going at different speeds and have different priorities. So some areas are kind of really pressing ahead. And some areas are frustratingly poor. I’ll leave it at
Matt Nally
that. Okay, completely understand that. So yeah, I suppose beyond that, then what are the realities? But how much electricity from solar, and so on can be can be achieved? Is it different? Many buildings cover, you know, all of their usage and push back into the grid? Potentially? Or do they cover a part of it? What does that generally look like? Yeah,
Nic Cory
I guess if I talk in terms of payback, that’s that’s the easiest way to see how should we, you know, should you proceed with a project or not, in terms of before I touched on that taking a property off grid, very hard to take it to take a property off grid, mainly because of the peaks that you use as power, you know, if you’re put it on a residential scale, you boil, boil your kettle, you suddenly need to pull a load of power for that instant that you turn the kettle on, and then it dies down. And actually PV is not very good solar PV is not very good at providing those spikes, and neither are batteries. Generators are what provide those spikes move out to commercial sphere, you know, you turn on your air compressors, you’re going to need to pull from the grid for that moment. So hence why taking property off grid is actually remarkably different. Difficult, not least, you know, in the winter, you’re obviously going to generate less less power with PV. In terms of payback a commercial project, a good commercial property project, you’d expect to pay back within three and five years. And we see that being delivered, you know, on a daily basis that that’s fairly normal. But I ran through the stats this morning, the last 400 properties, we surveyed that that are kind of reflective of the rates, current current rates, paying back in four and a half years on average. So that’s kind of what you’d expect on a commercial scale. Residential is entirely different. And it’s actually very good residential projects you’d expect to pay back in nine years through to 12 years. And you start to get in trouble with the business case there. Because outside of London, the average house people keep it for 15 years. So you’re getting very tight to kind of the lifespan that people are thinking about the system. So if it’s purely for financial gain, that’s why residential just just starts to become a bit trickier. That’s
Matt Nally
interesting. Do you think that will change as the potentially efficiency of solar changes or is it to do with the usage and the sort of as you say, the surge is in an in demand?
Nic Cory
It’s very much to do with the usage and you know, we’re at home in evenings. You know, that’s when you’re using the power. So what will change that is batteries and we’ve In that in the residential market, you know, you talk to some installers, nine out of 10 of all their instals are now with batteries. And that’s shows they’re starting to become far more, far more reliable for the householder to try and shift some of that usage, they still shift the remarkably small amount of power. And they still have quite a small short shelf life plus are expensive. So they don’t don’t quite stack up economically for a lot of projects and in commercial commercially, they, you know, it still has to the stars have to align for ventures to work on a commercial project. It does for some makes perfect sense. But but for majority, it doesn’t. So batteries will bring down that payback period for residential for sure. We’re just not there yet.
Matt Nally
Interesting. Okay. I think we’ve got a couple of more questions around there. So in terms of all the buildings that you look at, whether commercial or residential, and imagined, it’s more on the commercial side, but what what percentage are typically suited to switching to one or switching but adding on PV? Is it there quite a lot that aren’t as or is it majority can be.
Nic Cory
So majority can be on give some numbers on both residential and commercial. So we carried out a study, beginning of this year, on the residential property property portfolio across the UK, so extrapolated out after about surveying about 6000 properties, we could extrapolate out because it is a homogenous population 67% of of houses was were suitable for solar, which was higher than we expected. And that’s actually broken down 50% are sort of highly suitable with those south facing roofs. And then 17% have east west facing roofs that actually are exposed to enough radiation that would justify putting solar PV panels on there, just because of the sake of nature there, they’re generally towards the south draw a line from sort of Cardiff to Cambridge, and east west routes work down from there. So So relatively high proportion of residential roofs, you know, in our view should have solar PV put on there’s there’s no reason why not apart from occupancy and, and paying to put it on. Yeah, in terms of the commercial stock. For all of those where people come to us and request a survey is 90%, suitable for solar, which is, I think, an artificially high number because actually people are asking us about properties they sort of already think are suitable, I think there’s a lot of sort of pre sifting before we get to get to see that. So I’d take that 90% with a pinch of salt when we study sort of in particular cities. And I spoke earlier about Basingstoke that the town of Basingstoke on particular, there, it’s 70% are suitable for solar, of commercial property. And that’s broken down 52% are good, are sort of quite interesting for So learn. So again, it’s going to depend on the lease length occupancy as to whether you go ahead, and it was 18%, or sort of no brainers. I think that adds up to 70. Yeah, it does. So it’s about 18%, where you’re going to get a payback in less than three years. Regardless, it’s so suitable for PV. So less of that commercial stock is suited to it. And generally, that’s because commercial roofs are far more complex, you know, we stick all our plant on top of the building so so there isn’t space to put it.
Matt Nally
That’s true. Do you think, people or architects or whoever will design the building slightly differently in future to allow for that? Or is it quite restricted? And Danzig has to almost go there? And says we’re not restricting the outside use around the building?
Nic Cory
So we’re seeing a high amount of architects now coming to us early in the stage and saying, Here’s my design, here’s my CAD drawings, what can I do to make this a more efficient for solar PV? And the building I’m sitting in today is an example of that at the University of Southampton started building building came to us with the designs and said, Could could we tweak could we tweak the rooftop design move some plant to the north of the roof instead of the South. And we were able to triple the size of the system as a result of making a few tweaks. So increasingly, we’re doing that at the early stage of getting there, just before it goes in for planning so that they’re putting in for planning with a sensible size system rather than either bare minimums or over promising which is going to be even worse when it comes to delivery.
Matt Nally
Yeah, that’s fascinating, actually, and thought about the Yeah, that type of aspect isn’t what’s what’s restricting it. I suppose. One thing, more from an end consumer side and I imagine people may take this mentality into obviously a commercial building is you know, technology’s changing so quickly, even phones the last six months before the, you know, the old model. Is that something that’s an issue with things like solar and heat pumps and so on, or Why is the technology not moving on at such a rate that you have to worry about investing in something that then is sufficient?
Nic Cory
Certainly, in solar PV, the, there are some sort of, you know, there are leaps that you can see in the future that could could be around, but they’re 10 years before they’re going to hit hit the market in terms of actually being cost effective. So in solar PV there, isn’t it, we’ve been through that leap. And we’ve been through that mass cost reduction, as China came on board as the main provider, actually, we’ve kind of been through that progression, air source heat pumps, for sure. You know, there are, there are some some big leaps in efficiencies and cost, you may have seen octopus last, I think it was last month sort of released their their style of heat pump suddenly that that is actually going to change the market with with people like that getting involved. So PV is an established technology, we’re kind of we’re kind of their heat pumps, for sure. It’s, it is something that’s getting efficient year but more efficient. Year by year, I’d come back to the to what I said on batteries, that that’s the leap forward that we’re beginning to experience, certainly in residential, that leap is happening. And in commercial, we’re beginning to see it, we’re beginning to see the sort of containerized battery solutions for individual buildings, getting interesting for our clients.