MCourtney: Does your good lady read the Guardian (and would she admit it if she did)?

My wife read the Guardian? That really made me chuckle! Her feet are planted firmly on the ground and has a she PhD in common sense. There's no way she would read the Guardian.

Clearly great minds think alike!

From Not A Lot of People Know That.

Regular, Philip Bratby, responds to criticism in the Bournemouth Daily Echo:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/response-from-philip-bratby/

Worth reading, and Philip's comment.

Yes, that's a great one, Chuckle. It's always worth reminding ourselves how much of our produce is grown in greenhouses, and why.

My better half tells me she would sooner have reliables than renewables. Nicely put I thought.

The Guardian has a sensible article about Musk's battery.. (cost of it)

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/01/will-teslas-home-battery-really-transform-our-energy-infrastructure

This is 11 out of 10.

http://xkcd.com/1519/

It's a Fête du Travail in France today, and Il pleut des cordes so I took more interest than usual in the later news items on TV. The new Tesla battery was featured and a visit to someone in London doing a government funded evaluation. We just had our annual summary for electricity usage this week. We use 5300KWh annually, despite having mostly LED lights, wood burners for heating most of the year in spring and autumn when evenings get cool we use electrical heaters to keep warm, and a gas hob for most cooking, plus a small electrically heated towel rail which is on for about an hour in winter months. We have a pump on a small swimming pool in summer. Our hot water is either gas in the kitchen and guest bathroom and electric for our shower. So usage could be higher for others round here who only use gas for cooking.

So using our requirements less pool and water heating as an average household then to go off grid as Elon Musk claims is possible and not cut down consumption then we'd need about 6KW of solar panels and 3 battery units to cover low solar input periods (I have my doubts that it would cover cold cloudy conditions lasting more than 36 hours but that's a different argument). Discounting subsidies to recoup investment costs I would have to invest about £10K in Solar PV panels and a further £10K in battery storage. If we optimistically assume a 10 year life for the battery units and 20 years for the panels then for 20 years "clean" electricity I would have to invest at least £30K and probably more. which is about 60x my current annual bill. Every winter for those 20 years I'd be monitoring usage and stored capacity several times a day.

The only way this makes sense at current costs is for an individual is to vote for a party who will continue to subsidise domestic green energy. Especially if controversial gas extraction goes ahead in the UK.