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pjc50today at 9:52 AM3 repliesview on HN

Fairly boilerplate article, but the bit that is news is the UK balcony solar permitting. Better longread: https://solarenergyconcepts.co.uk/post/plug-in-solar-uk/

Government press release with a long list of pull quotes: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-to-make-plug-i...

(I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a decade ago. It is embarrassing to be beaten on environmentalist regulatory efficiency by Germany)


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oliwarnertoday at 4:01 PM

British industry and standards bodies think this is an unsafe plan.

Of course they would because it's work being taken away from them but it would be allowing people to plug generators into ring finals with unidirectional breakers. It's not even guaranteed that the circuit is protected by anything newer than fuse wire or an MCB. No guaranteed earth leakage detection. No guaranteed surge protection. Relying on the cheapest inverters to sync frequency accurately. And

I have more faith in German standards and work ethic than our own.

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ZeroGravitastoday at 12:07 PM

He also removed the effective ban on onshore wind construction that was introduced a month after he lost the election, restarting after a decade of lost opportunity.

This Trump-level idiocy that is just never mentioned, even as people blame the gas burned in england on windy days as a cost of wind curtailment, when the curtailment is more a like a third of the cost. Burning gas to power people who chose not to build turbines is the other 2/3rds.

In the alternate world that is tens of billions of gas costs avoided to date and tens of billions more in future.

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mytailorisrichtoday at 10:02 AM

> I note that in the alternate universe where Ed Miliband became PM because he didn't eat a bacon sandwich, we could have had this a decade ago

I read what is happening in exactly the opposite way. To me it shows that Milliand and the government at large do very little with no strategic thinking and no plan (same as the guys before in fairness but this government was supposed to be soo different...) and, in this case, is only reacting in a panic after almost 2 years in office to the pressure of "doing something" because of the Iran war, while also being told (slight mitigating circumstances for Milliband) that it mustn't cost anything. I always picture scenes from The Thick of It/ In the Loop when I imagine how they come up with 'ideas'.

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