Bitcoin Forum

If you have a south facing house, you can now get solar panels for free.

Look here: http://www.ashadegreener.co.uk/

This makes Bitcoin mining a whole lot cheaper. :-)

fantastic..

100% going to contract them

If your house faces north, install a Bitcoin mining rig because, obviously, you don't care about your electric bill. If your house faces east, you are a troll. If your house faces west, keep an eye on the house across the street facing yours, and report what you see and hear to the rest of the community.

Bitcoin: Where Orientation Matters

Guess the value will drop even more then :)

See, what is good about this is, you could get hooked up to the grid, what power you don't use, sell back to the power company = Profit. Same goes for windmills. I totally agree on solar panels & windmills, why pay for electricity when we could get it for free, that is if you can pay for the equipment in other country's not including UK offering free solar panels. UK offering free solar panels = Profit.

Testimonial..

"Given that the income is tax-free, the return on £14,000 investment is equivalent to 12.9% for a 50% tax-payer and 10.3% for a 40% tax-payer, with the investment recouped in as little as seven years. As the payments are linked to RPI, this equates to a real return of 18.2% and 15.6% respectively at today’s RPI rate of 5.3%"


You have to pay, but the government pays you back over the years..which makes them FREE

Nope, on this one you don't have to pay. They give you the option of them putting up the up-front costs so long as you have a south facing roof. The only thing is that you don't own the solar panels, they do. And they collect the cheque, however you get the electricity benefit and no maintenance costs or installation costs etc,......

A VERY good idea me thinks :-)

To bad I don't live in the UK lol

Please expand to your fellow neighbor country: The Netherlands!

I really don't see why other countries don't do this. Normally the UK is the last place to get anything good and the rest of Europe is years ahead.

The Government generates no wealth whatsoever.

It is funded 100% through taxation - either direct taxation of the wealth of individuals or the indirect taxation of the wealth of individuals by the taxation of private sector businesses - which increases the price individuals have to pay for goods and services. In this specific case, the UK energy suppliers are now charging everyone more for the energy they use to cover the costs of the tariffs which the UK Government have required they pay - without such tariffs everyone would be paying less for the energy they use.

Anything you get "free" from the government has been paid for through taxation of individuals.

Thus, this is merely a tax rebate for those fortunate enough to be in the position to install solar power generation equipment - owners of land - specifically those with buildings that have south facing roofs.

It is distributing wealth away from the poor to the rich.

That said, I currently support the move away from a reliance on fossil fuels for energy generation.

Suddenly this Aussie is a monarchist! ;)
Please bring this to the rest of the Brittas empire before sharing it with those pesky neighbours up there!

Apparently we did have a government solar rebate scheme here - but it certainly wasn't 100% - and for some reason it's been cancelled.

Is this correct? Have you in the UK seen this increase in electricity cost since the introduction of the FIT scheme?

I would have thought that the scheme would disallow the power companies raising prices to compensate, it does seem very unfair... but in another way its also even more incentive to become a part of the scheme.

So true...

Hey, hey!
We are not pesky, we are nice decent people!

No I lied completely.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/nuclearpower/8630832/Energy-prices-without-reform-well-all-be-in-the-dark.html

The "big 6" have posted record profit increases throughout, whilst simultaneously chronically under-investing in the infrastructure and raising the prices they charge by 3-4 times RPI every year.

The latest price rise was for electricity and was 16-18%. These rises are now impeding the ability of the UK to recovery from recession and leading the latest increases in the RPI figures.

It is classic short-termism.

(SSHH.. I know..  just tryin to pander to the guvnor's euro-phobia!)


It's criminal how little there is in the way of solar on the roofs around here.
I suspect they only offered a solar subsidy recently because China has been buying so much of our coal that solar is not seen as much of a threat to the coal-revenue.

Now.. has anyone worked out the best way to get the most megahashes per square meter of solar-panelled roof yet?

I actually wonder to how much sun hours these places got on average.

In Manchester we have over 50 different words for rain.
We need rain power! Sun is for southerners. We laugh at you and your southern pansy sunshine.

How often does it rain?

I don't think it is these tarriffs that have caused the prices to go up, its the governments mandate that x% of enery generation has to be from renewable sources which are mainly wind farms. I don't remember where I read it but the per unit cost of electricity from those wind farms is something like 5 times as much as those from coal power plants, so it does raise prices.

They need to stick a few more nuke plants in this country, that should help the long term price of it

I say wind turbines where it is windy  ::)
And solar panels in good weather  ::)

you could use a piezoelectric material to produce electricity from the force of the rain hitting it, although the forces would be pretty tiny and I wouldn't think anything would be efficient enough to get much if anything worthwhile.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/sep/13/rebeccaallison

From 2002 - it was a big year for news about rain Manchester in 2002.
I'm currently in Shanghai China, and its 30 degrees and it's midnight, but I can tell you without hesitation, it raining in Manchester (haven't you listened to The Smiths?)

Actually is mainly drizzle in Manchester - it wets you with no force at all.

What's the "Smiths?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smiths

'The Smiths were an English alternative rock band, formed in Manchester in 1982. Based on the song writing partnership of Morrissey (vocals) and Johnny Marr (guitar), the band also included Andy Rourke (bass) and Mike Joyce (drums). Critics have called them the most important alternative rock band to emerge from the British independent music scene of the 1980s.' Wikipedia

(that's right, some random person on Wikipedia called them the most important group from the 80's and even took the time to back it up with real links to real sources)

lol gotcha

Im from Manchester too, however the energy stats reckon that Manchester is still good for cutting your energy bill in half as a minimum on a medium sized house.

Nah, I looked into trubines a while back and well.....they're a rubbish solution.

1.) You need planning permission to install them.
2.) The consumer ones are noisy and produce next to no energy compared to solar.
3.) The heavy duty ones are big and expensive and will not be allowed in a residential area.
4.) Can be dangerous as the blades have a tendency to go flying off (rarely but still happens sometimes)

The other way is to use a Fresnel lens to convert water to steam and get that to turn a turbine, but not very economical yet and noisy too.

Solar is the only viable consumer solution at the moment. Turbines are best installed in farms. If there is a river near your house you even cant put a wheel in. Not allowed.

They are trying to do this in some countries on the motorways (ie. tyres hitting strips) but then they realised that this wears out tyres and the energy needed to replace was more that that gained. Cost the government less though and the end user more. So a small shift of wealth. lol

It's been sunny here for the last week or so. Rained for 5 minutes yesterday but was hot just like today. Very hot and humid right now.

Which bit of Manchester? I should have been more specific - it's definitely raining in Ardwick.

Sunny Sale. :-)

Well Sale is almost Cheshire, so of course down south in Sale you're going to get a lot more sun. My Mum's in Warrington, and she tells me it's like the South of France down there at the moment.

Hahahaha I suppose so but Ardwick is only about 7 miles away? It's really hot here. Can't sleep in this heat. In Warrington it's even worse. lol

Those two are good options, as well as growing feed stock (corn) for conversion into fuel. My government (US) must of did the math on this, otherwise they wouldn't be pushing it so hard to make it viable. Now only if my government would quit lying to me about UFO's not being real.

Bitcoin: One Step Beyond

How about heating your house with a Microsoft "datacenter" furnace?

"A team of Microsoft and academic researchers has come up with a proposal for using cloud computing not as an energy drain, but as a source of country-wide energy savings by turning cloudy servers into home and office furnaces."
...
"We propose to replace electric resistive heating elements with silicon heating elements," is the key to their vision, "thereby reducing societal energy footprint by using electricity for heating to also perform computation."

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/28/microsoft_cloudy_home_heating_idea/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/28/microsoft_cloudy_home_heating_idea/)

How about Hydraulic Hydro Energy Storage?
It's basically a giant Hydraulic Cylinder made of rock with like 1KM in diameter. Solar and wind power peaks (which currently can't be saved and instead get burned by routing the power output across the european energy grid) would be used to pump water into the cylinder. If the power grid needs more energy, you would just open the drains and the solid rock would press out the water with an insane pressure through turbines:

http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/5455/storagedevice.jpg
http://eduard-heindl.de/energy-storage/energy-storage-system.html

He's a german university professor, so he's maybe crazy but not dumb:
http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/heindl-958931-hydraulic-energy-store-system/
The presentation is pretty long but also interesting and covers a lot of questions (like how to build it, can it be done with today's technology, physics behind it...). It's an interesting idea at least...

ok, so how do we move wealth from the rich to the poor