The forever problem with these "green" ideas is ... night. At night, the sun stops shining and the wind dies down. But, human society does not.

That limitation exists in everything though in different forms. A Heat Pump does not generate heat energy. They just move and concentrate. Some early heat pumps pulled temperature differential from ponds, which under heavy usage, froze over and even solid. Using the Earth is more effective but 1] is less safe than the air (even if efficiency fails miserably below 40 F) but all of that energy still comes from the Sun. We just need a big enough "battery" or to actually generate energy which still comes from a star even if not from our Sun.

That said, I agree that "green" is a bit arbitrary, all things considered. That doesn't change the fact that hazel made a wise, if long term, investment and is now reaping the dividends.

Presumably jefro meant the total energy produced by the solar panels is likely less than the energy used to produce and install it (and thus it's only economical because of some subsidy/tariff program)? Or perhaps even if there was net energy produced, it doesn't outweigh the damage from minining the materials (this is somewhat subjective though).

I personally couldn't have afforded PV panels. My plan was to reduce consumption rather than increase availability. To that end I've never spent much on electricity and bought generally the most efficient devices.
I don't feel a $100 a month bill for all electric and EV charging a month is bad.

I did have a solar water heater that would turn water into steam in summer but I forgot to drain it one winter and it broke.

The PV panel is generally dumped by some country that has minimal environmental responsibility. Like any modern device it is full of toxic metals and plastics and what not. California will find out how they can recycle it soon. It takes a lot of power to make a PV currently.

Like the so called 20 year lasting LED I've had a panel fail well before it's time. It was easier to run a panel at gate than try to get 120VAC there to open gate.

My home insurance would have gone up if I had solar panels, reason, hail, wind, tree or other damage costs money. Extra cost never mentioned in sales pitches.

I am all for the type of power being produced in Spain and Morocco where the plant uses the heat of the sun.

If I could get anyone to listen I'd have them experiment with led's on the blades of wind generators. Some type(s) of wavelengths would reduce bird deaths.

Thanks for responding guys. FWIW what I read says a 300 watt PV panel takes roughly 500kWh to manufacture one. Depending on panel quality, installation, orientation, and obviously the amount of insolation per day, a 300 watt panel can produce a range of around 1.2kW to 2.5kW per day given a climate that enjoys roughly an average of 4 peak solar hours each day.

They are expensive to buy and install correctly, do have an environmental impact (but so does virtually everything including the PCs we are using here) but it's ultimately all about cost/benefit ratio which looks pretty reasonable since they have very few moving parts so require low maintenance and last a very long time... even in Space.

I'm convinced PV panels are a solid tradeoff, especially when considering the reduced strain (even assisting in some instances) on most country's power grid. Thermal panels of the variety like those commonly used for swimming pool heat, that are made from cheap materials and only need to raise ground water temperatures by 10-20 degrees F are also reasonable, if one owns a pool. Concentrating collectors tend to require massive installations to break even, and are not generally viable for simple home use, possibly excepting DIY projects. I don't know what value to place on energy independence. That depends on numerous events and conditions.

Personally I want to see modern nuclear generation gain traction, but I suspect that will be slow adoption until they establish a decent track record. Until such technologies become common, I think hazel deserves nothing but congratulations... seems a wise choice.

Hazel being in the UK has it's own set of metrics that I don't have. I'd imagine that jolly old England would have a lot of tax on electric. Pretty sure they'd find a way to tax her if they can.

The solar water-heating panel on my Scottsdale house "produced electricity," but did so indirectly. I have often wondered why no one has yet thought to rig up a solar panel to a heat pump, for use in "northern climes." Because, even when the outside temperature is very cold, "the sun still shines down," and therefore it produces a harvestable source of heat.

Congratulations ma'am.

Any change expected in UK once BoJo's successor takes over?

How are managing in the unprecedented summer temperatures?

AP

Nope! None of the contenders knows any more than he does about how to run a country! But then, nor does Keir Starmer either.
There's a lot of hysteria about this in my opinion. I remember 1976 when temperatures were near 40 degrees for weeks on end. That was the weirdest weather I've ever seen. The trees all dropped their leaves so that it looked like winter in high summer, and we were drowning in ladybirds. Now you have two very hot days and everyone behaves as if it was the end of the world.

I feel sorry for the French, the Spanish and the Portuguese. They have terrible wildfires.

The farther north you go, the less sun there is in the winter.

Dunno ... I still wonder why we have devices outside our houses which merely consist of fans and heat-exchange coils, which take no advantage of the sun. While of course these would be useful in the summertime, when we only want to get rid of heat, I wonder why we don't also use solar (heat-exchange) panels to assist us in other seasons. Because, even in the wintertime, these would be an active source of solar heat. Which our existing heat-pump systems ought to be able to use.

I am aware that some heat-pump systems already take advantage of groundwater: of the fact that the temperature, say, in a cave, is "always 58 degrees." So, why don't we make more aggressive use of the – even, wintertime – heat of the sun?

"No, that isn't a silicon 'solar panel,'" but it's functionally the same thing. Instead of using the sun to directly generate electricity, we instead use the sun to lessen our need to generate it.

A natural gas supplier in Texas used to offer almost free AC to people who bought their gas. They'd take I think antifreeze in a sort of rock tank and use natural gas to create cold. I've only seen two of the installs. Other that costing a lot in gas it was supposed to be pretty good.

A newspaper in Austin did take solar heat and use it in an ammonia chiller to cool their building. That design would be normally found in RV fridges and some very old house fridges. Was supposed to be a very inexpensive system. Very little electrical needs for basically boiling refrigerant. The only slight, small very minimal thing about is/was that any little leak can be deadly.

If one could use less lethal gas then it would be very easy to use heat to make cold. Might be possible to go back to the antifreeze tank. I might look into that.

I can dimly remember that when I was a child, you could buy refrigerators that worked on town gas. I have no idea just how they worked but I think they used ammonia as the heat exchange medium. I can remember that they were advertised as "the flame that freezes". And that they were supposed to be very economical, much more so than electrical fridges.

In 1973 I bought a 20 year old Servel gas powered refrigerator and my brother bought one as well. They ran on propane extremely efficiently and did use ammonia as the phase change material that absorbed heat from the freezer compartment and whisked it off along with that from the gas flame, out the little chimney. We used them for five years when we finally got power lines in, and sold them for what we had paid for them.

Prior to the Servels, we had bought antique ice chests and hauled block ice. We probably should have built our own so we could use modern insulation as the ice chests used simple sawdust. Nevertheless, it was surprising how well they worked even in the heat of Summer. Many years later I remembered and looked up how the ice industry managed before widespread electricity availability. There were grainy photos of groups of people harvesting block ice during winter and storing it for later use. It still amazes me that without electricity they could keep so much of the Winter ice well into the following Fall with such primitive insulation and building techniques.

One more exclamation point for how much Conservation leads the pack.

BTW In the late 70s and early 80s I was employed by a very solid Solar company in Western Colorado. In some of the industry publications there were 1 or 2 companies that tried to sell a Solar Plus Heat Pump solution. They didn't fare well because of the difference between Intenity and Quantity. For those unfamiliar, a kitchen match burns at roughly 600C - 800C and if you instead light 2 kitchen matches the temperature is exactly the same but there is twice as much quantity of energy, usually expressed in Calories or British Thermal Units (BTUs)

Heat pumps don't need high intensity. 10C (50F) is more than sufficient to keep a heat pump in it's most efficient area of operation BUT it needs massive quantity, BTUs, or the reduction in that pool (or "battery") of energy will drop rather quickly below any range useful to a heat pump. Some small ponds reported froze solid.

To provide such a pool of quantity of BTUs takes a massive surface area of thermal solar panels. I owned a full house system consisting on 12 x 3' x 8' panels all properly installed by a Master Plumber schooled in Solar. Those 12 panels managed approximately 75% of home heat and 100% of hot water with an R40 insulated storage tank of 400 gallons. My wood stove provided the other ~25% partly due to a servo controlled flue, and a heat exchanger coil in the firebox that fed the common 400 gallon storage tank.

I'm pretty sure 2-3 cold, cloudy days in a row would have caused that 400 gallons of 65C/150F water to have frozen solid had it been supplying a heat pump.