This is another disappointing response. One of the big selling points of the green transition has been stated as lots of green jobs. So where were these solar panels made? Did they in fact create lots of green jobs in the UK or were they largely imported?
Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (184258):
Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if he will make an estimate of the number and proportion of solar panels installed in the UK that were wholly manufactured in the UK in the last three years. (184258)
Tabled on: 10 May 2023
Answer:
Graham Stuart:
The Department does not hold specific information on the number and proportion of solar panels installed in the UK that were wholly manufactured in the UK.
The answer was submitted on 18 May 2023 at 16:41.
May 20, 2023
Good morning.
You did not ask for specific numbers, you asked for an estimate. Either way though, they do not know. Which is not surprising as I would not think they would want to keep that information.
But I bet they mostly came from China and Germany.
May 20, 2023
So I’ll assume that they were all made in Sunak’s, Hunt’s and Cleverly’s favourite country: Communist China.
I once looked at having solar-power installed but concluded that the £20K quote was excessive and that prices were being buoyed by the ridiculously hgh ‘Feed In Tariff’, which would likely be cut by a government trying to get expenditure under control
May 20, 2023
+1 rather the same for electric cars.
May 20, 2023
Indeed do not have either.
Economic life of a solar panel given as approximately 15 years.
Given that such panels need regular cleaning to be at their most efficient, a roof is the last place they should be situated.
There is a very good reason why solar farms are at ground level, maintenance and cleaning !
Manufacturers of Batteries used in EV’s would dream of a 15 year life !
In time I am sure both products will become more efficient, solar panels getting there, but Batteries a long way yo go yet.
Neither made in the uk in any volume.
May 20, 2023
Meanwhile, a solar panel system for an average house would cost nothing like £20k today …
May 20, 2023
Perhaps you should have gambled. Early FiT installations are now paid 68p/kWh for everything they generate. RPI indexation is now paying off handsomely. However, estimates suggest that domestic installations are somewhat suboptimal, with capacity factors of only 9-10% on average.
May 20, 2023
Why bother?
Do w really need people like this.
Neither use or ornament.
Their bosses and team leaders must be walking about with their heads in complete darkness.
Close the department down and pay the MPs to retain better researchers. Then you will get some answers as they can be held responsible and accountable.
May 20, 2023
A hi-fi magazine published a Letter to the Editor from a chap wanting to buy an ‘All British’ sound system, or a foreign one with no components from Japan. His motive was to avoid supporting a former British enemy from WW2. The magazine replied that no such product was known or likely to exist. The magazine was dated in the 1960s. Sources are far more numerous and entangled now.
May 20, 2023
Indeed so. Off hand I don’t know of any significant manufacturer of UK parts for the electronics industry now. There are still quite a few Brands, from earlier UK companies, but the stuff is all made in China.
As for solar panel sources, well, ‘Made in China’ sums it up.
May 20, 2023
I don’t think he looked very hard. He could have had a Quad valve amplifier (still being made!), FM tuner and speakers (or Wharfedale), a Garrard or Linn turntable, a tone arm by SME. Indeed, the Japanese have long been big fans of UK high end hifi and are a significant export market.
May 20, 2023
We do have a couple of manufactures in the UK, one at the very, very hi end of the market, top model is between £12,000 – £25,000 for just a turntable, then you need add all the other necessities, Amplifier, speakers, CD player/streaming etc etc.
Purchased mine way back on the 1980’s at an absolute fraction of the cost now, still going strong and sounding great, originally designed so that it is upgradeable, if you can afford it !
May 20, 2023
Probably non were made in the UK but perhaps a few were slightly “finished off” in the UK at best. Many perhaps even made by slave labour it seems. Using lots of fossil fuels in the process too. Then wasting more fossil fuels in the back up and or storage batteries that are needed.
May 20, 2023
The main problem with Solar electricity in the UK is you get the electricity mainly in summer around midday and nothing on freezing winter nights not much on freezing days. Storing electricity wastes energy & multiplies its cost many times to at least double. A battery to store about 10p worth of electricity can cost about £500 and might only work for about 2000 cycles. Thus in its useful life storing only £200 of electricity so doing the maths:-
£200 of stored on demand electricity costs circa £500+the solar cell costs+inverters and charger+interest to fund this (or loss of other return) plus you lose about 30% of the energy in the process. So perhaps £1000 for £200 of electricity or 5 times it’s value.
So rather expensive “free” electricity. Plus you cannot (practically) store it from summer to winter. Battery life perhaps only 7 years too.
Works a bit better in sunnier places needing aircon in summer or for heat pumps for swimming pools in summer.
May 20, 2023
Not even low in CO2 either as loads of fossil fuel goes into mining & making the (rather short lived) battery, solar cells and the electronics.
Not that CO2 plant & tree food is really a serious problem anyway more of a net benefit!
May 20, 2023
Then the batteries burst into flames occasionally and cannot even be put out easily!
Electric scooters/bikes(?) banned on tubes already it seems but they are often stored and charged in houses and flats even in huge tower blocks. What about EV cars on ferries and the channel tunnel should they be banned? Or banned from parking in garages or under houses? An EV car can contain about 5000 phone sized batteries so perhaps 5000 times more chance of a much larger fire. This especially when the car ages or suffers crashes, vibration fracturs or pot hole damage perhaps. No shortage of pot holes in the UK.
May 20, 2023
We get enough solar power in the winter months to run the house (except for heating), generate our hot water, charge the EV and still provide a surplus to our neighbours via the grid.
You pull fanciful numbers out of thin air and generate so much BS flooding this blog despite not living in the UK let alone our host’s constituency.
Reply This is not an MP blog and it covers national and international matters. I provide free local pages on my blog for constituency matters.
May 21, 2023
@reply – understood and appreciated, and I can appreciate alternative perspectives – just not the continual BS hosepipe from LifeLogic aka Ashley aka whatever that often floods your blog.
May 20, 2023
The only justification for solar panels plus battery backup is to have a maintenance store of power for when the grid goes down.
I’m beginning to think this is becoming very likely.
There might be a better return if you can sell spare summer electricity back to the grid with a reasonable deal.
May 20, 2023
I’ll give you an estimate Sir John.
It’s NIL.
I estimate not a single solar panel was wholly manufactured in the UK. And just to expand on my answer, I estimate the vast majority were manufactured in China.
May 20, 2023
Donna
I was going to say, exactly that – China!
Mostly everything else is made in China!
May 20, 2023
So many imported sources apply throughout the world. It was long ago that a ‘Foreign’ mark signified cheap low grade, and ‘All British’ widely applied to product manufacture embracing every nut bolt and washer. Govt subsidies prop up limp products in wrong ways but maybe ‘All British’ manufacturing would be an exception that could work better here.
May 20, 2023
+1 + some by slave labour it seems too.
May 21, 2023
China has a virtual monopoly on the materials for making solar cells, so your answer is correct. The UK does actually have some manufacturers who produce finished panels, much of which seem to end up in overseas aid projects. They tend to be higher end and more costly in terms of conversion efficiency relative to the Schockley-Quessier quantum limit on maximum efficiency. Chinese panels tend to be lower efficiency, but much cheaper, giving a lower cost of output if your land for deployment is cheap, as you need a bigger acreage for the same output.
Reliance on solar is once again reliance on China. Do our politicians have no perception of geopolitical risk?
May 20, 2023
A deliberate deceit. Don’t keep the figures then you cannot be accused of lying as opposed to BS that from Sunak down everyone is an expert.
An in other news I see Hunt is accusing the CMA of making it look like the U.K. is closed for business.
So his high levels of Corporation Tax, attack on profits through Windfall Tax, abolishing Tax free shopping, continuing bureaucracy, refusal to diverge from the EU and failure to de regulate the City not forgetting waste and inefficiency in the public sector, has anything to do with it.
What a pathetic excuse for a Tory Chancellor.
May 20, 2023
Well he was a dire Health Sec. for 5+ years too. PPE Oxon yet again I believe.
May 20, 2023
So what are the “Competition and Markets Authority” doing about the rigged market in personal 40% overdrafts (FCA under the fool Andrew Bailey), energy, schools (private and state), universities degrees (mostly worthless ones), transport why should car users have subsidise train & bus users?. The BBC & broadcasting, employment laws (minnium wage laws penalise the higher earners, firing laws penalise the better workers making them carry to lazy/incomp. ones.
May 20, 2023
The response does not even include a standard deflection of ” my Right Honourable friend makes a good point”, just an admission that “The Department does not hold specific information…” because the Department does not care. So green jobs are not the aim, just green voters perhaps.
May 20, 2023
Cameron destroyed the UK solar industry in 2012 (“greencrap”) when he scrapped the domestic FITS scheme, losing over 15,000 installation jobs with it. At that time we had a nascent solar panel assembly industry using imported components from the Far East and all the companies involved closed
There have been very few major solar instalations in the UK in the past three years, the government has made it very difficult if not impossible to get planning permission. As of February 2023, installed capacity was over 14.4 gigawatt (GW), with 33.4% of capacity coming from small scale (< 50kW) deployments with 4.82GW installed. Annual solar generation was 13.92 TWh of harvested free energy in 2022. Rock on, the fossil fuel lobby.
May 20, 2023
What UK solar “industry”, Solar panel manufacture has been in the USA, Germany and China while one of the most popular inverters is from Israel.
Also, you do not “assemble” an imported solar panel so to refer to what happens here as an industry is stretching things beyond fact.
May 20, 2023
To my mind, FITS was the reason why solar installations were so expensive.
May 20, 2023
SG :
Fossil fuels are of enormous benefit to the planet/environment and to all life. Firstly, they stopped the destruction of forests for building materials and fuel and secondly released CO2 which had been locked up over millions of years and had brought life 9 times close to extinction over the last 800,000 years by being only 30 ppm above the minimum needed by plants and hence all life on earth to survive. Their high energy density has allowed the Industrial Revolution to happen and for life on earth to flourish. Renewable energy is of such low energy density and so profligate in its use of materials that it is incapable of sustaining our current population size. Nuclear could but nuclear has been ignored which is proof that there is no CO2 problem.
May 21, 2023
I think you misremembered the timing. Solar installations continued at pace until 2016, when the level of FiT subsidy was substantially reduced. The FiT scheme closed completely to new installations in 2019. The original deals are still being honoured, paying over 68p/kWh. Solar installations picked up a bit last year as a defence to the sky high electricity prices we saw thanks to mismanaged energy policy, and AR4 has provided 2.2GW of solar farm projects.
Quite how the net zero ambition of 70GW is to be achieved remains to be seen. The reason for deterring solar expansion was that the very peaky output was already causing substantial grid problems. Increasing capacity will only make these much worse. Solutions entail massive and very costly investment in storage and wastage via curtailment and in massive grid investment, and those will fail to deal with the problems of highly seasonal solar supply.
May 20, 2023
Graham Stuart read Philosophy and Law (Selwyn) but failed his degree. Ideal for a Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Mr Sunak?
At least Lord Callanan another energy minister seems to have worked out that green hydrogen in largely a bonkers nonstarter he at least has (BSc) albeit from Newcastle Polytechnic in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Perhaps he can explain and get it through to PPE Rishi Sunak why the net zero agenda and UK energy policy is complete lunacy in almost all the other areas?
May 20, 2023
I used to think that government energy policy would be better-formulated in the hands of a comedian – and then I read Rowan Atkinson’s Wiki profile and saw that I was right.
May 20, 2023
Indeed he would be far superior. Sound on free speech too. Can we get him to be PM.
May 20, 2023
In France it was. M Hulot is a former clown, appointed by Macron when he first came to power. He duly made it into a “Canard sans tête” according to the contemperaneous head of the French nuclear industry.
The French Parliament has just produced an enquiry into the energy industry and loss of French sovereignty which is quite damning about successive government policies, making alternative sensible recommendations. It has plainly scared Macron into an about turn and emergency brake on green policy. Our own politicians and regulators would do well to read it. The original French pulls no punches, and it is very well researched, unlike the propaganda advertorials we have seen from BEIS, the CCC and National Grid.
Kathryn Porter summarised it here
https://watt-logic.com/2023/05/16/french-energy-sovereignty/
In English for those whose school French is long forgotten.
May 29, 2023
Thanks a lot, Mark, for the link.
May 20, 2023
Your usual obsession with education/degrees ignoring post uni acquired knowledge. I thought you had moved on. Sadly not.
May 20, 2023
Another awkward question for SJR.
The vaccine manufacturers are charging 5x the original price for the new dual booster with omicron and the original strain elements, which is around £100 per shot. All over 75s are being invited to have more boosters for an infection which now is similar to the common cold in symptoms. If they work, why do they have to be every few months. Many patients are now on their 7th. How much is the NHS paying for these and when will they no longer be needed?
I write having received yet another invitation and having refused any more after serious respiratory immediately following the second.
May 20, 2023
I personally know of three people who have had heart arrhythmia issues following Covid vaccinations one needs a major op and would not tough them with a barge pole. I do not even know that many that that well people either.
Look at the excess deaths & stats on this first.
May 20, 2023
I am puzzled why you are concerned how many solar panels were “wholly manufactured in the UK”.
Why no similar concern for oil, gas, cars, computers, ships, sewing machines, industrial machine tools, semiconductors, food and the rest?
After decades of preferring cheap imported tat leading to the deinvestment and destruction of UK industry and commerce only now when it is too late you politicians start complaining about imports.
Reply Because we were told there would be lots of green jobs here.
May 20, 2023
@Reply
So did you accepted the loss of so many industries and jobs even though no extra jobs were promised?
Was it all simply to placate the finance sector?
We are supposed to be one of the largest economies yet if so then were is all the money, where is the prosperity?
To misquote an American president – a willful group of little men, representing no opinion or interest but their own, have rendered the United Kingdom helpless and contemptible.
Reply No I did not accept job losses and criticised damaging policies
May 20, 2023
Reply – Reply
Green jobs.
We do get Elves helping out Father Christmas for a couple of weeks a year, I dressed up as one myself last year, whilst rattling a collection tin for our local Charity, well not exactly rattling as that is not allowed any more, so I was re-arranging the position of the coins.!!!
May 20, 2023
Best to just ask how many solar panels were built in the UK over the period and how many were imported.
May 20, 2023
Rather than have fields of solar panels, would it not be better to turn them over to woodland? Growing trees store energy in wood that can be recovered as and when necessary, unlike the energy from solar panels that has to be used there and then. Plus they charge us nothing to do it.
May 20, 2023
Everybody knows that they’ll all made in China ….the same business model future for EVs
May 20, 2023
The response to that must be: ‘Why Not?’, given that one of the stated advantages of all this greenery is more UK jobs. Perhaps I should declare an interest here as the former chairman of a solar energy company, but one of the few things that made domestic solar installations remotely economic after the poorly time reduction of the feed-in tariff, was moving the source of the panels not from the UK where they were not made, but from Germany to China, which remains the main supplier.
May 20, 2023
Sir Redwood, you asked a good and fair question.
But the Nut-zero department will not track any stats which contradict their narrative, they start by promising green jobs and then hide the real facts – no green jobs in the UK for solar panel manufacture.
May 20, 2023
It’s China. Britain wouldn’t be allowed to burn the large amount of coal required when starting with silica rock. So we outsource that and label solar ‘green’.
May 20, 2023
As we lost our empire the City of London gained financial ground. Why is it that some do not believe that the UK can make it again?
May 20, 2023
They’re all made in China, as are all our wind turbines. So zero energy security. Manufacture requires enormous amounts of (coal fired) energy and toxic chemicals which end up in a large tailings lake in northern China. So could not be made in the UK. Probably uses more energy to make than produces energy in the UK with our 10% capacity factor. Not suitable for the UK as produces no electricity when we really need it, unlike hot countries who can use it efficiently for air conditioning in the heat of the day.
May 21, 2023
What remarkable restraint, Sir John, to describe this answer as ‘disappointing.’
I have for some years now expected Government announcements to be more than somewhat disconnected from the facts of reality. The announcement of and claims made for the Sunak Framework will go down in courses in public relations as a classic example of spin over substance which will be believed by people so intelligent and practised in sophistry they can persuade themselves black is white. This Framework agrees that EU rule in Northern Ireland is permanent but was announced as scrapping EU rule measured, unbelievably, by the number pages. Apart from claiming the opposite of the truth, it sought veracity in a unit of quantity that has no bearing whatsoever on the content – utterly vacuous but sounded good to wishful superficial thinkers. One had to go to the EU website to find out the truth.
And that is the problem with the Conservative Party. It adopts policies it doesn’t believe in – or at least half of it doesn’t – because they appeal to certain activists and pressure groups. Hence spin without substance. Inevitably its governments prove ineffectual and superficial and continually reverse direction to follow the loudest noises of the moment in the media.
May 21, 2023
So the government’s claim that green policies will create jobs in the UK is total nonsense as they cannot even be bothered to keep appropriate data. We are being lied to.
May 21, 2023
The UK solar industry is cock-a-hoop at the prospects for more backdoor subsidies via the government’s proposals to offer CFD compensation for “non-profit factors” – I am responding to the DESNZ consultation telling them that further fudges and subsidies are only making matters worse, and they need a policy reset on capacity plans that looks at whole system costs, including grid costs and impacts on other generators etc. instead of the piecemeal approach that simply assumes that wind and solar should be the mainstay of the future. The present policy willfully ignores the reality that wind turbines are now much more expensive, and that adding renewables is going to create massive problems with unstorable surpluses on the one hand and the need for dispatchable backup on the other, and that these probelms gett bigger and the costs higher the more renewable capacity that is installed.
The other reason for the delight of the solar industry is the apparent support in Parliament for the reintroduction of feed in tariffs by the back door following the campaign by powertothepeople.org. This will add to the bills of other consumers if it proceeds not least because it will impose additional local grid costs. It should be subject to the same whole system approach that seeks to minimise costs that I am advocating. Indeed, we need to abandon net zero policies, and recalibrate by aiming for a low cost, resilient energy system first. Only then can we decide how much we can afford to pay on the fruitless quest to make up for growing emissions in the tiger economies.