Council installing solar panels

[juuule]

Just read this and I am so jealous

"SOLAR panels which have been installed on every property on a north Manchester estate could save residents £100 each every year."

\link{http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/214/214140_solar_power_to_the_people.html?\Full report here}

I'm quite impressed by the possibilities of ground source heat pumps

\link{http://www.groundsourceheatpumps.co.uk/default.asp\ like these}

unfortunately they aren't feasible for the house we are building but if I was doing something on a grander scale or in your instance commercial or social housing then they look very good.

I believe the Queen is installing something on the same lines

This is the sort of things that ought to be going into new developments. As you see from my posts I'm sceptical of small scale energy generation, but if you are building a few hundred houses you can do all sorts of things.
Black tarmac spaces for parking can be made heat collectors, storing heat in grey water from runoff. Neatly reducing the need for reservoirs, and reducing the increase in flooding you get from more land being built on. The pumps for this might viably be solar PV since they do most of their work on hot days. In many sites it is quite feasible to have toilets etc disperse into the soil, though you have to get this right first time, and of course nowhere near water that might be used.
Typically larger heat plants are more efficient than small, so sharing this might work, providing you made sure the support contracts were properly done, else you get the misery as bad as when mass insantiy put local councils in charge of running boilers on council estates.
An issue with recycling is that we now have 7 different bins, bags etc, this can be engineered to be less hassle and thus more effective.
Heat sensors are pathetically cheap now, so you can make houses know where people are in them adjusing lights and heat accordingly (and provide very good security).
Insualtion is obvious, so much so that some people think that the energy used in producing the amount you need for new standards isn't actually saved in the life of the house.
If you're doing it on a really big scale, then thew house life cycle itself can be part of the process. They're not built with reclamation in mind either at the component or structural level.

We could also build them to require less travel.
Though I cannot even guess how you'd do that.
The optimisations aren't actually that hard to work out.
But who would do it ?
Local councils would mix social engineering with the witless incompetence and financial bullying that they use instead of brains.
Developers only want to ship easy to sell houese, and the government simply doesn't get it.
But we could reduce the impact of most factors of new living accomodation by an easy 50% without increasing costs all that much.
But who' going to volunteer to have 500 new homes built near them ?

But in Sweden where they have shared heating (communal boilers - often woodchip or pelllets) they get the houses too hot and people throw open windows...so that slightly negates the saving in doing it on a large scale (my brother lives there and it really frustrates him)

I do think more should be done for new houses - it's getting developers to agree

Communal heating does have issues like this, though in the case of storing solar heat, it matters rather less if you waste it.

My skeepticism about solar electricity is possibly going to be obsolete sooner than I had hoped.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5128762.stm

The high defect rate is a big issue for chip manufacture but for PV cells my guess is that it will hardly matter at all.

If you can reduce the huge energy bill in making this kind of silicon, they will also become cheaper in cash terms.