Rooftop Solar Panel, Battery Installations Are Causing Fires in the UK – RedState

Old Britain went all-in on “green energy” as part of its national policy, and it didn’t work out very well for them. But the UK currently has many policies in place that promise to be truly disastrous, but we’ll talk about their immigration policy another time. No, this time it’s about energy, and the UK government has pushed all sorts of boondoggles, including things like installing solar panels and batteries on residential roofs.

There’s only one problem: they catch fire.

A surge in house fires caused by solar panels and their batteries is raising safety concerns over Ed Miliband’s plan for millions more rooftop installations.

UK fire services have faced a fire involving a solar panel every two days in 2024, according to data collected by insurance company QBE, an increase of 60% over the past two years.

That’s a lot of life-threatening fires – and a 60 percent increase in two years is nothing short of alarming. There may be more to it than solar panels, but they are certainly a contributing factor:

QBE analyzed data from UK fire services to determine how many fires were caused by solar installations.

The study also found that fires were increasing faster than the rate of installations, suggesting that an increase in the number of solar panels alone could not explain the increase in incidents.

Adrian Simmonds, senior risk manager at QBE, said: “Solar power is essential to the UK’s clean energy transition, but the rapid pace of its deployment raises risk concerns.

“Our analysis shows that fires involving solar panels have increased twice as fast as new installations over the past two years. Safe installation and maintenance of solar panels is critical to reducing fires.”

It is worth noting, as the Telegraph points out, that it is not just installation that is essential, but also, perhaps more so, maintenance.

The most common source of outages was inverters, electronic devices that convert direct current produced by solar panels into alternating current used by the power grid.

This process generates a lot of heat, so the inverters must be positioned with good ventilation and kept free of obstructions. Poorly trained installers may place them in attics or closets where they become hot and a fire can spread quickly.

Sticking something known to generate heat on a roof, where obstructions seem likely to accumulate, seems like a bad idea.

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Lithium-ion batteries pose a known fire risk, as do these inverters. And consider that roofs can attract all kinds of trash, wind-blown, brought in by nesting birds, among dozens of different sources. This makes the idea of ​​a residential rooftop installation seem cumbersome.

And of course, we always come back to the same calculation: solar panels, even perfectly functional, even perfectly maintained, always produce intermittent and low density energy. Britain continues to promote these ideas, but they are doomed to failure, just as such projects here in the United States fail. It’s not necessary. Britain has vast offshore oil and natural gas reserves. But as long as Labor is in charge in Britain, these messes are expected to continue.

Editor’s note: Schumer’s closure is here. Rather than putting the American people first, Chuck Schumer and radical Democrats forced a government shutdown on health care for illegal immigrants. They own that.

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