Monbiot vs. Leggett

Lie much George?

I just read Monbiot's squirmy attempt to get out of his bet with Leggett. He's claiming he and Leggett never agreed to a definition of Grid Parity. That's the lamest thing I've heard in a long time but George doesn't stop there. He goes on to offer up a sorry excuse for a definition of grid parity that no one has ever heard of and claims that by this retarded definition he won the bet. The argument he makes is so empty he has to lipstick his piggish drivel with some gibberish about the Government being SOBs and blah blah blah pay no attention to the bullshit behind the curtain. If words were turds George's performance here was a shit show.

I went to comparemysolar.uk and looked up some price quotes for photoelectric systems in London. They range from 1.45 GBP/Watt up to 1.62 GBP/Watt for 4 kW systems. The quotes I looked at also had data for annual performance (837 kWh/kWp).

Here's a basic set of LCOE Assumptions:
System Price: 1500 GBP/kW
System Life: 30 years
Performance in First Year: 837 kWh/kWp
Performance Degredation Rate: .5% per year
Annual O&M: 10 GBP/kW
O&M Inflation Rate: 2%
Inverter Replacement Year: 15
Inverter Replacement Cost: 100 GBP/kW
Percentage Financed: 0% All Cash Deal
Discount Rate: 5%

If you plug these numbers into an LCOE calculator you come up with 14ish cents/kWh for your solar electricity costs. That's about a penny cheaper than the current retail price of electricity in London.

Leggett won the bet.