Installing solar panels or a wind turbine can be a very good investment in the UK thanks to the feed in tariffs which pay householders a tax-free, index linked income for the energy they produce, providing over a 10% annual return.
The tariffs pay up to 41.3p for every 1kWh of electricity produced using solar panels and an extra 3p per unit on top for any surplus electricity sold back to the grid.
The average cost of home solar panel installation is £14,000.
From this outlay, Ownenergy, a company that advises consumers on renewable energy, suggest that averge 3 or 4 bedroom hosue can expect a return of approx £950 per year.
Given that the income is tax free the return is equivalent to 12.9% for a 50% taxpayer and 10.3% for a 40% taxpayer, with the investment being recouped in as little as 7 years.
Electricity feed in tariffs were introduced by the UK government in April 2010 as a means of encouraging householders to install solar panels or wind turbines.
Panasonic is making a big move into the domestic solar panel business.
Next month The Panasonic Group will launch in Japan its HIT(R) 215 Series* household solar power generation systems.
Panasonic will be able to provide overall energy-saving systems for homes that will include rechargeable batteries, heating and air conditioning, security systems and Net-linking gadgets besides solar panels, which will all be hooked up to each other, he said.
Homes will be able to save on utility costs by selling surplus power from solar power generation systems, and using water heaters at night when utility rates are cheaper, he said.
“You will be living with virtually zero carbon-dioxide emissions through creating, saving, storing and managing energy,” Sakamoto said in Tokyo.
It is the first series of collaborative products to be developed since SANYO became a part of the Group. The launch signifies how the newly extended group has combined its collective strengths for a full-scale entry into the solar cell business.
The new products combine SANYO’s solar power generation modules with Panasonic’s energy management technology, construction materials, and electrical technology, and will be broadly promoted across the companies’ various sales routes, including home appliances, electrical and construction products.
In doing so, the Panasonic Group and aims to establish a position as the top manufacturer in the market with a target share in Japan of at least 35% by 2012.
Wind energy is both green and fun, so the idea of building one’s own wind turbine is a good one. The following will give you an idea of what is involved.
Wind energy on a large scale is now competitive with other sources of electricity on a commercial scale. However, small domestic-sized wind turbines have not yet reached this point. The wind is free, but small wind turbines are expensive in relation to what they produce, and cannot realistically compete with mains electricity. Building your own machine saves some of the cost, but please do not underestimate the difficulty of the task. If it were easy to save money by using small wind turbines, then they would be a major feature of the landscape by now.
Most residential locations are not suitable for windpower as trees and buildings break the force of the wind, and create turbulent gusts which can be very destructive. Open hilltop sites or coastal situations with unobstructed views may be suitable for siting a wind turbine. A very tall tower is helpful, but these are not always appreciated by your neighbours.
What size of wind turbine do I need?
Wind turbines work with thin air, so they need to be large in relation to the power they produce. To power a modern home on a good site, the blades would need to span about 5 metres from tip to tip. This is known as the rotor diameter. With careful conservation of energy a smaller machine may suffice. A rotor diameter of 2 metres might yield about 500 kWh of electricity per year, compared with an average annual household consumption of roughly 4,500 kWh.
What sort of generator should I use?
Most small wind turbines are used for charging batteries, to provide a reliable stand-alone power source where grid power is not available. The obvious choice of generator for self-build is the car alternator. However this has major drawbacks. It must be driven at a high shaft speed (over 2000 rpm) to give full output, so you will need to gear it up or modify it in some way to drive it with rotor blades, which typically only manage a few hundred rpm. This reduces the efficiency. In low windspeeds there is very little power available in the wind, and you need a highly efficient generator to capture it. Most, if not all of the power in light winds will be used up energising the magnetic field in the alternator, so the results are disappointing. Nearly all small commercial wind turbines use purpose-built permanent magnet generators for this reason. The DIY enthusiast can make one too, but this is not simple to do. Or you can reuse a permanent magnet motor as a generator. The generator is the key to success or failure of the project, and by far the hardest part to get right.
Can I make my own blades?
The good news is that yes, many beginners have made very useful wind turbine blades, often carved from wood. Or there are sources where you can buy them ready made. If you plan on making your own, it is well worth doing some research and finding out all you can about it in advance. Not only will this save you from ‘reinventing the wheel’ but it will also be safer. Safety is an important issue even with the smallest wind turbines. Never underestimate the destructive power of a runaway windmill rotor in a high wind. Make sure that you have built-in protection against all eventualities. Control systems are as important as any other part of the wind turbine.
Its not easy building your own wind turbine but with skill and dedication it can be very satisfying.
The UK can achieve grid parity for households by 2013, seven years sooner than expected says Jeremy Leggett, founder of Britain’s Solar Century.
Its is believed that south-facing roofs and facades in Britain could one day provide a third of UK electricity needs.
Householders convinced that the UK does not have enough sunshine to effectively use solar panels are ‘wrong’, according to a domestic solar panel advisor.
The UK energy advisor Heat my Home has explained that the panels operate on solar radiation not sun rays and the UK gets enough of this to run solar.
Stuart Lovatt of Heat my Home said: “One unique selling point with solar is the longevity. A good quality system will easily last 30 years, so the long-term benefits of solar are obvious.
“How many things today can you buy with such a long lifespan, but solar does, and this makes it a perfect investment if you are thinking long-term such as retirement.”
Germany is the biggest installer of solar panels in Europe and shares a similar climate to that in the UK, both of which receive around 60 per cent of the solar radiation levels the equator does.
Regardless of whether you choose clunky roof panels or integrated tiles, the basic principle of solar panels is the same.
Solar panels are made up of a series of photovoltaic cells, consisting of layers of a semi-conducting material, usually silicon. When light shines on the cell it creates an electric field across the layers causing electricity to flow. The more intense the light, the more electricity you generate – but remember, it’s light and not heat that matters, so you’re not totally at the mercy of the weather.
A two-way meter clocks up how much power you import from the national grid, but literally runs backwards (making you a profit) when your home is doing the generating. Or you can store the electricity you generate during the day in batteries for use during the night.
Great article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper proving that even in rainy Britain home solar panels are a great investment.
The Rewards of Solar Panels by Ashley Seager
We live in an old terraced house on a cloudy, rainy island. Yet the solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on our roof, put up two years ago, are supplying around 90% of all the electricity used by my family.
The initial cost is high, but don’t let that put you off. Two key developments in recent months have made it worth considering solar PV panels.
One is that a government incentive for PV doubled on 1 April and the other is that interest rates on many savings accounts have dropped to about 0.1%, meaning it is time your money worked harder.
And don’t be deterred by the idea Britain doesn’t get enough sunshine. In fact, solar radiation here is remarkably consistent and only around one third less than southern Italy or Spain. I have just come to the end of my second year with a solar PV system on my roof and it has been a great success.
We have a 3kW peak system (about 4m by 3m) on the roof. It produced 2,703kW hours (kWh) in its second full year (to 5 April), only 1% lower than the 2,730 kWh it produced in the first year, and that in spite of a lousy 2008 summer.
That was about 80% of the 3,500 kWh we used, and our usage was up because we had builders do some underpinning, which meant lots of kettles and cement mixers on.
The previous year we – a family of four –
used 3,000 kWh, so the solar system produced 92% of our needs, a figure we expect to return to in the coming 12 months.
The panels, made by Kyocera of Japan, come with a 25-year guarantee and should last a lot longer than that. What you effectively do when you buy a solar PV system is pre-buy decades of electricity at today’s price, thus shielding you from price rises. One great thing about a PV system is that it is “fit and forget” with little or no maintenance or noise. And they don’t have to go on a directly south-facing roof –
ours points south-east and works very well.
So how do the figures work out? Well, buying 3,000 kWh of electricity normally would cost around £420, based on 14 pence/kWh with npower, our supplier. We end up saving almost £400 of that by producing nearly all our own.
On top of that, we were getting payments under the government’s Renewable Obligation Certification (ROC) scheme of around £35 per megawatt/hour, rounded to the nearest whole one. So that is £105, putting us about £70 in the black for the year.
Since 1 April, that ROC payment has doubled to £210, putting us about £175 in the black. That compares with £420 in the red without the panels –
a gain of almost £600 a year.
Indeed, the system means that, with a condensing boiler, we are now down to only about £30 a month to heat and light our property while our carbon emissions are very low. So what about the investment yield? The system cost £17,000, for which we got a 50% grant, making £8,500. With a return of £600, that’s around 7%. It’s not taxed, so is equivalent of about 9% for a basic-rate taxpayer and 11% for a higher-rate taxpayer. You’d struggle to do better buying junk bonds and this stuff is certainly not junk!
Moreover, that gives you a crude payback period of only 10 years, not the 100 years that some critics have claimed.
Ah, you say, but that 50% grant is no longer available, the maximum is £2,500. True, but systems have come down in price since we installed ours, so your post-grant price for a system like ours would be around £12,000 now. The £600 saving gives a return of 5% (or 7% or 8.5% gross –
not bad when compared with just about any other kind of investment these days).
And, if you are lucky enough to be on a tracker mortgage that is close to 0%, you could add on to your mortgage and it would really pay to invest in a PV system.
That 5% yield is likely to improve –
next April, the government plans to introduce a so-called feed-in tariff (FIT) when you get paid an above-market price for every unit of electricity fed into the grid.
The ROC system gives you the equivalent of about 27p-28p per exported unit, but the FIT could well be higher than that. It is not clear how the FIT will work but it will probably replace the ROCs and the £2,500 grant.
And the yield will likely improve further as electricity prices are almost certain to increase faster than inflation over the next three decades.
Some critics say PV is an expensive way to save carbon, but system costs are plummeting as world supplies of silicon, from which PV is made, have shot up. Moreover, global panel production has rocketed in response to FITs in other countries. A PV system in Germany, for example, is about half the UK price –
no wonder the Germans have 300 times as many PV systems installed as we do. But even with the higher UK prices, it is worth investing in a PV set-up.
Ah, but what if I move house, you ask? Well, I am convinced that a system that saves you £600 a year and protects you against future rises in electricity costs will add to the value of your house. How could it not?
