Our Energy 1: is solar still an economic as well as a greener option for a domestic supply?
You might have had that slightly alarming feeling, when you think you’ve found the right home for you but then, after you’ve made your offer but not exchanged or completed contracts, there’s one detail you’ve missed that suddenly comes to light. The alarming nature of that feeling comes, I think, from the dawning possibility that this issue is a game-changer such that the whole deal will need to be called off and the process of chasing your dream must begin all over again. Solar panels and the question of who owned them were the subject of the ‘will we, won’t we’ moment in our recent house purchase.
Imagine: as people who have always aspired to ‘going green’, how excited were we that the bungalow we’d set our hearts on (despite the smaller garden!) had a wonderful array of twelve solar panels on one ‘almost-south’ facing roof? At this point I have to confess that our lofty ideal of going green had been fairly limited in the past. True, we’d been recycling since the mid eighties when the first paper and bottle deposit boxes had been set down in the car park of our local park; we’d also scrapped the second car and used bikes and Shanks’s Pony to get around, as much as we could; our garden was organic and left, somewhat, to nature; our care with water use would have been legendary — had we not kept the ‘one flush after we’ve all been to the loo strategy very quiet — and we’d never used a tumble dryer since our lads were out of cotton nappies (sorry boys, the secret’s out!) However, when it came to making use of low-carbon electricity, the best we could manage was to choose a supplier with the best green-alternative package as our south-ish facing roof was too small to carry more than a couple of panels and the cost of extending the roof, plus buying a worthwhile number of panels, proved exorbitant.
Whilst we were prepared to install solar panels on whichever property we purchased, the fact that the prospective new place already had a set meant that not only could we take a step in the right direction on our going-green trajectory but, also, we could take advantage of the feed-in subsidies to which they would be subject - given that they were installed before the government first reduced and then withdrew the subsidy. The feed-in subsidy was an important facility that allowed solar-panel owners to be paid for the energy they generated, helping to ensure that the owners would receive monies that would, over time, cover the original outlay on the system — outlay we presumed we were making in paying a premium price for the property.
Returning to the brief hiatus in our house purchase: it turned out the panels belonged not to the vendors but to a company who had leased the roof space and installed its own system; that company, therefore, was due to receive all the associated subsidies and feed-in tariff payments — ouch! We hadn’t noticed any reference to this small matter on any of the documents or web-pages relating to the sale (we’ve never looked back to check whether it was mentioned) but the property search clearly revealed the contract relating to the lease. On the plus side: we no longer needed to install panels in our new property and we were able to use, free of charge, any electricity as it was generated. On balance, we decided to go ahead with the house purchase.
Readers who are thinking of buying a solar panel system themselves need to be aware that the only source of income from these energy-generating marvels is the electricity you are able to use at the moment it is generated - when light falls on the panels; they don’t work at night and they generate less energy (albeit more than you might think) when it is cloudy. Even then, it’s not exactly income, except that it saves money from the electricity bill. We soon became aware of the limitations to this and pondered strategies that might allow us to make the most of the energy generated… Should we avoid putting on the washing machine or dishwasher until it’s sunny? How about installing a timer for these devices so that they always came on around noon, with Sun at its highest point? What if it’s cloudy at noon?
The ‘we must do something about this’ moment arrived when our, very useful, smart-meter indicated a further limitation. On a nice sunny day in April, our panels were generating, over the course of a day, around 8kWh (8 units) of energy which was plenty for our needs except that they were feeding most of it into the grid. Then we discovered that if we, for example, put the kettle on, it required around 3kW of power and, if our solar cells were generating, say, 1.8kW of power at the time, then 1.2kW was required from the grid.
We realised that what we needed to do was store energy, rather than feed the grid and that this would involve a battery of some kind. Such a battery would charge up when we were not using devices and chip in, for example, with the 1.2kW surplus needed to run the kettle. I think that, if we can make this work and spread the news a little, more people might opt for a solar solution. Future articles will cover our exploration of this idea and analyse the results, in hope that we can show that this green solution is also an economic one.
