Free solar panel discussion

dapri

EcoPower wrote: »

I have installed a 1Kw system last November and have been very pleased with the result. After the Govt grant for installation the cost was £5K. FIT payments look like being circa £300 PA giving about a 17 year pay back. I cannot see how this makes any commercial sense for people to give away free panels. Am I missing something?

A 1kw array is relatively costly to install when compared with a larger array, fixed costs such as the access etc remain constant regardless of size - so a one KW array I would expect to cost around £5.5k to install - a 2KW array around £9.5K a 3KW array around £14k and so on so the larger arrays will have greater pay back and higher return ion investment - typically around 9% with a pay back in 11 years or so - this then leaves the coompany 14 years to reap the full rewards of the FiT as by then it will be much higher than 41.3 p per unit due to the effects of RPI increases !:beer:

portlandstone

mikeashbee wrote: »

I have solar water heating in my flat in Turkey and there is plenty of hot water for 8 people day and night. So I am sold already! I am looking forward to a similar scheme for hot water here.
I have a large south facing roof. Does anyone have answers to the following?
1. I have cheap economy 7 electricity at some hours during the
night. Would I have to forego this?
2. What if chimney repairers, TV aerial/sattelite dish fitters have to gain access over the panels?
3. Does it affect my house insurance and does the solar panel fitter repair free if there is a gale?
Thanks in anticipation!

Sorry this discussion group is all about solar electricity generation, not solar hot water. We have solar hot water too and the payback is terrible; about 2.5% per year, so don't bother. Use all your roof to put solar electric (PV) panels instead.

skelly01

Can any of the companies answer why it only seems to be England that they are offering the free panels too?
I am in central Scotland, so there cant be much difference.

Perry525

The Australian government was running a similar scheme.
Lots of people were disappointed with the result, as the systems did not produce enough electricity, to be either useful or to pay for themselves.
You really need to look at your past bills, say for the last five years, to see what power you used, then try to guess what will happen to prices in the future.
Keep in mind that if you do not go for this scheme, you will be one of the people who are overcharged by the suppliers to pay for the ones who have.
Note: Spain has a similar scheme, so has Germany, both are trying to reduce the money paid to users.

Upright_Tone

tingleytim wrote: »

My roof is south west facing and is of no interest to A Shade Greener. How much less efficient is a SW facing roof compared with a south facing roof? When cloudy there is presumably very little difference. But what tends to be the difference overall? Is it still worth my while installing panels at my own expense on a SW facing roof?

I was very interested in the feed-in tariff scheme when it was announced a few months ago. To my mind, it was an absolute no-brainer that if we had the capital to invest, this was a far sounder investment than anything on offer from financial institutions - this quite apart from the fact that I would like to be able to help reduce carbon emissions.

So I contacted a couple of the registered companies and they did a Google-survey of our house and confirmed that our south-west facing roof was perfect. Then one of the companies came round to do a site survey and immediately said it wouldn't work. The reason is that there are tall trees at the bottom of our and our neighbours' gardens, which would cast a shadow over the roof particularly during the winter months, thereby reducing the amount of electricity we could generate to below what would be economically sensible for our investment. While I was very disappointed, I was impressed that this commercial company had enough integrity not to sell me an unsatisfactory system. The company is British Eco.

So a SW-facing roof should not necessarily be a bar to installing solar panels - but maybe the companies who are offering to fit the system for free will judge that they do not give enough of a return to make it worhwhile for them to pay for them.

If it wasn't for our tall trees (which have preservation orders on them by the way), we would certainly have had our roof panelled at our own expense and estimated we would have been looking at around a 8% per annum return on the investment.

Warlocks2010

One thing that the article or any posts forget to mention is, if you buy the panels yourself, the interest you are losing.
As an example, let's say you extend your mortgage by £12k to purchase the panels at a rate of say 4% (and interest rates will most certainly rise in the coming years!); this equates to interest only of £480 per year.
The article states that you can expect approx an £800 return per annum if paying for the panels yourself (forget the £120 saving as you get this regardless of free or paying for them yourself).
This therefore means the real benefit is a profit of £320 per year.
Over the 25 years, this only works out at an £8000; which is therefore £4000 LESS than the money needed to pay for the panels in the first place.
I would therefore suggest that the FREE panels (including maintenance as well!!) is a far more beneficial option for the standard householder.

I am happy to be proved wrong on my figures above but think they stand up...

Derekfromtheborders

We are haveg solar panels installed and the council require that we obtain a building warrant. This has cost us almost £200 so far for the application fee and a structural survey. It is still not approved because they want eveidence that the panels meet building regs for fire penetration (technically they need to be low vulnerability) as they reckon they are a type of roof covering!

gentoo_penguin

As an environmental measure the feed-in tariff as designed costs £460/tonne of carbon dioxide whereas insulation costs £10/tonne. ("Policy Exchange" publication - see website)

Photovoltaic (PV) has and always will be a rubbish way of generating electricity. The stuff they put on the international space station uses a more advanced version of the technology and each one of those panels costs about $1m, but then again they're a bit far away from a three pin socket...

Spain, Germany and Italy (note at least two of those countries are a little bit sunnier than England) have all vastly curtailed their programmes because it costs so much money for so little benefit.

But we need to revisit "As designed"

Even if you believe that the measure wasn't simply a headline grabbing political measure (So "green" it was called "clean energy cashback") with marginal pay back even according to the government provided calculations (DECC website) - and I'm sure that we all have views about how accurate government calculations are - the high tariff for was for individuals to get a real rate of return associated with the costs of small scale installation (it's all on the DECC website).

However the scheme does not prevent a company buying en masse, installing en masse, taking the economies of scale and still claiming 41.3p/kWh - with the flourishing of these free schemes it is going to change the cost base.

As designed the costs are passed on to the consumer - the government calculates that this will be £8.50/year and I am sure we believe that. This, however, is before all these schemes - and looking at the interest on this website - they look like they are going to be successful.

So, that will be more than £8.50/year for a rubbish environmental measure.

A quick thought experiment: if everyone were to install PV - the only person to pay for it would be the person on whose roof it were installed.

What about poor people? I know: let's pay for them to have a rubbish measure put on their roof so we can pay for the cost of their generation via our bills. It would be cheaper and greener to pay their bills directly.

Some of the posts here are hoping that they will get a subsidised loan to pay for a subsidised measure. Eventually all this is going to have to be paid for.

Insulate your loft, fit thermostatic valves, lag your tank - consider not buying that 500" plasma TV: that would be both green and money saving.

Curlychick_2

I have registered for the free solar panels & will update as & when i get further info.

solarfan

This is a new business model for the solar market, and a potential money maker, with companies offering free solar ranging from those who have never previously installed the technology to well established companies with a track record in the industry. The good news is that the business model does seem to make sense (there is such a thing as a free lunch!), but you need to be aware that you will only get the solar for free if your roof fits fairly strict criteria (the company needs to make sure that they will make the necessary return from the system on your roof). This means that you may need a certain size of roof, be based in a certain part of the country, have a roof pointing in a certain direction, or perhaps all of these, before you will be accepted to a scheme. That said, if you are accepted, it is in the business' interest to keep the panels working, so you can be pretty sure that you will have minimal issues and that if anything does go wrong they will fix it quickly.

As this is a new business/financial model there are a lot of questions that you should ask the company before signing up, covering everything from ownership to maintenance. A first stab at creating a list of these questions is hosted on the Energy Savings Trust website at energysavingtrust.org.uk/Generate-your-own-energy/Solar-electricity/Consumer-guidance-on-free-solar-PV-offers, which is well worth a look.

As other people have posted, if you can afford a system you should buy it yourself and keep the tariffs, but if you can't, then these schemes could be a great way of reducing your CO2 and saving some cash on your bills.