Rushcliffe Solar

Rushcliffe Solar started as a Transition West Bridgford campaign to encourage greater use of Photovoltaic home power generation systems in Rushcliffe borough, but we are always willing to answer an enquiry from other towns in the region. There are many buildings and entire streets with roofs which have a good view of the Sun and could produce power for the Grid and Income for the occupants. Hit the You Enquire tab to get a free appraisal of the photovoltaic potential for your building. Email: RushcliffeSolar@gmail.com
If you are thinking about it, do not be put off by recent changes in the tariff!: Since April 2012, the tariff was reduced to 21 pence/unit and ones on poorly insulated buildings get only 9 pence/unit. There have been further reductions since. Use the Expertsure calculator to check out your house and see if it is still worth doing.

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

1000 megawatt milestone achieved

26 Feb 2012: Here's a link to a Guardian report that the growth of solar panel installations in the UK has pass the 1000MW mark last week. This has been due to the 'explosive' growth of the rate of installation since the Feed in Tariff was announced in 2009. This is 41 times the amount of PV panels previously installed. I call that a success.

    Looking at it from the higher plane, it should not be about Tariff, which is a short term incentive - but the tariff has been miraculously successful. As a species we are motivated by economic forces.
    It should be about widespread generation of totally Clean Energy with zero infrastructure cost (we provide the roof and pay for the installation), and zero wholesale fuel purchase cost (the Sun), and zero running cost (apart from the FIT which is cheaper than the costs of salaries and maintenance of a power station).
   A good economic justification for the tariff is that energy delivered to houses from distant power stations is only about 1/3 of that generated at source, whereas the energy we supply to our neighbours is 1/1 - 3 times as efficient!

There is still uncertainty in the industry about the status of the FiT, although there is no worry about the 21p tariff - the confusion is about the 43p one. If you have a decent size of roof with good orientation, it is still an excellent investment at the 21p rate.
   It is most unfortunate that at the same time as this confusion is occurring, there is also much discontent in the Wind industry. Although the government is nominally backing it, the confusion in the PV industry and the damage caused by the 100 tory MPs letter has caused the big players in the Wind industry to freeze some projects which would have created thousands of jobs. Whatever you think of wind towers in the landscape, there is still an overwhelming need for electricity in our modern life. The MPs think that electricity flows from a socket, not being aware that it has to be generated somewhere. They would be woken up to reality if there were more brown-outs. In the high winds of last autumn, a nuclear power station in Scotland was out of action for more than 2 days, so it isn't just windmills that have problems sometime.
   The government has a target of 22mW installation by the end of the decade, but their tampering with the FiT and their linking with EPCs has made this target near impossible unless a future government support the FiT more earnestly. Germany has 25MW already.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/23/feed-in-tariff-solar-breakthrough?intcmp=122

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