My credentials, well read my other blogs, but yes, I bought 2.6 kilowatts worth, I paid £11,000 and had I delayed a year would have got the same for about £9,000 . Yes, I would have been financially better off by delaying my installation.

Which is why I welcomed the sharp drop in FIT rates, When the Feed in Tariffs started the standard 2kW system would cost about £12,000 or approaching £20,000 if you got scammed.  Prices have come down to as low as just over £6,000 almost half !  So, if £12K  was a great deal when FITs were 41p and index linked, why is £6K  not the same great deal with FITs at 21p !!  Actually its a slightly better deal!

To my mind the solar companies have really shot themselves in the foot. Rather than saying that low installation prices would make the drop in FITs match the return that early installers got, they said that solar panels were now unaffordable  But they are the cheapest they have ever been!  The idiots have told the public not to buy their product!

21p means the FIT scheme can be retained for far longer, it means the cost of installation can comedown and the industry retained.  At 43.3 it means the scheme must close overnight when the set amount of money has run out!

Church and charity warn on solar :http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16304817

Just because they look inflated doesn’t mean they are at the correct pressure.  Seeing our Yaris MPG slip to 48mpg  I checked the tyres, 1 was correct the others were down to 20psi.  Topping up the pressure got the mpg back up to 55mpg.  That’s  like a 10% improvement! or the equivalent of a 14p saving per litre of fuel!

The same can be true when replacing your fuel filter. But that costs money.

What this will mean is that solar schemes will invariably be limited to roofs, which are dead space with no other use than keeping the things and people below, dry and warm.

It also means the solar scheme will almost certainly be installed close to where the power generated will be used, thus reducing transmission losses and limiting the need to upgrade the local power transmission lines.

And it means that those who are paying the higher bills that pay for the Feed in Tariffs will have more of an opportunity to benefit, not the bankers in the city.

I really struggle to understand why the solar industry is so upset, the Govt have not reduced the available cash at all, there will almost certainly be just as many installations, it’s just kept it out of the hands of the larger players.

This risks driving out industry to relocate to countries with laxer standards and the result being higher levels of CO2 generated – though not associated with the UK so DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) can claim a level of success when in fact more damage is being done.

We need to take real action that on the one hand isn’t an accounting exercise, but equally doesn’t damage industry, without which there is no money and we all go hungry.

The 1st thing to do is get away from the obsession with electricity as representing the only form of energy. There is far more energy saved per unit of investment through insulation than all the clever ways of generating electricity. Our houses are in a sorry state, not only that, but energy is so cheap relatively speaking that most people couldn’t care to save it.

I remember the news item about 2 years ago where a new house was raided because its thermal signature was so high!  Incredible! It shows the shoddy construction of new houses. Bring in better building controls which demand decent insulation and we might get somewhere, then work through the existing stock to upgrade, not to modern standards which are shoddy, but to a decent standard of insulation.

Let people know how well they are doing, thermal imaging cameras in the winter will show which houses are losing heat and where, then help people fix it.

Here’s and opportunity for D. Cameron’s big society, give the task to friends of the earth and fund them, though keep control of the looney’s.

Glass skyscrapers, what do they think they are doing? A greenhouse in the sky, the amount of energy required to cool them is huge, and for what benefit? Actually it boils down to vanity, Norman Foster and his like should be ashamed of themselves.

Then look at water heating. I could cover my roof with solar PV and it still would struggle to provide enough energy to heat my hot water, but a couple of panels of solar water heater and job done! But I am paid an inordinate amount to generate a small amount of electricity while there is little or no subsidy for solar water heating. Okay RHI is about to be introduced but it is still totally out of balance in respect of saving carbon.

The graph shows the emissions reductions as we approach the 2020 target of a 20% reduction, the provisional figures for 2010 are almost certainly due to the recession which will be  replicated in 2011.

But, I do wonder how much of these emissions reductions are due to the export of industry to China and how much to increased efficiency and the use of renewable energy.

Certainly, while we have boosted the numbers of wind turbines and solar panels, these only represent perhaps 1 or 2 % of generated electricity, the headline figures of a 100MW wind farm realistically equating to maybe 20MW actually generated.  Solar panels  don’t yet make much of an impact.

What is clear is that the emissions reductions are almost certainly down to the shifting of industry to other countries, potentially with a higher level of emissions due to lowered efficiency.

Where the consumption of lets say a “tyre” for a car might have cost .2 tonnes of carbon where it was made in the UK, that tyre made in China and with the electricity generated from a coal power plant, equates to .3 tonnes, then it has to be shipped round the world (though perhaps we have saved some of the raw material shipping costs?).

So, there is more carbon in the form of CO2 generated but Britain claims a reduction!

Its the same as carbon offsetting or perhaps nearer the knuckle, getting somebody to accept a speeding fine so you can retain a clean licence?

To have any chance of showing an honest reduction in CO2, the 1st thing DECC needs to do is totally review the way Britain’s contribution to Global CO2 production is counted. Not based on what is generated in the UK, but what is gereated as a result of UK consumption of goods and services.

On the plus side this means we can remove the carbon associated with exports, but add those associated with imports. What about shipping and international travel ?

Do an honest measure and we might find that CO2 production that is attributed to the UK  has gone up since 1990. I think this is the more likely outcome.

A bit of rummaging around in the attic showed what the problem was, rat or rats had eaten through about a foot of the insulation, just next to where there was a draught!   I replaced the insulation, taped it up and the taps were running hot again!

So, if your solar water heating system is running just not up to scratch, check the pipes running between the roof mounted collectors and the hot water tank, they really must be well insulated!

Where is most of domestic energy consumed? In heating!

How is most of that heat generated? By using gas or oil or coal, rarely electricity!

What do the government want us to cut down on?  Our consumption of gas and oil and coal.

Looking at hot water alone and lets say I have a choice of heating it using solar hot water or electricity. Throughout the summer I can have all my hot water heated by a solar water heater which comprises a contraption made up of glass, copper and insulating material, all relatively low tech but varying in efficiency depending on the way it is formed, perhaps solar flat plate or vacuum tube.

This solar water heater will cover between 4 and 6 square metres of my roof and provide all my hot water from , late spring to early autumn. The whole system will cost in the region of  £4,000, is reliable and relatively maintenance free.  Very little electricity is involved.

 Conversely, I could do the same job with £10,000 to £20,000 worth of solar PV, which while I might have to pay a great deal to  install, I will get paid Feed in Tariffs which will pay back the full costs in 10 years and give me a profit for another 15.  These solar PV panels are very costly to make, invariably imported from China, consume vast amounts of rare metals and are very costly in energy to manufacture.  

If the Government really wants to cut down on the use of energy, they should proactively support the installation of solar water heating, in my opinion to a greater extent than solar PV as there is a far greater carbon saving return per £ invested whether through grants or when considering the cost of the installation. 

More information on the  Renewable Heat Incentive and how it relates to Solar Water Heating can be seen here within a press release from the Solar Trades Association placed on the solaruk website. http://www.solaruk.net/news/solarenergy.asp?item=2170

The Government seem to have got hung up on electricity rather than energy.

While the whole, very strange comment from Barry at SolarTwin is here: http://bit.ly/gNcg3P  what it seems to be saying is that anybody who isn’t SolarTwin is misleading the public when they claim to offer free hot water from the sun, the premise being that as solartwin has a small photovoltaic panel that drives a circulating pump, then only they can claim to offer free solar hot water.

Oh dear! 

But if Solartwin is saying that their solar hot water is free while most other’s isn’t, perhaps Solartwin might identify what they actually mean?

I have solar hotwater and am very happy with it.  I prefer to

 regard it as paid for in advance, basically I have paid for a job lot of solar hot water when I had my panels installed, as with all installations it cost some thousands of pounds and certainly wasn’t free. But that’s the case with all solar systems. Once I have received my job lot of hot water its then free!

Other ways of looking at it are to simply wipe of the cost of the installation and then for parts of the year treat it as free or consider the savings on the alternative to using solar.  Personally I have no problem with the promotion of solar hot water as free, isn’t it?

As to SolarTwin’s statement that because there is a mains powered pump that uses paid for electricity the hot water is no longer free,  again, oh dear, should the Solar Industry collectively hold its head in shame?   Can ST solely claim this accolade of free hot water?

I have to wonder whether users of SolarTwin’s systems have some special dispensation from the water utility? Perhaps they have missed something here, water isn’t free, therefore hot water isn’t free!

Then using my approach of considering the payment for the solar system as an advance payment for hot water, if I was to buy a SolarTwin system then I would be purchasing a small solar PV unit instead of mains electricity, so also by their argument, not just the fact that water is charged for, their hot water is equally not free!

Is solar hot water free? Of course it is! Arguing about whether to include the cost of pumping, all or part of the solar hot water system, whatever, is so silly that it is a waste of anybody’s time. 

In my opinion – apart from selling the systems – there is only one matter that legitimate solar businesses should get concerned about within the industry and that is solar energy systems that are sold by aggressive high pressure sales-staff at prices far in excess of their worth to vulnerable people!

An example of solar PV embedded in a panel alargely for solar water heating can be seen below, this is taken from the www.solaruk.com website and shows a large scale system.

The image shows a tracking array of solar vacuum tubes with the addition of a Solar Photovoltaic panel covering the solar thermal system's manifold, otherwise unused for direct energy collection.

Solar systems can be compared on this page: http://www.solarkent.co.uk/solar-water-heating/comparison.asp I don’t have direct access to current pricing so this might be out of date, however I expect the differential to be similar.  It looks like you pay a lot more for “freer” hot water from Solartwin than from others that they say are less free.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Minty-Fresh™.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2010. That’s about 4 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 16 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 40 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 44kb.

The busiest day of the year was January 7th with 26 views. The most popular post that day was Why Isn’t Solar Energy being used in Egypt?.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were solarkent.co.uk, renewables-map.co.uk, solaruk.net, solaruk.com, and google.co.uk.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for solarkent, feather board cladding, solar panels egypt, british embassy cairo, and solar panels in egypt.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Why Isn’t Solar Energy being used in Egypt? September 2008
5 comments

Feed in Tariffs, a kick in the teeth! December 2009
2 comments

Free Solar Panels October 2010

About February 2008
5 comments

New Wind Turbine Installed! October 2008
3 comments

This incentive is planned to be paid where a unit of heat is created that avoids the burning of carbon (oil/coal/gas) or multiplies the amount of heat rather than having a direct generation of heat. An example of this being the use of a heat pump.

The ideal technology for RHI is Solar Water Heating, once installed (apart from the pump) a totally carbon free means of heating water. With a heat pump, the heat that is accounted for on the RHI is the difference between that which would be generated by heating air or water directly using electricity and the actuall heat given out. So a heat pump that has a conversion ratio of 3 to 1 could be said to provide 2 units of carbon free heat for every 1 that uses carbon.

The unit of heat is nominally going to be measured in MWhr under the RHI.

The RHI committee are looking at the ROI (Return on Investment) and how to measure.  One of the ways of measurement will be to set a nominal effectveness for a technology and work out an annual incentive payable on an installation.

Potential for Fraud within the RHI

I can see this being wide open to abuse. Lets say I have a Heat Pump that runs for the 1st two or three years, it means I don’t have to use my boiler and I get an annual incentive for using what is a marginally cheaper system.

Once the system is beyond the warranty period, lets say it fails and repairs will cost the equivalent of 2 years worth of incentive. With a failure I will anyway switch on my boiler, I need heating, then I must arrange a repair. But the RHI continues to be paid as it is not based on a meter. Even if there is some facility for inspection, all I have to do is say it failed last week and I am arranging a repair.

The same will apply to any system that is not metered in a verifiable way.

Insurance

As a solution, perhaps include a mandatory insurance policy that is paid out of the RHI. This can be open to competition as with car insurance, but the payment of RHI is dependent on the equipment being insured. This will have an additional bonus in that reliable systems will cost less to insure and therefore challenge the market to improve quality. To an extent, as with the motor insurance trade, this will represent an unofficial but effective additional  regulation of the RHI.

Insulation

Now, the RHI is there to pay an incentive to reduce the use of carbon in heating. But lets say I have a house with an energy bill of £1,000 to heat it. I switch to a Heat Pump and with incentives covering my 2/3rds heating that is carbon free my heating bill comes down to about £300.

But what if I super insulate my house such that I match that reduction in energy use. Or turn my thermostat down by a notch and put on a jumper and save £500? It seems the RHI is focused on making money for people who both have money and choose a technical solution.

cavity wall with additional 2 inches of insulation and weatherboarding

I would exclude water heating from this as this kind of heating requires a proactive response rather than preservation of existing heat.