Reading the election pledges of the parties in the current election, I notice that everyone is trying to jump on the renewable energy bandwagon. I think this is a good thing, however, a couple of things have crossed my mind, partially prompted by a conversation at work recently and some other thoughts I’d had. I also just had a smart meter fitted and it’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t use power.
On a good day, usually a weekday, our household uses around 12kWh of electricity in total in a 24-hour period. On a bad day (2 TV’s running, raining outside (so no outside clothes line), doing laundry (washing and drying), cooking (electric), cleaning (music/TV), ironing and so-forth) we’ll use 17kWh. I don’t think we’re unusual in that respect. Looking at statistics on nPower and E.on’s website, we’re pretty much average, with a normal family with 2 adults and 2 children, using, on average, 14kWh per day.
The conversation at work was around solar panels – photovoltaic cells that you can place on your roof that give you electricity from sunlight. E.On have started selling a new product called ‘Solar Saver‘ for which you pay around £12,000 for them to install some solar panels on your roof. They also then install an inverter (as the power from a PV Cell is DC) and a special meter that not only shows your draw from the grid but also credits you for any surplus energy you put back into the grid – through what they call a Feed-in Tariff. They also claim that an average house will make enough back in their Feed-in paybacks, to pay for their installation in about 12 years.
However, knowing that they use Sharp 2.1kW panel installations, I’m not sure how that would work in the long run. A Sharp panel installation, over an average year, will generate 800kWh per household (figures from the Sharp Solar Brochure). That works out at 2.1kWh per day. So in my case, on an average day, I would still need 11.9kWh from the grid.
The tariffs show that exporting energy back to the provider you only get 2p per kWh exported. Bearing in mind it only generates power during daylight and on an average day you get 14 hours of sunlight, on a 2.1kWh day which works out at a constant stream of 150w. Bearing in mind my smart meter tells me my house uses 340W to 400W on a constant stream even when everything is turned off (don’t forget your fridge, freezer, digital TV boxes, broadband router and cordless phones all use power), so there would be no point where my house’s total power consumption, even on tickover, would drop low enough for me to get any export back unless the PV panels outputted more than 400w in a constant stream. You apparently also get a kick-back on the Feed-In Tariffs, but that’s assuming the change in government doesn’t kill that one off to pay back the debts run up by our wonderful banking sector.
So if my £12,000 initial outlay would pay for itself in 13 years – why don’t the energy companies put their money where their mouth is and fund the installation of the PV cells themselves, and just charge us for the electricity we use from the grid, make the local electric free, and just not pay us back the export payments / Feed-In Tariff payments?
That way they’d apparently make the cost back of the installation of the panel in 13 years and have the green agenda ticked by using people’s houses for electricity generation who wanted to be more green and would be happy to have free PV cells installed.
I get the feeling that would never happen!
Note – if I thought PV cells would make a difference I would have them in a flash – but at the moment they’re just not efficient enough for the cost. Make it £1k instead of £12k and I might consider it. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors figures conflict with the figures given by E.On, giving a payback period of 40-50 years. So in that case, with a lifespan of the panels of around 25 years, they would never pay for themselves, which is why the energy companies aren’t falling over themselves to give them away to you.