Finding the chase and cutting to it

Much has been in the news lately about the removal of subsidies for home owners who are deciding to move to micro generation of electricity through the use of solar panels.

We were in the 2nd wave of adopters and missed out on the 17p per unit feed in tariff or FIT.  To be honest though, that isn’t why I am writing.

We moved in to a house without solar cells.  It did however have a south facing roof which made it a logical move.

FIT is great, do not get me wrong.  We’re getting around £400 annually from this.  Solar generation though is providing move than the income from FIT: the graph to the left shows (in dark blue) our electricity consumption per quarter.

Solar cells mean we’re using less electricity from the grid.  Full stop, that’s something no-one can take away from us.

We’re benefiting most during the summer months, as we live in the northern hemisphere and there are less day light hours providing good energy levels during the winter.

That’s really the point: if the feed in tariff disappears, everyone with solar cells will have no incentive to feed in.  That disappears.  We generate around 4MWh a year.  We use around 4.5MWh a year, currently (1.2MWh of that is for transport, with the Leaf).  At the moment, much of what we’re generating, we’re not directly using.

So?

So we’ll get a battery, which will reduce further the amount of energy generation the UK will need.  Which would make it completely unprofitable to do electricity in a large scale if everyone did that.

In fact, we’d be tempted to go the whole hog, potentially, and get a combined hear and power boiler.  At £6K they cost around the same as photovoltaic cells generating electricity but the are a great complement as when you’re heating the house, it tends to be when the sun isn’t shining.

For the UK in general, that could mean the end of our reliance on fossil fuels for central electricity generation, but it wouldn’t be as efficient or as well maintained.

Has this been considered to the full?

What about the Leaf?  Is that making a huge difference?

Actually, no.  Since we installed the home charging point in June 2014, we’ve charged the car with 1.2MWh of electricity – about £168.

In total the car has had 2.4MWh of electricity since January 2014.  So we’re getting around a third from home, the rest while out and about (although we don’t know how long that will last).

If we didn’t have the electric car, the solar cells would be producing pretty much all our needs, albeit, not necessarily when we want to use the generated energy.

But that is very cheap driving.  £336 for 18 months worth of journeys or 3-4p a mile if we’d bought the electricity from the grid – much less if we generated it!