Anybody out there fitted/had fitted these to their roof? I was
> thinking about going for it and I went to an installer's "showroom".
> There was a massive frame attached to the roof structure with V. large
> CSA aluminium brackets.
> There were about twenty of them. There were lead sleeves round them > for weathering.
> All told made a hell of a mess of the roof. It sruck me that it would
> cost as much to remove them as to put them on if the worst came to the
> worst. Well I exaggerate a bit. But not much.
>
> Are there any alternative methods of fixing?
>
But someone close to the dofE told me the battle is on to remove as much of the subsidy as is politically acceptable.
Another rumour appeared in Private Eye..that a strong lobby group from the nuclear and other alternative energies not covered by existing ROC legislation are pushing with some possibility of success to get ROCs replaced by a straight tax on carbon fuels. This would have the effect of removing a large part of the subsidy from wind and PV, and making fossil electricity a bit more expensive.
The main reason to do this, is to subsidise nuclear and other things like carbon captured coal , without being seen to subsidise nuclear.
If this did go through in some form..and its only a private eye rumour plus some stuff I learnt talking to a government advisor, the together with a formal policy in the current Energy bill at is set to draw a line under decommissioning nuclear, so as to make the ultimate costs clear to any investors in it, it could finally spell the first move towards this insane rush to buld totally inappropriate 'renewables' everywhere to cash in on a policy that costs a fortune and achieves next to nothing in fossil fuel reduction terms.
But don't hold your breath. Renewables are very lucrative as well as useless, and a lot of people like our very own 'dynamo dave' are hanging on the public tit sucking away like mad and will throw their toys out of the pram before sanity is restored.
Is also deeply awkward for the Liberals (what isn't) who now in government, have been presented with the fact that pretty much their whole energy policy, so beloved of the Greens and the more stupid and naive electorate, would inevitably lead to a complete collapse of the country due to total energy shortage, if it were to be implemented.
Watch out for a completely schizophrenic Huhne, prating on about renewables in public, whilst hastily implementing and a pro coal and nuclear policy behind the scenes.
at least Cable bless him, has had a little moral courage to come out and say 'election promises of a minority coalition party don't count for much in the reality of a complete lack of money, and a partnership with a party that has at least some clue about managing finances'
Those interested in these issues are in, I suspect, for an entertaining year watching positions rapidly shift and be rationalised away..
According to my brother, who seriously looked into it:
The special Feed In Tariff for PV panels is based on nominal figures, based on the size, type and alignment of the panels. As such, the amount you can expect from your FIT payments should be known from the output - and the idea that you could charge 12V batteries from economy 7 and feed it back during the day is a non-starter. They won't pay you any more than the agreed from the outset.
In the end, he wasn't able to take it up, because he couldn't get listed building consent for the roof works needed to allow the panels to be optimally aligned to maximise output.
He's got a CHP boiler instead and now gets a 3p/unit FIT for any excess electricity generated when heating his home.
However, the ability of governments to do what they want is legendary.
And stone throwing vandals to smash things they perceived as costing THEM money as well.
People in glass houses..with solar panels on their rooves... The tide is turning against renewables, thank god.
The main problem is that the politicians will look silly saying so, and the public is still in a state of GreenBliss, believing all the crap the renewable lobby pushes out.
I can - with the aid of ebay - if I could get just net-metering, NOT FIT, construct solar panels that would pay back in 3-5 years.
(with FIT, it'd be 8 monthos or so, which is barking mad)
Doing it less hackily - not assembling panels myself - would still be ~10 years.
A more modest FIT that significantly relaxed the rules would be a lot of use.
For example, there are quite a few people with a garden where a panel can be put on a structure that's little more than a shed, for _considerably_ less money than a 'proper' install.
I'm sure out friends arrangement is a different. They recently ahd a typically-ish domestic system fitted - about 2.4 kw I think.
the FIT is related to the output from the panels, but on their size of system, rather than measure how much you actually fed into the grid net, they just get paid the FIT on a fixed proportion of the output.
On larger systems (not sure of the cutoff point) they use a more complex system.
4kWp is the maximum size for the highest FiT Band. The rating is dictated by the certification of the panels. This would equate to about
32m^2 array area.
In my case I have a ~2kWp array since late January, facing approximately SSE on a 35 deg pitch (from the horizontal) roof. The output is separately metered. I am sure this is mandatory.
You are however also paid for "export". In my case this is unmetered (but it's up to your provider)....I get paid about 3p/unit extra for "deemed export" of 50% of all units generated.
And don't forget that by day you benefit from leccy you don't buy in the first place.
All the payments are index linked and tax free.
In the past 10.5 months about 1830 kWh have been generated....even though shading issues make winter performance non-optimum. I guess it will be about 1870 by the anniversary. My expectation was about 1600 so I am happy.
I've been logging the output so if anybody is vaguely interested here is the graph up to yesterday:
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