Solar panels and payback

Possibly it depends on how the cost of the installation was calculated. Possibly it included the energy company selling carbon credits :)

"The stadium sponsor, Utilita Energy, funded the project"

Any information regarding 'renewable energy' is 99% guaranteed to be a lie. Only subsidies make the thing profitable. And I wouldn't bank on them being around that much longer. Despite Red Ed Microbrain.

My panels were installed in 2011 and the break even point was forecast to be 7 years and it was exactly right. My F.I.T. income is higher than my dual fuel outgoings.

The FIT payment scheme you are on is probably a lot more generous than available to anyone installing solar today.

Money Saving Expert web page suggests for a £7k installation cost the savings may be around £300 per annum.

If I cant increase the value of £7k bu at least £700 a year I have bought the wrong financial instrument. What does it cost to wash the birdshot off them?

Since solar produces when all the other panels in the country are producing it's pretty much worthless without subsidy.

It is questionable how much longer politicians will be able to justify such an arrant waste of public money

Panels are very very cheap now. <£100 for a 500W panel, which would give you back about 500kWh pa with optimal positioning:

What costs is the installation: inverter, fixings, access, labour. Those are wildly different depending on your site - an industrial building with a huge roof, existing roof access and simple fixings could be much cheaper to install compared with a domestic property with only space for a few panels, awkward tile mountings and a need for scaffolding.

Something like that building with a lot of roof area sounds like a perfect spot for cheap solar, and they have a giant building that's likely going to consume the energy at any time of day, so it's straight money off their bill.

No brainer.

Theo

Money Saving Expert does suggest not borrowing the £7k for installation as the interest on the loan will wipe out the potential savings for many years and make the payback much longer than ten to fifteen years.

Soon with all this increase in other renewable energy payments for feeding in from solar will be almost zero, except during a cold winter's night :)

Plus, you'd need to discount the cash flow. So more than £700 in that example.

Maintenance is another issue. As is a sinking fund to replace the inverter and batteries, probably within 10 years.

All of this should have been factored in to a quote - which I think is pretty routine.

In my case, 8 reasonably oriented panels and a 5kWh battery was about £7k, with a predicted payback of about 10 years. After 6 months, the prediction looks to be reasonably accurate. Time will tell.

Apart from no VAT, I didn't use any public money.

Another variable that I don't expect everyone else to share is the CO2 saved, although I haven't calculated the net saving - if any. Plus I get a good feeling from generating my own electricity, and not stuffing the pockets of the energy companies. TBH I didn't pay very much attention to the payback when I had them installed.

Your mileage undoubtedly varies.

Roof fixings on my slate pitched roof cost a fair chunk of my overall installation - I'd guess about 15% of the £7000.

Quite. I'm having difficulty understanding the antagonism towards it all.

We may well get a plug-in when it comes time to replace the car, and will then look at getting some panels here to charge it up. I'm just hoping WW3 holds off for long enough for that to be an astute investment.

There are no solar subsidies available. This is purely a business decision.

Homeowners on low incomes may get some grants for better heating/insulation/etc which in limited cases may include solar - that's not a subsidy as such, it's just paying for improvements the householder couldn't otherwise afford, like a new boiler.

Current export tariffs pay less than the import tariffs.

The FIT hasn't been open for new installations since 2019. Folks who signed up on a prior tariff get the terms they signed up for - that's how investment works. They bought panels when they were much more expensive and that's why the FIT subsidy was available - to make the payback time reasonable.

ie all this antagonism is based on out of date arguments from the situation a decade or more ago. The proponents don't seem to have noticed the world has moved on.

The longer you wait the cheaper the panels become, although labour cost inflation may wipe out the saving. That's a point in favour of DIY :-)

I'd really like the price of microinverters to come down, because that would make for an easy DIY install. Unfortunately Enphase dominate the market and prices seem static. There are a few new brands coming on the market which look interesting, but they may not have G.98 approval for the UK:

Possibly another 6 to 7% on health and safety - the scaffolding required to work at heights.

I note new regulation coming soon about the installation of associated batteries. They will no longer be allowed in lofts and if internal to a house the requrement to arrest the spread of fire.

Even the (domestic housing) solar panel installation companies hyping up the payback period are quoting at least 8 years.

On a domestic installation the positioning of the fixed panels is not optimal on the majority of houses. Most households will not use all of the output during the long days in the summer, even with additional batteries, and will not achieve a feed in anywhere near the domestic price cap tariff.

Combine it with a battery and you can run on off peak prices and export at double that price.

TIM

Please indicate which of those schemes applies to the owners of a giant stadium.

Anyhow, those are grants not subsidies. Subsidy pays you an ongoing return as you do whatever thing you are being encouraged to do - generate solar electricity in this case. The grants, as I stated in the paragraph you snipped, give a one-off contribution towards the upfront cost - generally in very limited circumstances (eg a homeowner on benefits).

I don't think you'll find any stadium claiming benefits, and the domestic Feed In Tariff (a per-unit subsidy) has been dead for 5 years.

Theo

That's because the cost of panels is trivial compared with the scaffolding to get on the roof. Let's say you're having a 4kWp setup - that's £800 for the panels, but it'll be ~£1k for the scaffolding alone. Meanwhile this stadium is fitting 1000 panels (cost ~£100k) and probably doesn't need any scaffolding because there's already roof stairs.

Also it's probably a steel roof so maybe you can use simple screw on clamps and an existing electrical riser, while a domestic tile roof needs tiles removing and cutting, brackets fitting, rails installing, wires running, all for a poxy 8 panels.

I'm not sure what kind of inverter they'll use on a 500kWp setup, but it probably costs proportionately less than 125 domestic inverters.

Domestic can be marginal unless you have some of: a) cheap roof access b) cheap fixings c) a good use for the electricity (either regular daytime loads or an EV)

If you can achieve those you can get good payback times, but the solar cowboys are not cutting those costs (all more profit for them).

Theo

One of the Utilita Energy commercial business models is to fund the installation up front and provide the maintenance costs for the first 5 years. These costs form a loan which must be paid back over a 5 year period. The company paying back this loan "owns" the generated electricity. Any electricity that is not locally used is exported at a fixed price set by Utilita Energy. As one of the Utilita Energy web pages indicates - there will only be savings in the first 5 years if the value of the electricity used and the value of the export is greater than the repayments on the loan (and presumably the interest on that loan).

Their other business model is to fund all installation and ongoing maintenance but they "own" all the electricity generated for 30 years. This electricity is sold back at a undisclosed discount to the company where the panels are located.

I assume that if a return on the investment is going to be AFTER (not during) 5 years they have entered a contract for the former scheme. Extrapolating from scant case study figures Utilita Energy have published for a smaller installation the yearly loan repayments may be close to £250k/annum

What subsidies? The ones available to low income households? My (Limited) understanding of such subsidies is that there's very low take-up, and it's for 'light' solar only - no battery for example.

And do you see no benefit for such households - only costs?

I agree broadly with the principle of profit. Are there many of those original highly advantageous FIT recipients about?

Ah. So you're antagonistic because it doesn't suit you. Yet. Got it.