Solar Power

 Yeah, I know, my posts are much too serious, so here is something much less dystopian.

Our solar panels have now been in place for 4 years as of April 16th, so I can now show some decent average figures.  Actually, it took me a few days to get round to connecting the WIFI dongle on the inverter to our router, and a couple of days more to be bothered to download the app, so these figures are very slightly low.

In total we have generated 12.406MWh of electricity, that is an average of 3101.5 units (1 unit = 1KWh) produced per year.  The estimate when we were buying the system was for around 2700 units, so I cannot complain.  Peak production for a single day so far is 27.5 units but there have been grey and rainy days even in June where the system only produced 1 or 2 units, so if you wanted to live off grid, you would need a much more extensive and complex system that the one we have.

Now the bit I hate.  Our local electricity supplier charges 29.06p per KWh, but pays only 14.22p per KWh (as of my last payment, this payment may have gone up slightly).  Lets assume that we had exported all of the electricity we have produced to the grid at the rate above.  Our income from the solar panels would than be. £1764.13, but if I were to buy the same amount of electricity from the grid, I would have to pay £3605.18.  That is one hell of a difference!  

The panels cost about £5200 to install, so the payback period, if all our electricity was exported would be approximately 11 years and 9 months.  This long payback period is something I mentioned in my last post on our solar panels, and is due to the rubbish (some would say corrupt) government here in Northern Ireland who so grossly mismanaged a green energy scheme years ago that it had to be discontinued (funny though, loads of their supporters managed to make shed loads of cash from it first).  Anyway, while the rest of the UK get grants for solar, we don't, and this situation must affect the number of solar installations here.  Perhaps things will improve.  Perhaps too, pigs will fly!

As mentioned before, the way to make the panels economically viable, is to use as much of the electricity generated as possible, rather than exporting it to the grid.  If you have read my previous post on this, our solution was to fit a sensor that turns on our immersion heater when it detects that electricity is being exported.  If we had fitted a pressurised gas heating system, as most houses here now have, this would not be possible, but fortunately we kept our hot water cylinder, so this was the best solution for us.  I estimate that it saves us about 800 to 100 litres of heating oil per year, and this, along with reducing our electric bills and the small income from the electricity we do export, reduces the payback time to around the 5 to 6 year mark.  Add to that the environmental benefits, and yes, solar is a big, maintenance free winner.  I'm glad we fitted them.