Solar Feed In Tariff Website

Greece has recently gone through the greatest financial crisis to affect a member of the Eurozone since the introduction of the single currency ten years ago. With raging unemployment exacerbated by huge cut-backs in public sector spending, the Athens government spent the first quarter of 2010 faced by riots in the streets, a result of the financial crisis which is hitting the Greeks harder than anybody.

However, plans are afoot to revitalise the stricken Greek economy with the announcement yesterday that 12 billion euros will be invested in green projects in an attempt to create jobs in new renewable industries. In a press release issued by the Greek government, Tina Birbili the Environment Minister said,

“The ministry hopes the programme will decisively contribute to face recession and lead to dynamic economic growth”

Birbili believes that renewable projects could attract around 32 billion euros of investment from around the world creating up to 192,000 jobs. This will at least come as a glimpse of light in a country where unemployment is steadily on the rise and national debt is at an all time high. The EU bailout, funded largely by Germany expires in 2 years, by which point Greece will be hoping that the economy is back on track.

Both Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have been keen exponents of renewable energy as a means of kick-starting the struggling economies of the UK and US respectively. Sound bites such as ‘Green New Deal’ have regularly appeared in the press both sides of the Atlantic in a reference to the government projects of the 1930’s designed to boost recovery after the Great depression. It seems that Greece is going to follow this lead with a number of projects now in the pipeline.

Certainly, with Greece already falling behind other southern European countries with regards to its renewable energy uptake, the investment could provide the vital impetus needed to get the renewable energy industry in Greece on its feet. With targets of generating 40 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, they have their work cut out.

Tags: Gordon Brown, Greek economy, green jobs, green new deal, renewable energy, renewable investment, Solar Feed In Tariff, solar power, Tina Birbili

Hello

Here at Solarfeedintariff we like everybody to share their feelings on solar energy. One of our readers has been kind enough to give his thoughts on his new solar system and the report is below. Please feel free to submit any articles you feel would help educate the world on solar energy.

We have an unshaded South West facing roof at about 45^o angle.  We had scaffolding for some quite substantial roof work, so decided to use the opportunity to have PV panels installed.  Because of a dormer, we had little space and could accommodate only four panels, mounted horizontally, giving us a maximum of just less than 1kw. The supplier was a JHS, a small company in Banbury.

The inverter gives a reading of the current power and total units each day – this gives lots of opportunities for taking readings and doing all sorts of nerdy analysis. Over the first four weeks (July) we are averaging 3.5 units per day.  On about the 15 August the sun will actually hit the panels square on at one point in the day – will this be the best day overall?   Facing SW, the panels do not see the sun at all until after 11 am (BST), until that time we generate more power from bright clouds than blue sky.  Hence it is ideally white cloud until mid morning and then sun – although we do get several hundred watts from bright white clouds.

Getting ourselves registered through our utility company (SSE) took a bit of effort.  The web-site was uninformative, emails were not replied to and I did not have the patience to wait for them to answer telephones.  Writing a letter worked, we were put in touch with the ‘microgeneration’ department and now have a feed-in contract.  There does not yet seem to be a formal scheme for submitting readings of our solar generation, we are asked just to write or email the reading every three months.

There are four ways you save money, three of them legal.  (i) The feed-in tariff, 41.3p per unit generated is very generous.  (ii) For the power you actually use while being generated, you obviously save on your electricity bill – around 11p per unit.  (iii) They also assume (they cannot measure, without extra equipment) that 50% of your power goes back into the grid, effectively this gives you get an extra 1.5p per unit generated.  (iv) If you have an old fashioned meter, the little wheel goes backwards  when you are not using all the power, and this drives the meter backwards – the effect of this is that you are saving 11p per unit on all the power you generate, not just that you use.  I suppose the utility company knows this – the meter does belong to them!

Our installation cost around £6000.  Will we get out money back?  Well at my age (67) maybe not, but we should see a substantial saving each year – and  it’s all been very interesting.

C J Pavelin July 2010

Tags: feed in tariff, micro-generation, p.v, solar energy production, solar energy review, solar panel report, solar pay back time