Japan may announce preferential price rates this month for electricity generated from renewable energy in a program that will start in July to encourage investment in non-fossil fuel power plants.

A five-person panel have been discussing the preferential rates, known as feed-in tariffs, since March 6 and will hold their sixth meeting on April 25.

Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry hopes to receive the recommended rates by April 27, which will then need government approval, Keisuke Murakami, who heads clean energy programs at the ministry, said today.

The feed-in tariff guarantees above-market rates for solar, wind, geothermal, biomass and hydroelectric power. The Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association proposed 42 yen (52 cents) a kilowatt-hour for 20 years for solar power. For wind, the Japan Wind Power Association suggested as much as 25 yen a kilowatt- hour for the same period.

Murakami said no decision had been made about rates for solar power in response to a Nikkei newspaper report today that said the rate will be 42 yen a kilowatt-hour for about 20 years. The newspaper didn’t state the source of its information.

By : Bloomberg

When connecting a solar power system to the grid, the application process involves submission of a form to the relevant Distribution Network Operator (DNO). Which form and when are two important matters covered in this article.

Read the full article here

Registering Solar Generators with the DNO

Depending on who you ask these days, different sized systems require different application forms be sent to the DNO. The general expectation is that the larger a system, the more preemptive information is required to be transferred. Let’s look at the two main forms that will affect systems of 4kWp and smaller.

Small Scale Generator and the G83

Systems deemed to be under 16 amps per phase are considered ‘small scale’. They can be installed straight away and registered by submitting a G83 form to the DNO following the installation. EON has a copy of their G83 form here for download.

In order to establish if your generator is under 16 amps per phase, it is best to consult with your solar installer. The correctly trained electrical staff they have on hand will be able to assist. As a rule of thumb, systems under 3.6kWp will be under the 16 amps limit the vast majority of the time. However, seeing as the feed-in tariff changes after 4kWp this presents a grey area for installations between 3.6kWp and 4kWp.

Large Generation and the G59

For generators over 16 amps per phase it is a legal requirement for the DNO to be consulted prior to an installation taking place. In addition, a G59 form (download here) is required to be submitted. The process of a DNO reviewing and returning a successful G59 can take up to 8 weeks.

Obviously the important aspect of this process is establishing the amp levels of the proposed solar power installation with the installer’s electrician. The tilt, orientation and location of a solar generator can affect the amps, so it is vital that anyone installing systems from 3.6kWp upwards establishes the correct process for registering their system. This is especially the case with the deadlines of April 1st and July 1st 2012.

Written by Jarrah Harburn

Next week’s Budget is likely to deal a further blow to Government promises to create jobs and tackle soaring fuel bills by building a clean economy and safeguarding our environment, Friends of the Earth warned today (Friday 16 March 2012).

The environment charity is urging the Prime Minister, who promised to lead the “greenest Government ever”, to ensure George Osborne keeps his pre-election pledge for “the Conservative Treasury to be in the lead of developing the low carbon economy and financing a green recovery”.

There are growing concerns that next week’s Budget will lead to:

• Little action on developing a clean, low-carbon economy
o The UK’s dependency on expensive fossil fuel imports has led to rocketing fuel bills. Developing the UK’s vast wind, wave and solar potential would create thousands of jobs and boost our energy security. But George Osborne has shown little enthusiasm for getting the UK off the fossil fuel hook – and recently inaccurately claimed that moves to boost a clean economy are responsible for driving up energy bills.

• A reduction in safeguards for wildlife and the countryside
o The results of Government reviews of planning and environmental regulations are expected to be announced alongside the Budget. This could pave the way for more building in the countryside and less protection for our wildlife. George Osborne recently told MPs he wanted to make sure that “gold plating of EU rules on things like habitats” were not putting “ridiculous costs” on firms – despite little, if any, evidence to back up this claim.

Friends of the Earth’s Policy and Campaigns Director Craig Bennett said:

“In opposition the Chancellor pledged to lead the fight to create new jobs and tackle soaring fuel bills – and keeping his promise to develop a clean future is the best way to fix our broken economy.

“We must free ourselves from the shackles of our reliance on costly fossil fuels by switching to clean British energy, which is the only way to give us affordable power in the long term.

“David Cameron’s silence on this issue is deafening – he must remind his Chancellor that the best way to build a strong economy is to build a clean economy.”

Responding to George Osborne’s stated intention to “make sure that gold plating of EU rules on things like Habitats aren’t placing ridiculous costs on British businesses”, Craig Bennett added:

“There are many reasons why the economy is struggling, but measures to protect our precious wildlife sites are not one of them.”

The whole idea of this feed-in-tariff business is that you earn money by selling units of energy produced by your solar panels. So much so that after 25 years of operation you’ve made your money back and have even turned a tidy profit. This means that in order to know whether putting up some solar panels makes any sense, you need to know exactly how much energy they’re going to produce over the 25-year guarantee period.

Easy, you might say – the calculation is pretty straightforward. You find out the average annual irradiation (sunnyness level) from your local weather station, and multiply by the efficiency of your solar panels and the number of square metres you have. This will give you a nice number and away we go. The only problem is you might be more than 50% wrong because we’ve missed out a couple of variables. Variables such as temperature coefficient, tilt angle, diffuse-light fraction, solar cell type, shading losses, inverter losses, cable losses, degradation, module de-rate factor, mismatch losses, anti-reflective coatings, snow and lightning strikes, to name a few.

Of course there are an infinite number of effects that can influence the output of your photovoltaic system (solar eclipse, anyone?). The question is whether you have considered the important ones or not.

Knowledgeable installers use one of a number computer programs designed specifically to take these factors into account. You type in what type of solar panel you’re using, how many, where they are, what angle they’re tilted at, what direction they’re facing and then press ‘go’. It then calculates the amount of energy you’ll produce each month and even the return on investment if you want it to. Behind these models is actually some physics that describes the behaviour of solar cells under different light intensities and correctly.

The most commonly used model in Europe is called PVSyst, developed at the University of Geneva. This software package contains information on a large number of different solar panel types and is capable of taking into account many of the above listed factors. Installers across Europe use this software package to predict the energy yield of residential solar systems, as do many banks pondering whether to provide multi-million euro loans to super-large PV power projects. Even with this advanced software package however, some of these factors are very complex, and improving these models is an active area of research.

Here, I’ll deal with a couple of these complications as examples. When you buy a solar panel, it invariably comes with a power rating. Full size modules are generally around 200W. What does this mean though? In principle, the power rating indicates what you get when the panel is illuminated by full-sunlight. ‘Full sunlight’ is not very specific, so the international community has defined what is known as Standard Test Conditions (STC), which corresponds to an irradiation of 1000 W/m2 and a cell temperature of 25oC, when the light has a specific spectrum (or colour) known as Air Mass Index 1.5. So the power of your solar panel comes from its performance under exactly these conditions. In general this is measured using special type of lamp called a ‘solar simulator’ that tries to reproduce the AM1.5 spectrum as closely as possible. Calibrating these lamps precisely is notoriously difficult and there are very few testing centers around the world that are truly trusted. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, USA uses at least two different lamps and one outdoor measurement to record STC performance, after a long period of calibration.

Because measuring the STC performance is so tricky, the power rating you get has a plus or minus 5 percent error margin. This is hard to include in your simulation. In addition, manufacturers will often deliberately under-rate the power of their solar panels to be sure they don’t fall below the warranty. This means you may well get considerably more power than you expect.

Another factor that adds to uncertainty is the degradation factor. When you buy solar panels they are normally guaranteed for 20 years, but only to 80% of the initial power output. This means the manufacturer expects them to degrade 1% per year on average. When calculating performance in the models, people also tend to use a 1% degradation rate per year. This is only a rough estimate however. During the certification process, solar panels are given all sports of nasty treatment to test their reliability to breaking point. This doesn’t tell you much about the rate of degradation when the solar panels are outside under normal operation though. The only reliable way to test degradation over 20 years is to wait 20 years, but this is complicated by the fact that technology improves reliability much faster than that. So the degradation of solar panels made in 2008 has only been tested since, well, 2008.

What these issues highlight is that understanding the energy yield output of your solar panels is not as straightforward as it may at first seem. When having your system designed, make sure who-ever you’re dealing with has some experience, and if possible, get a second opinion.

The other critical piece of information for understanding the financial viability of a solar installation is how much you will get paid per kWh under the feed-in-tariff. Unfortunately, the UK government has not released the final figures yet, which means no-one in the UK can make a reliable financial plan for getting solar panels, even when the launch date for the feed-in-tariff is just 4 months away.

Hopefully I will be able to update you on this in the near future. For now though, it’s better to be more conservative with your numbers than too ambitious….