Ashely Seager discusses his experience with domestic PV in today’s Guardian. Some of the interesting headline figures include 92% of his family’s annual electricity consumption coming from the PV panels and an estimated ROI of 7%. Pretty good going really, though he points out that the grants fiasco has reduced this return significantly.
More interesting though was his experience in trying to work with different electricity suppliers:
I left Powergen last year because the npower deal was the best on the market. Powergen, you may not be surprised to hear, was really difficult about my going. It couldn’t grasp that my meter had gone backwards and unilaterally added 4,000 kwh (a year’s consumption) to our final bill – daylight robbery, if you will pardon the pun. I had to really battle with them to get a final refund. This whole thing can be a hassle so make sure you choose the right supplier at the outset to avoid having to change.
When academics talk about microgeneration, they refer to it as a socio-technical system. In other words, it’s not good enough for the technology to work; the business model, regulations, and all the other little bits have to be in place for the technology to be widely adopted. If the billing departments and call centres of electricity suppliers think that microgenerators are somehow defying the laws of physics, then there’s still a long way to go before adopting microgeneration becomes easy and commonplace (even if the price was right).
As a postscript, I also liked this blurb. A year or two earlier and the Seagers would have made excellent case studies for my DPhil.
What has been interesting is the effect it has had on us as a family. You might think generating your own power would make you relaxed about leaving lights on or the TV on standby. But the contrary is true. It has woken us all up to the realities of energy use. The computer, TV, lights, everything, we now turn off at the wall when they are not in use. We have some of those remote control switches to turn off wall sockets that are hard to get to. In future when we go on holiday, we will empty the fridge and freezer and switch them off. The challenge now is to raise that 92% figure to 100%.
The tumble dryer has long gone, and I feel that hair-dryer use may be excessive.
