Category: solar

Sooo.. at long last I’ve just made the first deposit payment for getting my much-talked-about solar panels installed. This has been at least 5 years in the making. ‘Sheesh’ etc…

This is what I’m getting:

A 2.15kWp system.

10 x MPE 215 PS05 schuco modules. Total area 14.96 square meters installed in 2 rows of 5 at ground level. (roof is unsuitable).

A sunny boy SB2500HF-30 Inverter.

The quote says that it should generate 1845.56 kWh per year. They calculate that if I use all that power (and I will) it will save me £230.70 a year based on 12.5p/unit electricity cost (bound to rise dramatically over the lifetime of the panels). (however my current provider charges 11.52p/unit).

edit: just investigated and in the last year we used 4,134 kwh, so this set of panels is slightly under half my total usage.  I bet that’s because we have an electric cooker…

In addition, the feed in tariff would pay 1,845 * 43.3p = £799.13 a year.

Total income is thus £1,029.82 per year.

Total installation cost is £10,608.

Assume the panels are worthless after 20 years, I’ll earn £21,216 over that, which would be a gain of £11,000. I can see that the performance of the panels will degrade by then, but I strongly suspect energy prices will rise enough to more than compensate. I also can’t see the feed-in tariff being reduced or abolished for existing installs by any government of any color.

Obviously the panels may not generate the described amount. There is some shading in the garden (bah!). And I’m not going to cry into my tea if the output is below maximum.

Interestingly, the cost of the panels+inverter dropped about £1,000 in the last 8 months. Also of interest is that VAT on them is charged at only 5% (although tbh, if the government really want to kickstart a domestic renewables industry that needs to be 0, not 5%).

Fun fun.

No point in me talking about my new game today. People are swooning over E3 videos :D

 

I develop on a PC with 2 monitors. 1 is a 21 inch iiyama monitor and the other is a 24 inch iiyama. They are both great, but they are different sizes, and resolutions. There is a tiny part of me that thinks this is inconvenient enough to justify buying another 24 inch one. There is also the rest of me, the rational me, that knows this is nonsense.

Maybe I’m just in an irritable mood. My local council was supposed to rule on our solar-panels planning application yesterday. They did not do so. It’s still undecided, despite us originally submitting it in OCTOBER 2010, and there being zero objections.

One day, the useless, time-wasting, lazy idiots that work in such places will be thrown into the real world to get a real job in the private sector, and it will be like a hurricane has hit them.

Bah.
Work trundles along on mystery next game. It looks quite nice now, and the tools almost work, which means one day I’ll have proper maps and units in there. One day, there will be screenshots. One day :D

 

Regular readers of this blog might know that one of my long term goals is to get solar power hooked up at my house, a task massively complicated by it being a listed building, and the planning authority being bureaucratic gits. Anyway… we finally have the planning notice nailed to our fence awaiting neighbours comments (there won’t be any, nobody even walks past our house), so the wheels are in motion. I know some people are trendily anti-green-energy, so I thought I’d lay out my motivation:

1) Energy prices.

Clicky here: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/prices/prices.aspx to get unbiased figures, and you will discover that from 2005, UK domestic electricity prices have risen by 55% since 2005. Yup, that’s 55%. In 6 years. Assuming my panels last at least 12 years, they will preside over another (v roughly) doubling of electricity costs. We aren’t building new coal or new nuclear in the UK, and the severn barrage has been turned down, so I don’t see supply rising in those 12 years. Meanwhile the population rises and people keep buying domestic gadgets that drain power, plus people buying plug in hybrids soon will only add to the demand. Plus a greener future government could levy a tax on energy that raises prices even more. I expect the price to have tripled by 2020, personally.

2) Feed-In-Tariff.

It’s VERY generous, and some people resent this, but it’s there for a reason. It’s to make solar panels a no-brainer for the home-owner and kick-start our market. There is literally no good reason other than aesthetic to not stick them on your roof if you have a south-facing one. You are literally burning money with it sat in a savings account, on the roof, the returns are higher :D It says a lot about how behind Germany we are that even with such a high incentive, people are not doing this.

3) Geekiness / Green-ness

I’m a fully fledged Geek AND I’m a committed tree-hugger, so it’s no surprise that I want some cool geeky tech. I reckon if nothing else, the panels will 100% power everything in my home office, meaning positech can claim to be a carbon neutral game developer. bwahahaha! Plus, I like the idea that occasionally the energy company has to pay ME money.

We should know in roughly a months time if we get the go-ahead. The company to install them has been chosen, the site selected, the money (£10k) set aside at last. It’s only some jobsworth in the local council who could stop me, and if they turn it down, we will appeal. I’m a stubborn bastard, if I have to drive to London and personally harass the energy secretary to overturn it (they have that power) I will do so. Expect a ton of geeky photos and details and stats and analysis of the things if I ever get them installed. Once I’ve recovered from my celebration hangover obviously…

Not long ago I actually left the house and went shopping. Obviously I didn’t actually buy anything, but I did end up in an apple store, for the first time ever, fondling an ipad. I used to be an apple hardware engineer, so I have no hatred of them, but I haven’t ever owned anything more than an ipod. Anyway…

I just don’t get it.

I can see that it’s a geek fantasy to have a ‘padd’ from star trek as a geek toy, I can imagine all sorts of cool commercial uses for it, I bet a lot of admin staff in airports or warehouses or any sort of travel hub or whatever, have a legit use for something like the ipad. In other words, places where you are stood up and consulting notes now and then.

But at home… no.

Basically if me and my better half are surfing the net, or wanted to look at photos or whatever, then My default position is to stick my feet up on a pouffe, slouch like a student on the sofa, and park a laptop on my legs/belly. This works perfectly. The keyboard acts as the base, and the screen is constantly adjustable to get the perfect viewing angle.

With an ipad, I’d have to hold the stupid thing, or grab a cushion to prop it up, or some other silliness. I also find it much easier to control whats on the screen with keys or a touchpad, so I can still…you know…SEE the screen as I do it. The first dozen times you zoom in by splodging your hands on the screen is cool, but isn’t this just the silly tom cruise interweb interface again? (I admit it is cool to turn pages this way though).

Seriously…who reads like this? (img from http://www.grip-it-strips.co.uk/)

I also don’t think the ipad is especially thin, or lightweight, compared to a fairly high-range lightweight laptop. Obviously, I didn’t buy one, I also think it’s hilariously pricey for what it is. So tell me, what am I missing? Am I just lazier than everyone else? am I just tragically uncool? Or after a month of fiddling with your ipad do you wish it was the same form factor as a netbook?

I’ve been working for hours on the campaign, so this is my break:

I emailed the solar company yesterday and finally said yes. That is the end result of a long torturous period of talking to different companies about potential installations, and looking at a total of 4 different roof locations, before eventually sadly concluding that they would have to be ground mounted.

What I’ve said yes to is an array of 10 PV  panels, in 2 groups of 5, in a portrait orientation, so as to minimise the width of the array, as the shading from the trees and the house take place at each end at the start and end of the day, thus minimzing overall shading. This means the array is likely to be about 5 meters by 3 meters in size, and means there is less room for parking, which is fine because this is the money I’d otherwise have bought a newer car with anyway :D

The panels themselves will be schuco MPE 215 (215watt) modules. The inverter will be a sunny boy, with a remote monitoring system called a sunny beam. If I can find out how to code a blog page widget to show current solar output, I will :D.

The installers (no doubt optimistic) estimate is for it to generate 2.15kwp which is 1,792KWH per year. Thats £740.19 in feed in tariff and a saving of roughly £268.33 per year. Thats a total of £1,009.02 per year on an investment of roughly £11k. Thats a ROI of  9.1%, or ‘much better than any bank account’. Now you see why I’m doing it :D If the power generated was 50% lower, it’s *still* a good investment…

HOWEVER. All this assumes that I get a) Listed Building consent and b) Planning permission. I am optimistic, but planning people can be very prickly. Quite *why* anyone could object to them is beyond me as you can only see the site from physically in our garden, plus they don’t even touch the house. I’m still nervous about getting an answer though.

I’ve wanted solar panels for about 10 years now, but I won’t believe it’s really happening until I have them working. The plus side to all this is the proposed site is right outside my office window, which is kinda cool.

Now back to debugging…