At a recent high-profile conference on solar energy in London, one of the battle-weary participants advised that anyone who was keen to make the most from PV should now best emigrate.
This fairly sums up the frustration with the government’s PV feed-in tariffs debacle in the last few months. It also constitutes a stark reminder to us all that without subsidies, PV modules do indeed belong in far-away, sunny climes where they are best able to pay off their manufacturing pollution deficit. In the meantime, no-one could fail to notice the stampede of small PV arrays appearing on UK household roofs, not wholly unconnected to a plethora of full-page newspaper adverts offering ‘free solar’ without capital outlay to selected roof owners.
Against this backdrop of suspicion and ker-ching!, the eagerly-awaited Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) announcement has now arrived. Intended to revive the faltering renewable heat market, it in fact contains – predictably – few concrete details and raises more questions than it answers. Suffice to say there is an offer of payment from central government funds for generating renewable heat. When this might take effect is a different matter.
The RHI is unfortunately going to be judged in the same light as the PV FIT, which revealed that the British populace is far more interested in its own bank account than saving the world. The problem here is that accurate fiscal analysis of capital investments is not the nation’s favourite pastime. In a nutshell, then, you are likely to get at least five times more tariff cash per kWh generated for PV for 25 years than solar thermal for 20 years, but it requires at least twice the capital outlay and four times the roof area. Crunch the figures in your own way, but solar thermal has been left on the proverbial starting line with not only a misfiring engine but its wheels missing too.
It gets worse for solar thermal given that some of the key innovative areas in mainland Europe – such as commercial solar air heating cladding and large-scale district heating – have been targeted for exclusion in the government’s proposals. These sectors alone are capable of spearheading the needed cost reductions in skills and production, but their fate appears doomed in the UK. This is a classic example of government policy interfering in a market that it has so far shown neither empathy nor logic.
Naturally enough, with the subsidies so skewed in PV’s favour, we are now seeing new electrical switchgear products that benefit PV. The bad news for solar water heating is that one of these quite sensibly encourages water heating immersion heaters to be automatically switched-on when the sun shines, rather than exporting the energy to the grid. Without skewed subsidies, this wouldn’t have previously made sense given that solar thermal is four times more efficient at converting the sun’s energy. Although PV initially appears to be a technology able to shun the chains of localised storage, a report by the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) ‘Integrating Renewable Electricity on the Grid’ (pdf here) suggests that the variable nature of solar and wind resources mean that a national renewable electricity contribution would be difficult to reach without storage devices. This will all be painful news to combi-boiler owners aspiring to have PV on their roof as they will rarely have electrical immersion heater back-up. Perhaps one day house buyers will independently see greater value in heat storage rather than so much reliance on instantaneous devices.
Whatever their motives, the huge upsurge of households now engaging with solar energy is at least a small step towards creating a substantive low CO2 economy. At policy level, nevertheless, there are enough indicators with red flashing warning lights to demand caution. Take the study which found that the Elm Tree Mews development in York – designed to meet targets set for 2013 – had heat losses of more than 50 percent higher than intended in the design, and that renewable heating systems were not performing as they should. REAL Assurance, which underlies household renewable subsidies, has already had to attend to 100 serious complaints this year. On top of this, the BBC recently highlighted micro generation rogues on their website pretending to be MCS registered installers.
The statutory consumer body Consumer Focus, in its response to consultation on a micro generation strategy, highlighted high pressure sales techniques as the principle cause of consumer complaints in the solar PV market. Issues included sales representatives:
- offering 20 per cent discount on prices during their visit
- staying six hours in their home
- offering a large discount for monitoring
- demanding 35 per cent of the contract price as a deposit
- Solar thermal panel in Australia
Ironically, sales people were slated in the same report for offering solar thermal sales materials at the same time as selling solar PV systems! Unless this is a vendetta against solar water heating, this would suggest that even though there may be more situation-appropriate measures than PV on offer, such as cavity wall or loft insulation, these too might not be in the customer’s interests to mention.
With so much contradictory messaging and confusion, perhaps emigration makes the most sense for both solar thermal and PV after all!
