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Science Forum Index » Energy Forum » 3% tax free return on home solar power
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| habshi |
 Posted: Fri Apr 18, 2008 6:57 pm |
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What Germany is doing should be copied by all countries so
economies of scale can make home solar even more lucrative.
It was with some trepidation that I went into the cellar this week to
take some meter readings in order to find out how the solar panels we
had fitted on our house exactly a year ago have been performing. Was
the hefty sum of £8,500 we forked out last year a good investment or a
waste of money?
Well, the news is better than I had expected. We, a family of four,
have produced 92% of our electricity usage from the roof of a
century-old terraced house in south-east London - laying to rest the
idea that Britain is not sunny enough for solar power. It also
disproves any suggestion this sort of technology only works in
state-of-the-art, modern detached houses.
Not only will we not pay for any electricity, we should get a rebate
of about £50 once a payment from the so-called renewables obligation
(RO) scheme, which rewards microgeneration schemes with cash, is
included.
In all, the saving for the past year will be around £500, giving a
return on our investment of 6%, which is not subject to tax. Next
year, when the payments from the RO scheme will double for
photovoltaic (PV) solar installations, we will get about £150 back,
giving a total return of 7%. That will rise further if energy prices
continue to climb - which is likely after oil prices hit yet another
high this week.
There is an important caveat here. I received a 50% grant for the
system from the government's low-carbon buildings programme - the
total cost of buying and installing the panels was £17,000.
Unfortunately, the government is so pathetic at supporting low-carbon
technologies that it last year cut the maximum grant to £2,500 because
the scheme was so popular. As a result, demand has collapsed to the
extent that the small company that fitted my system has gone out of
business.
That means your return on a system purchased now will be lower -
little more than 3% for one like mine this year, rising to close on 4%
when the RO payments increase next year. Still, 4% that is not taxable
is comparable to a building society account that you do pay tax on.
What is particularly annoying about all this is that in Germany, where
a proper system of support has boosted volumes - the Germans kitted
out 130,000 houses with solar PV last year, while the UK managed less
than 300 - costs have fallen dramatically and a system like mine would
only cost about £9,000 without a grant.
Our system works by producing power - up to 3 kilowatts - during the
day and exporting much of it to the grid because we are out at work
and school most days. It's fun to watch our old-fashioned meter
spinning backwards when the sun is shining. We get 12p per kilowatt
hour (kwh) for what we export, though we pay more for what we import
in the evenings. But the RO payment of £105 makes up the difference.
Mind you, in Germany, we would get about 35p/kwh. No wonder the
Germans have gone mad for PV.
We are now with npower, although Scottish and Southern Energy offers a
flat 18p/kwh including the RO payment which, in terms of sheer
simplicity, has to be a winner, although my 12p plus RO is equivalent
to around 18p. They also fit an export meter for free whereas npower
estimates our exports at 50% of what we produce. I will soon have a
new meter fitted because none of the power companies likes the idea of
them turning backwards.
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.
Just as exciting as our solar output was the fact that, at the same
time as fitting the panels, we took a bunch of measures in the house
to cut our electricity consumption. We changed every bulb in the house
(except the fridge and microwave) to low-energy ones, and replaced our
ageing fridge and freezer. Meanwhile, our electric oven packed up last
summer, so we replaced it with a gas one, figuring that generating
heat with gas was probably a lower-carbon solution than doing it with
electricity.
The upshot is that we cut our electricity use from 4,000 kilowatt
hours a year over the previous five years to a tad under 3,000 kwh, a
reduction of 25%. As our 3kw peak solar panels produced 2,730 kwh over
the year, we only used about 250 kwh of electricity from the grid.
The PV system is not even on a south-facing roof - it faces south-east
- and is at a shallower angle than would be ideal. But still it
performed well, and will go on doing so for decades. The estimate of
panel "degradation", or loss of performance, is said to be 0.5% a
year, so negligible.
People seem fixated with asking how many years the system will take to
pay back. I could answer the question at the current yield of 6%, but
that is up to 7% next year, so the payback time will shorten. And if
oil prices continue to rise, pushing up electricity prices, my yield
will rise and the payback will shorten. So it is impossible to
predict.
But all that misses the point. The system represents an improvement to
the house that saves money. So it should generate a higher sale value
if I move. People don't ask what the payback time is of a new kitchen
or bathroom - also home improvements - so why do they ask about a
carbon-saving technology?
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. But in a family with two girls, that may prove a struggle.
However, I have my eye on the electric toothbrushes next! We are also
turning our attention to our use of gas. Last year, our boiler packed
up (it was an expensive year!) so we fitted a new, condensing one
which will use less gas. And I am going to double the thickness of the
loft insulation.
Longer term, I plan to fit a solar thermal system which should provide
between 50% and 70% of our hot water. Then it would probably be worth
plumbing a hot-water feed into the dishwasher and washing machine
rather than using cold water heated by electricity.
If any readers have views on this, please let me know. The aim is to
see how little energy a fairly average Victorian terraced house can
use and what the costs involved are. So far, it has been about £10,000
to achieve the electricity savings mentioned above.
The additional loft insulation will be a few hundred pounds. A solar
thermal system will be about £3,500.
money@guardian.co.uk
.....
The company's 25 kilowatt SunCatcher dishes are 38 feet in
diameter, covered with 82 curved glass mirrors. The system tracks the
sun and focuses the solar heat onto the heater head of a Stirling
engine, mounted right on the dish.
Using hydrogen, the heat and subsequent cooling off of the gas powers
the engine.
"When you heat it, it pushes the piston, when you cool it, it
contracts," said Osborn. "Then we just very quickly and efficiently
alternately heat and cool to expand and contract, expand and
contract."
"You're not burning the gas, you're not consuming it, it's all
closed-system," he said. For cooling, Osborn said they "run it through
a radiator, much like your automobile."
The system pairs up two technologies which have been around for quite
some time.
The Stirling engine was invented in Scotland almost two centuries ago,
meant to be a safer alternative to steam engines.
As for solar thermal, that dates back as far as seventh century B.C.,
with people said to have used burning mirrors to light fires.
Phoenix-based Stirling Energy Systems has received its first big round
of funding, putting the concentrating solar power company closer to
reaching its goal of generating up to 1,750 megawatts of electricity
in the deserts of Southern California |
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| habshi |
| Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 7:05 pm |
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This is a good idea , internet can save a lot of travel. A bit
like mobile phone masts. Also note human numbers have jumped from just
2,000 just 40,000 years ago to 7b today!!
excerpts
This gave rise to separate human communities localised to
eastern and southern Africa that evolved in isolation for between
50,000 and 100,000 years
Modern humans are often presumed to have originated in East Africa and
then spread out to populate other areas. But the data could equally
support an origin in southern Africa followed by a migration to East
and West Africa.
The genetic data show that populations came back together as a single,
pan-African population about 40,000 years ago.
"Although there is very deep divergence in the mitochondrial lineages,
that can be different from inferring when the populations diverged
from one another and there can be many demographic scenarios to
account for it," she told BBC News.
She added: "As a general rule of thumb, when mitochondrial genetic
lineages split, it will usually precede the population split. It can
often be difficult to infer from one to the other."
The University of Pennsylvania researcher stressed it was not possible
to pinpoint where in Africa the populations had once lived -
complicating the process of reconstructing scenarios from genetic
data.
The Genographic Project's findings are also consistent with the idea -
held for some years now - that modern humans had a close brush with
extinction in the evolutionary past.
The number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before
numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age
excerpt dawn.com
New wireless WiMAX technology shows it possible to achieve
download speed of up to 65 Mbps at close range to users. This would be
sufficient to plug many of the gaps in the Internet infrastructure
quickly and at much lower cost and inconvenience than digging up roads
to lay new cable.
This is the need of the hour that the government should help and work
in tandem with companies like Wateen and Wi-Tribe (QTel) for the
promotion of WiMAX so that all the able-bodied people of Pakistan
residing in towns and cities other than the three privileged ones
mentioned above could have an access to the information that is
everyone’s right.
....
Scientists hunting an invisible form of matter that pervades
the universe and holds galaxies together claim to have found it
underneath a mountain in Italy.
The discovery, at a laboratory built deep into the Gran Sasso mountain
in Abruzzo, could end a 70-year race to find the elusive “dark matter”
that physicists believe accounts for 90 per cent of the mass of the
universe. Its existence was first postulated in 1933 by a Swiss
astronomer who observed that distant galaxies must be held together by
a huge gravitational pull caused by some apparently invisible form of
matter. It gained the name “dark matter” because it does not shine or
reflect light.
Researchers led by Rita Bernabei at the University of Rome claim that
a giant detector inside the mountain laboratory has picked up signs of
dark matter. The signal suggests that it could be made of theoretical
particles known as axions. The discovery was announced at a physics
conference in Venice. The experiment was designed to detect dark
matter in space as the earth flies through it |
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| habshi |
| Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 6:01 pm |
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These houses dont need any heating or air conditioning ,
inspired by ice9 , adding crystals to wood
Very exciting Video on
http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10007
Michael Sykes, a builder from North Carolina, has created a
home that can heat and cool itself using only solar energy. The
principle at work is "phase change." Sykes has engineered the resin in
the wood he builds with to change phase at 70 degrees F. The resin
goes from liquid to solid and back to liquid again at room
temperature. The phase change allows the walls to soak up and trap
vast amounts of heat during the day--cooling the room. At night, the
wood releases the heat and warms the home. In this video |
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