RICS Exchanged

Spring/Summer 2011

Green living: power up

Generating your own energy at home could drastically reduce your energy bills. With the initial outlay often being waived by companies or with the opportunity to sell your excess electricity to the National Grid, going green can really pay off.

Be ahead of the pack and turn your home into a profit-making mini power station. Install a wind turbine or photovoltaic (solar) panels on your roof and you could generate even more electricity than you need and sell the excess back to the National Grid. So not only are you seeing your electricity bills shrinking, but you’re getting extra income too.

The initial outlay for a solar panel system is between £10,000 and £20,000. For a mast-mounted wind turbine you’re looking at between £15,000 and £24,000, but you can also get a smaller roof mounted micro-wind system for about £2000.

The initial outlay is quite substantial, but depending on your circumstances, you may find you’re eligible for a grant to help towards this cost. And, once you’re generating electricity, you will also start generating income too. The government-backed ‘Feed-in Tariff’ actually pays you an incentive fee for all the electricity you generate. In addition, when you generate more electricity than you need personally you can sell this excess back to the National Grid. You get quite a decent return on the initial investment as you should also see your electricity bills fall by around a third a year. It is estimated that most people should break even in 10 to 15 years.

If you can’t afford this initial outlay, some green energy companies will install solar panels for free or for a fraction of the price, at around £500. But there is a catch. The companies take all the money earned from the Feed-in Tariff scheme and from selling any excess electricity back to the National Grid. In return you get free electricity.

As the solar panels only generate electricity during daylight hours and wind turbines will not create as much power when there is no wind, you will still need to draw some electricity from the National Grid to power everything you use during the hours of darkness or no wind.

Case study:

  • Helen Hollern
  • Lincolnshire
  • Four-bedroom house
  • Wind turbine
  • Impressive immediate saving on energy bills; suitable windy location; investment will eventually be recouped.
  • Hugely expensive initial outlay; visually obtrusive; requires electricity to run.

Helen Hollern and her husband Mike Thompson installed a wind turbine on their land just over two years ago and it’s been turning over the majority of the electricity they need to run their four-bedroom house with adjoining stables ever since.

“We had been living on a small cottage on this land and we got planning permission to knock it down and build something bigger on the condition, that it was very eco-friendly

“We initially looked at going for solar power, but we live in a very exposed area of rural Lincolnshire, close to the coast. It’s a naturally windy spot and we are lucky to have the land to situate a turbine on. As a result, we were advised that a wind turbine would pay for itself a lot quicker than solar.

“We didn’t know anyone in the industry so we just researched wind turbines on the internet. We looked at several suppliers and then started off contacting the company closest to us, Green Generation. I phoned them and they came over soon after to do a site visit. We were talked through the costs and the best place to position the turbine to catch the wind. We decided to go with Green Generation, because they seemed so knowledgeable and it was good that they were so local.

“The turbine cost us £22,500 and we were initially told that it would take us about 15 years to recoup the investment, we have no plans to move in the near future so this didn’t put us off. But as a result of the Feed-in Tariff that we receive from the energy company that we have selected, Green Energy UK, and the amount of free electricity that we benefit from, we think it will pay for itself a lot quicker than that.

“Our new house would have cost a fortune to run had we had to buy in all our electricity. The whole property relies solely on electricity, we have no gas, and it costs less than £300 a year to run. In my old cottage on this land I was paying £110 a month for electricity and about £1500 a year on heating oil, so we are considerably better off now.

“We hardly notice the turbine, we sometimes hear a faint hum from it if we’re outside and the wind is blowing in our direction, which is rare. And, all it needs is an annual service.

“We also have an air source heat pump, which helps reduce our bills too. Although it requires electricity to run and doesn’t generate electricity itself, it heats our whole house and our hot water very efficiently. It’s a heat exchange system, which does exactly the reverse of a fridge and absorbs heat from outside. For every one unit of energy that is used to generate the heat, you produce four back so it’s very efficient.

“We get a lot of satisfaction from doing our bit for the environment and we think that green energy will become increasingly popular. We are now thinking of installing solar panels too. “We think that all these green initiatives will be a plus point if we do ever decide to sell the property.”