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INSTALLATION OF OUR ALTERNATIVE ENERGY TYPES OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FOR YOUR HOUSE SELLING YOUR ENERGY AND CLAIMING ROCs
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January 2006 for Big Green Gathering Let us start this article by asking a question. Would you like to have an alternative, renewable energy technology installed on your house that would generate electricity or hot water that your family could directly use in your home? Our expectation is most people who know something about global warming; its causes and predicted effects would at least wish to consider the option. However, it is likely they would have many questions to ask about the reality of the technology or how to go about getting it installed in their home. It was quite a few months ago now since we first started to take the idea seriously ourselves. We knew that solar panels could be fitted onto roofs to generate electricity and we knew that our large roof faced the sun. That was about it. Of course a few more searches on the internet increased our knowledge base considerably. We found that grants were available from the Energy Saving Trust which would greatly reduce our capital cost. Then of course came the lengthy process of organising contractors to visit for site surveys and again more information was added to our knowledge base. Next we had to contact the power generation companies to learn about connecting our solar photovoltaic or PV system (as we now knew the correct terminology) to the grid so that our excess electricity could be sold to our electricity supplier. Again there were various options available from different companies with different types of metering systems and so the list of research to do went on. The process of finding information from various sources and building it together to make a clear picture took quite some time. There wasn’t anywhere we could find this information simplified and in its entirety, however we persevered and finally on November 24th 2005 we received our grant offer of £8,200 and the process was almost complete; all we had to do was install our panels within a six month time scale before our promised grant money could be realised. The panels are due to be fitted in early April. A few days later on 28th November Tony Blair started to seriously look at nuclear power as a way of securing energy supply in the forth coming decades for our country. Then the following thoughts struck us…
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As we had gone through the process of finding this information we reasoned we could post this on a website together with regular updates to show the realities of generating our own electricity. The knock on effects of this would be that other people could benefit from our research. We might in some way help to make the decision making process easier for the many people who agreed with the concept of alternative energy generation at home but as of yet, for various reasons, had not committed themselves to its uptake. www.alternative-energy.co.uk was born...initially on one long Friday night in early December! Since that time we have included information about energy efficiency, the types of alternative energy available and the factors to consider before installing a type of alternative energy. There are now direct links to grant application forms and we have included a payback calculator to give some idea of when an investment in alternative technology is likely to be recouped. We again had to start to learn a little more about the different types of alternative energies that we hadn’t considered at our house such as micro hydro-turbines and ground source heat pumps but this all made interesting reading. This information is also included on the site and so are the latest designs in wind turbines. These have now been developed so that they can be fitted to domestic houses and grid connected so that money can be received for excess electricity generated. Their present costs are about £1,500 to £2,000 but a DTI grant of 30% can be applied for to reduce this cost. In early 2006“Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill will be discussed at committee stage and it is expected that small scale wind turbines be defined as ‘permitted development’ this means that planning permission will not be needed before they can be installed. Many people predict that eventually small scale wind turbines will be as ubiquitous as satellite dishes (and twice as useful!)What has pleased us more than anything has been the fact that we have received over 500 hits on our site in less than a month and have been asked to write for two online magazines (this being one of them). Good Energy, the only major electricity company to source their power solely from renewables, has also endorsed our site and will include a piece about what we are aiming to do on their website in the New Year. We hope that you will be able to visit our site to see what we have achieved so far and to view the pages that we will post in the future as our solar PV is installed. We hope by making our experiences available on the web that other people will be encouraged to think seriously about the future of their energy supply and install some form of alternative energy themselves.
Paul www.alternative-energy.co.uk
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