Microgeneration *can* generate grass roots support and involvement, that’s true, it may be the only thing it has going for it – but feed in tariffs don’t per se.

I don’t know much about the Danish planning system but I do know that wind there didn’t get off the ground in such a big way because of feed in tariffs – it’s widely credited to be because of tax breaks that enabled communities to hold shares in wind turbines (big ones) and this lowered planning issues.

They have a saying in Denmark (a Wind guy once told me) “You only hear your neighbours dog barking”. In Germany too the reason for their great capacity in wind is not feed in tariffs causing grass roots support, its a more pragmatic attitude from the Germans about development bolstered by the fact that the market there started with individual farmers owning machines.

In both cases the market was driven by lots of small local owners and big developers were rare until relatively recently. In the UK the opposite is the case. Feed in tariffs lend support to large and small entities as does the RO – neither differentiates between them.

Cheers.

We will need a huge number of wind turbines to produce that amount -like covering all of the land space in the UK and much of the sea around – and this is even before we have begun switching to electric cars.

I am all for wind meeting a far greater proportion of our needs but let’s realise that it can come no where near meeting our total needs, even with substantial energy savings we have to embrace all options. It’s too late to be picky on what we use to reduce carbon.

The ad recreates an England vs Germany penalty shootout which Germany win 200 – 1 as Germany has 200 times the amount of Solar power mostly generated by FIT’s.

Get your MP to sign New Clause 4 in the Energy Bill to include a renewable energy reward. It’s gotta be worth it!

Rgds

Damon

Big scale Renewables are far far more economic, and therefore sustainable, in terms of material use per energy output – and so it’s where the biggest efforts should go (the world is getting shorter of materials). But I’m a big believer in getting people involved, that’s what we’re trying to do, and microgeneration is, after all ’something you can try at home’ – it’s a good thing to do.

Cheers.

Thanks for that, but…

I agree only if you are talking about larger projects, unless you’d be prepared to provide larger ROC payments for microgeneration to get people involved. For example, you/Ecotricity are only paying me 4.5p/kWh (incl VAT) for my PV microgenerated power even though we generated significantly more than we consumed yesterday and we’ve made heavy investment in efficiency and generation here at home to get there. Where’s the incentive in 4.5p? Why not more like the 20p/kWh elsewhere in the EU and/or officially supporting net metering?

(Not that I’m complaining about the rate per se, but in the absence of claiming grants my pockets are only so deep!)

Don’t forget getting ‘mindshare’ from individuals, not just bulk RE…

Rgds

Damon