Part two of Feed In Tariffs – Do they work at Home?
This is a follow-on post from my ‘What’s Wrong With Feed-in Tariffs’ posting earlier.
It’s not un-common to hear people say ‘We need Feed in Tariffs in the UK, like they have in Germany – they’ve got umpteen Gigawatts of renewables from it’. And fair enough they do. It’s important not to confuse large scale FITs with micro though.
The problem for onshore wind (large scale) in the UK is planning not financial and therefore FITs just can’t help. We need German planning laws to emulate German success, in large scale wind.
But what about micro generation; Are feed in tariffs the answer to better deliver this?
Planning used to be a barrier to micro generation but no longer. The problem is just that the numbers don’t stack up. It’s a financial problem, the territory of FITs.
German FITs pay well for micro generation – more than 30p per unit. No wonder much more gets built there than here with our 10p or so. That’s how it works. It’s nothing to do with it being an easy system to use or anything else, just much more money.
But multiple ROCs would do the same job here. They recently doubled and it would be easy enough to have them quadruple (to emulate the value of German FITs) – much easier than to set up a new scheme. And here’s why.
Export from home generation cannot be economically metered, so the ‘system’ cannot attribute it to individual suppliers, it just reduces grid losses. FITs require an electricity distribution company to pay for the power, one who operates the grid – and who then passes on the cost to electricity suppliers working in that region. That’s how it works in Germany. It would be complex to set up and run – compared to multiple ROCs. And it would require new legislation, no small issue.
And would FITs for micro generation give us shed loads of renewables, like Germany? Well yes and no – it would be a boost, but let’s not overestimate how much they have in Germany – from micro gen. Germany’s incredible 12% renewables contribution is often described as coming from ‘wind and solar’ - giving the impression that solar (micro generation) plays a large part. It doesn’t.
Solar actually makes up 0.3% of Germany’s electricity – wind and other large scale renewables produce 11.7%. Put another way micro generation makes up just 4% of the electricity supported under FITs in Germany. It’s good but not as good as it’s cracked up to be.
FITs are good at stimulating micro generation simply because they pay well. Money is really what stimulates micro generation. FITs are a mechanism that works in Germany to provide that money, they could be made to work here but not easily. Whereas multiple ROCs could readily do the same job. The system and the legislation is in place and it works in a UK market context. There’s nothing clever about FITs, they just pay well. That’s easy to emulate. You’d think.
Our German friends do have something we lack – commitment to renewables. That’s what we need. German style commitment to Planning for large wind that works and Finance for micro generation that works.
Now, if we had smart meters that (a) did half-hourly accounting and pricing in both directions and (b) communicated this to the DNOs and/or upstream suppliers automatically and (c) showed us as consumers what was going on per consumer circuit and per generation source, and could do so in a reasonably-priced unit*, we’d be onto a winner. Just HH/TOD pricing and per-circuit reporting could cut usage and shift peaks.
Anyway, yes, doubling the microgen ROCs again would be good and sensible from what you say.
(BTW, given that you’ve told your RW customers you’re paying double ROCs from 1st May but haven’t asked (me at least!) for total-gen readings, how do you intend to do it? Backdating to the Ofgem reading might be administratively simpler IMHO…)
Rgds
Damon
* Yes, this is the killer until Ofgem/BERR pulls its finger out and mandates something to get economies of manufacturing scale. I think that they/DNOs/suppliers should force HH metering to all single users over 500kWh/month to start catching the profligate and not hurting the energy-poor.
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — May 21, 2008 @ 9:02 am
Secondly, grants for micro-generation have been cut recently. Are grants part of the answer for micro-generation?
I’d also be interested to hear from you why you think countries like Norway and Sweden are such a success with Renewables. Whilst many European countries struggle to hit 15% renewable generation targets, Norway generates well over 40% of it’s energy from renewables, whilst Sweden generates nearly 30% .
http://www.sustainable-development.gov.uk/progress/international/4.htm
Comment by Chris — May 21, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
Comment by Martin — May 21, 2008 @ 7:04 pm
Yes, solar thermal is next on my list as money allows, and can make a great big dent in a house’s carbon footprint (I reckon that it could knock 25% of our annual mains gas consumption by halving our DHW gas use).
It is a shame that excess from solar thermal in summer cannot be exported or otherwise used which is why I’m brewing up two madcap plans: (1) a seasonal thermal store to carry that excess summer energy round to winter and almost entirely eliminate the need for non-solar DHW mains energy [a nice 10t milk tanker would do the job for us] and (2) a Seebeck or Organic Rankine Cycle heat-recovery generator to extract the excess and export it to the grid.
The former takes space and labour but the hardware is relatively cheap, and I’m progressing outline quotes for that, slowly.
The heat-engine theoretical recovery limits for using excess heat (hot water tank at 90C, outside air at ~20C) are 10%-20%, which given the high efficiency of collection of solar thermal, might give an overall collection efficiency similar to putting thin-film PV directly on the roof, but with a guaranteed tank of hot water too!
ORC systems of suitable size seem thin on the ground at best, but I do have some Seebeck devices in front of me at this moment to play with when I have that round tuit… B^>
(More of this madness at my Web site, should anyone care to look.)
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — May 22, 2008 @ 8:37 am
Comment by Peter Simmons — May 25, 2008 @ 2:58 pm
Comment by paul — May 25, 2008 @ 5:54 pm
Comment by dale — June 2, 2008 @ 12:18 pm
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-software.html#WebLoadMgmt
This is something that company such as Ecotricity could manage at little cost if the National Grid was not interested in handling it directly…
An interesting slant would be to defer load when grid CO2 intensity is high and/or when Ecotricity turbines are generating less than expected….
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — June 12, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Comment by paul — June 12, 2008 @ 2:22 pm
http://gallery.hd.org/_javadoc/org/hd/d/pg2k/svrCore/GenUtils.html#mustConservePower()
But most users don’t have things they can turn on to soak up demand I suggest; trimming peaks is probably easier to do on a large scale as a little system-tray icon or the equivalent.
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — June 12, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — June 12, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
I used to ‘do’ festivals with a microgen rig, and we used a tea urn to shed extra load on extra windy/sunny days (and cranking up the soundsystem of course).
It really put me in touch with the concept of ‘harvesting’ energy and celebrating an abundance when the conditions were right
Cor - pet AI! Sounds exciting, but that page didn’t make any sense to me
Comment by paul — June 12, 2008 @ 4:01 pm
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — June 12, 2008 @ 4:08 pm
Comment by dale — June 17, 2008 @ 8:33 am
(I have fed the other part of the idea to a smart-socket manufacturer just in case they can use it somehow, though I don’t know what the selling proposition would be! In other countries they already do this but there needs to be some agreed way of signalling to the devices, eg over radio like for Economy 7, or over DNO wires.)
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — June 17, 2008 @ 9:11 am
FYI: I’ve just found a good person at the EU Commission in the energy-efficiency/labelling area who’s in favour of tweaking energy labelling to support grid-friendly ‘dynamic demand’ stuff for wet/white goods and computers. Ie, that reduces grid balancing costs and automagically allows a little more intermittent generation on the grid.
All I have to do it dig out some hard numbers for him that he can wave under ministers’ noses to back up such legal changes! The weight of the world is on my shoulders… B^>
If you’ve got a cluestick for me, it would be welcome, else Google is my friend. %->
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — August 4, 2008 @ 3:28 pm
Comment by dale — August 9, 2008 @ 11:45 am
Less, something about biting off more than I can chew springs to mind!
Anyway, I’ve made a start but it’s still very d(r)aft!
http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-dynamic-demand-value.html
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — August 9, 2008 @ 3:48 pm
I’ve updated my document (still draft!) with some real(ish) numbers, and it looks like domestic dynamic demand could eliminate much of the extra balancing cost of adding another 20GW+ of wind to the UK grid, at least over the seconds-to-hours timescale, and might even help automatically suppress domestic energy demand for a percent or more longer-term if we had a real RE drought (eg a run of cold and still days).
BTW, the DUKES report for 2008 confirms that wind passed hydro for electricity generation in 2007!
Rgds
Damon
Comment by Damon Hart-Davis — August 27, 2008 @ 1:10 pm