Q I am considering an offer from British Gas to install solar panelling on my house. The offer is very generous. There is no charge, a 25-year guarantee and all work involved is done by its employees. Is there any drawback to solar panelling?
A Yes, there are several drawbacks. Earlier this year (March 21) I answered a query about the Feed-in Tariff (FIT), whereby home owners generating their own electricity are paid for every unit of power they feed into the national grid. It is the FIT that makes photovoltaic (PV) solar panels worth considering as an investment, because it might earn the average PV panel owner about £900 a year. (Although, as I pointed out at the time, it would still take about 13 to 17 years for this income to compensate for the installation costs of some £12,000 to £15,000.)
Without the FIT payments, generating your own electricity from the sun is not such an attractive proposition. At the times when you most need to use electricity – that is, after dark – your PV panels won’t be generating any, so you’ll be paying for your power at the normal rate through your meter.
You get free electricity to use only when the sun is shining brightly and directly enough on the panels to generate a current. But that is chiefly in the summer, between 10am and 2pm, and with little or no cloud cover (with respect, not the most common conditions in your part of Britain). And, of course, at those times, you are unlikely to be using much electricity anyway.
You won’t have the lights on, you won’t be watching television because you’ll be out in the garden and you won’t be needing to heat the house. Possibly the only benefit you will get is free power for your fridge. The surplus electricity generated at these times will be fed into the grid, earning FIT money for the owner of the panels, which won’t be you because it will be British Gas.
The promotional literature from British Gas (and the other companies who are making similar offers) suggests that the average householder signing up for this “rent-your-roof” scheme will reduce their electricity bills by about £150 per year. However, many people will save much less. It depends how much electricity you use during those sunny periods. People who are out at work during the day, for example, will not see much benefit.
In return, by installing its PV panels on your roof, British Gas will be claiming all your Feed-in Tariff payments for itself. You will have to sign a contract leasing your roof and the air space above it to British Gas for 25 years, for no additional payment. The lease will be lodged with the Land Registry, and therefore legally binding. You will not be able to change your mind or remove the panels during the 25 years and, should you sell the house, the new owners will also be bound by the terms of that lease.
For me, this is a major stumbling block. I personally would be hesitant about buying a house with these unsightly black rectangles stuck on the roof and even more hesitant once I found that I wouldn’t even benefit financially from the surplus electricity they produced.
I’m sure there must be many other potential homebuyers who would feel the same way, and you might even find your house “blighted” by this 25-year commitment.
full article
Sunday 7 November 2010
Friday 27 August 2010
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax.
Thank God man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt Nasa would be telling us that this year is now the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia's vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapour, the world's storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence – drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.
This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.
Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, had been opposed to meaningful action on global warming until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable.
Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life, and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places – making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn't happening?
But the broader public mood, smeared like sun-screen over us all, isn't active denial. No – it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way – but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived – but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilisation, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale.
Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally destructive sites in Britain, and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: they played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth.
That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You own this bank: 84 per cent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you, by financing the most environmentally destructive behaviour on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here democratically – everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus – because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity?
So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS's offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's leading climate scientists, explains: "My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in 50 years, we don't know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don't know how much it would rise. It could be 10 centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilise. There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt whether our global civilisation could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring."
Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is – hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?
You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at twitter.com/johannhari101
j.hari@independent.co.uk
full article
The world's ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shrivelled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 per cent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen – with their pesky graphs and studies and computers – came to pass.
This is all happening today, except for that final stubborn step. It's hard to pin any one event on man-made global warming: there were occasional freak weather events before we started altering the atmosphere, and on their own, any of these events could be just another example. But they are, cumulatively, part of a plain pattern where extreme weather is occurring "with greater frequency and in many cases with greater intensity" as the temperature soars, as the US National Climatic Data Centre puts it. This is exactly what climate scientists have been warning us man-made global warming will look like, to the letter. Ashen-faced, they add that all this is coming after less than one degree of global warming since the Industrial Revolution. We are revving up for as much as five degrees more this century.
Yet as the evidence of global warming becomes ever clearer, the momentum to stop it has died. The Copenhagen climate summit evaporated, Barack Obama has given up on passing any climate change legislation, Hu Jintao is heaving even more coal, David Cameron has shot his huskies, and even sweet liberal Canada now has a government determined to pioneer a fuel – tar sands – that causes three times more warming than oil. True, the victims are starting to see the connections. The Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, had been opposed to meaningful action on global warming until he found the smoke-choked air in the Kremlin hard to breathe. But if we wait until every leader can taste the effects of warming in their mouths, the damage will be irreparable.
Given the stakes, the reasons why so many people still refuse to accept the evidence can seem oddly trivial. A common one is: "It snowed a lot in the US and Britain last year. Where was your warming then, eh?" But scientific theories are based on patterns, not individual events. You might know a 90-year-old woman who has smoked a pack of cigarettes every day of her life, and is totally healthy. (I do.) It doesn't disprove the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. In the same way, one heavy snowfall doesn't prove anything if it is part of a wider overall pattern of dramatic warming. And that snow probably was. While it snowed a lot in a few places, there were at the very same time harsher, more bitter droughts in many more places – making it globally the fifth hottest winter ever recorded, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (All the others were in the past decade). And that winter is your punchline proof that warming isn't happening?
But the broader public mood, smeared like sun-screen over us all, isn't active denial. No – it's the desire to endlessly postpone this issue for another day. In 1848, a 25-year-old man called Phineas Gage was working on constructing the American railroads. It was his job to lay explosives to clear rocks out of the way – but one day his explosive went off too soon, and a huge metal rod went through his skull and out the other side. Amazingly, he survived – but his personality changed. Suddenly, he was incapable of thinking about the future. The idea of restraining himself was impossible to grasp. If he had an urge, he would act on it at once. He could only ever live in an eternal present. As a civilisation, we are beginning to look like Phineas Gage on a planetary scale.
Yet scattered among us there is a fascinating group of people who are offering a path to safety. Every summer since 2006, ordinary British citizens have built impromptu camps next to some of the most environmentally destructive sites in Britain, and taken direct action to shut their pollution down. So far, it has worked: they played a crucial role in the cancellation of the third runway at Heathrow and a big new coal power station at Kingsnorth.
That's how earlier this week I found myself on a high wooden siege tower in a camp in the Scottish hills, staring down across a moat towards the glistening, empty offices of the Royal Bank of Scotland. You own this bank: 84 per cent of it belongs to the taxpayer after the bailouts. Yet it is using your money to endanger you, by financing the most environmentally destructive behaviour on earth, like burning the tar sands. The protesters chose to come here democratically – everything at the climate camps is done by discussion and consensus – because they have a better idea. Why not turn it into a Green Investment Bank, transforming Britain into a global hub for wind, solar and wave power? Why not go from promoting misery across the world to being a beacon of sanity?
So the protesters risked arrest in marching on RBS's offices because they know the stakes. As Professor Tim Flannery, one of the world's leading climate scientists, explains: "My great fear is that within the next few decades – it could be next year, or it could be in 50 years, we don't know exactly when – we will trap enough heat close to the surface to our planet to precipitate a collapse, or partial collapse, of a major ice shelf... I have friends who work on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and they say [when a collapse happens] you'll hear it in Sydney... Sea levels would rise pretty much instantaneously, certainly over a few months. We don't know how much it would rise. It could be 10 centimeters, or a metre. We will have begun a retreat from our coasts... Once you have started that process, we wouldn't know when the next part of the ice sheet would collapse, we don't know whether sea level will stabilise. There's no point of retreat where you can safely go back to... I doubt whether our global civilisation could survive such a blow, particularly the uncertainty it would bring."
Nature doesn't follow political fashion. Global warming may not be hot today, but the planet is – hotter than ever. When you stare out over the wave of Weather of Mass Destruction we are unleashing, who looks crazy – the protesters, or the people who have yet to join them?
You can follow Johann Hari on Twitter at twitter.com/johannhari101
j.hari@independent.co.uk
full article
Scheme to 'pull electricity from the air'
Tiny charges gathered directly from humid air could be harnessed to generate electricity, researchers say.
Dr Francesco Galembeck told the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston that the technique exploited a little-known atmospheric effect.
Tests had shown that metals could be used to gather the charges, he said, opening up a potential energy source in humid climates.
"The work I'm presenting here shows that metals placed under a wet environment actually become charged."
Dr Galembeck and his colleagues isolated various metals and pairs of metals separated by a non-conducting separator - a capacitor, in effect - and allowed nitrogen gas with varying amounts of water vapour to pass over them.
What the team found was that charge built up on the metals - in varying amounts, and either positive or negative. Such charge could be connected to a circuit periodically to create useful electricity.
The effect is incredibly small - gathering an amount of charge 100 million times smaller over a given area than a solar cell produces - but seems to represent a means of charge accumulation that has been overlooked until now.
However, experts disagree about the mechanism and the scale of the effect.
"The basic idea is that when you have any solid or liquid in a humid environment, you have absorption of water at the surface," Dr Galembeck, from the University of Campinas in Brazil, told BBC News.
full article
Monday 23 August 2010
Free solar energy panels
What’s the deal?
Alternative energy companies including Isis Solar, Home Sun, and A Shade Greener are offering free solar panels that can deliver electricity bill savings of up to hundreds of pounds.
Their offers typically include the supply, installation and maintenance of solar panels worth up to about £12,000.
Homeowners benefit from free electricity when there is sufficient daylight to power the panels, while continuing to pay for electricity from their existing supplier at other times.
Large, unshaded south-facing roofs are typically needed to fit the panels.
Is this good?
The Energy Saving Trust says that solar panels can save the typical home about £200 a year in electricity costs.
Consumer Focus, the watchdog, says the panel offers could be attractive to households who don’t have funds to pay for installation.
What’s the catch?
In return for free panels, the installers pocket the new “feed in tariff” – also called the “clean energy cashback” – of about £800 a year that can be earned under the government scheme to encourage renewable energy generation.
Homeowners are also tied in to contracts with installers for 25 years – so, if you sell your home, the buyer will generally have to take on the contract.
Also, installers could go bust, making it hard for homeowners to enforce maintenance agreements.
What’s the alternative?
Households could pay to have their own solar panels fitted, and then receive the feed-in tariff payments – which are tax-free and inflation-linked – as well as saving on electricity bills.
For a £12,000 outlay, households could earn £23,000 over 25 years, says Moneysavingexpert, the consumer advice website.
full article
Alternative energy companies including Isis Solar, Home Sun, and A Shade Greener are offering free solar panels that can deliver electricity bill savings of up to hundreds of pounds.
Their offers typically include the supply, installation and maintenance of solar panels worth up to about £12,000.
Homeowners benefit from free electricity when there is sufficient daylight to power the panels, while continuing to pay for electricity from their existing supplier at other times.
Large, unshaded south-facing roofs are typically needed to fit the panels.
Is this good?
The Energy Saving Trust says that solar panels can save the typical home about £200 a year in electricity costs.
Consumer Focus, the watchdog, says the panel offers could be attractive to households who don’t have funds to pay for installation.
What’s the catch?
In return for free panels, the installers pocket the new “feed in tariff” – also called the “clean energy cashback” – of about £800 a year that can be earned under the government scheme to encourage renewable energy generation.
Homeowners are also tied in to contracts with installers for 25 years – so, if you sell your home, the buyer will generally have to take on the contract.
Also, installers could go bust, making it hard for homeowners to enforce maintenance agreements.
What’s the alternative?
Households could pay to have their own solar panels fitted, and then receive the feed-in tariff payments – which are tax-free and inflation-linked – as well as saving on electricity bills.
For a £12,000 outlay, households could earn £23,000 over 25 years, says Moneysavingexpert, the consumer advice website.
full article
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