Right to Low Carbon

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Doug King

This week all attention seems on rights to light. A proposal has been made that the historic right to occupy your home without needing to turn the lights on during the hours of daylight could be brushed away in order to permit more dense urban development.

Surely this is another example of legislators failing to consider the consequences of their actions. We are driving forward with national legislation to force all new buildings to become zero carbon in an attempt to meet our carbon budgets. Meanwhile, work by the Green Construction Board indicates that we will need to work just as hard, if not harder, to cut carbon emissions from the existing building stock. Now we have a proposal that will force an increase in energy consumption on the neighbours of new development that is deemed desirable. I have no doubt that the desirability of the new developments will be based on their energy efficiency credentials, so who actually stands to win from this situation?

However, in the sustainable urban future, we will find that other rights become just as important as rights to light. Our plan to decarbonise the UK presently relies on the pervasive use of PV in the urban environment to supposedly offset carbon emissions at other times of the year. As taxation falls more heavily on carbon emissions I believe that we will see more and more legal disputes over someone interfering with neighbours attempts to cut energy consumption. This will not be just over rights to daylight, but I predict disputes over rights to unpolluted fresh air for natural ventilation and access to renewable energy sources such as the wind and sunshine.

This PV installation was an exemplar when installed, until the neighbours built higher.

Since Government is presently considering changes to legislation on rights to light, now is the time to look to the future that we want to build for ourselves and implement broader and better informed legislation that protects building owners rights to comply with carbon emissions legislation in the manner that suits them best.

FiT for Investors

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Doug King

Aviva, on of the UK’s largest financial investment operations has bought up 23MW of domestic PV installations from Homesun, one of the UK’s largest installers of “free” solar panels.

How does Homesun provide people with free solar panels? It allows homeowners to benefit from the electricity generated (if they are at home during the day to use it) but keeps the Feed in Tariff (FiT) payments. Obviously Homesun will have done their homework to ensure that all their installations are on optimally sited roofs (they don’t do installations in Scotland) and as a business I’d guess that they are knocking out installations for little more than £5,000 each with a return of £1,000 PA from the FiT. Of course Homesun don’t use their own money for the installations, they borrow money and now pay a hansom return on those loans, keeping a healthy profit for themselves into the bargain.

Does this sound familiar? In March 2010 I wrote in this blog that FiTs were a public subsidy for the rich and I have gone into print predicting that they would become a means of funneling tax payer’s money to the bankers.

So why would Aviva be interested in Homesun? When the financial markets are in turmoil investors run for low risk investments, typically gilts, but with concerns about sovereign debt even those are not guaranteed anymore. So imagine the attractiveness of a government guaranteed annual payment well in excess of the rate on gilts. That is what Aviva bought when it bought Homesun’s 23MW portfolio, a guaranteed annual income of around £9M. No wonder they were happy to pay some £100M for it.

As I’ve said before: everybody wins, the homeowner with free electricity, Homesun’s shareholders and Aviva’s investors. The only people who lose are those who Homesun judged to have unsuitable roofs, who will fund the FiT payments through increased electricity bills.

Since the recent cut in FiTs, Homesun no longer offers “free” PV installations.

A Shot in the Foot

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Doug King

I have often bemoaned multi-headed government and its total inability to communicate between the left-hand and the right-hand, but this takes the biscuit.

In a valiant attempt to increase the uptake of small-scale renewable energy Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Greg Clark, signed into legislation on 30th August an order to extend permitted development rights for the installation of solar panels on properties in Conservation Areas and World Heritage sites. This meant that, for the first time, millions of homeowners could consider the option of installing PV from 1st December 2011.

Then, on 31st October, Greg Barker, Minister for Energy and Climate Change, without warning, announced a dramatic cut in the feed in tariff support for domestic PV effective from 12th December 2011.

At a time when solar installers’ order books are full until spring next year, government has given a large proportion of the population just 12 days to install PV and benefit from the feed in tariffs that many others have enjoyed for the last couple of years. I wonder how many cases will end up in the European Court of human rights over this issue?

Clarity on Performance

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Doug King

Following the piece I did for BBC Country File on Feed in Tariffs, I found myself in an interesting debate in the letters section of New Civil Engineer. As usual, this started me thinking, this time about communicating sustainability to the public.

The standing of climate science is currently pretty low as it has become apparent that scientists overstated some of the issues. The same happens when Government makes overblown statements about the effectiveness of renewable energy in desperate attempts to meet its own policy targets.

The announcement launching Feed in Tariffs suggested that householders could earn £900 per year from installing PV. They failed to mention that this was only true for the South East of England, on a perfectly pitched roof, facing due South; hardly representative of the average. Further, such an array would be a little too large to fit on the roof of an average 3 bed terraced house and would cost £13,000-£15,000.

I believe that there must be much more clarity on the actual performance of real systems. We have already seen the market for DIY wind turbines killed off by public reaction to the overstatement of returns by manufacturers. This has reduced the choices for homeowners, even where these could have been installed in worthwhile locations. For engineers and Government to similarly hype up the potential returns from renewable energy does not do the industry any favours.

We need to build public trust and support for renewable energy by making realistic assessments of the returns they can expect from real installations, not theoretical ones.