An aspect of this that always blows my mind is that yes we (bill payers) are paying £229 / MWh but the users who have this generation installed are paying nothing to use the electricity. This is like if a big factory had it's own power plant and the public paid (over the odds) for the electricity it made, the factory used the electricity and paid nothing! People would be outraged! The average cost of electricity supplied to your house was around £250 / MWh last year so I think that should be added to the FiT cost "to the public who aren't FiT generators" because without it we wouldn't be paying the FiT and the current FiT users would actually have to pay full bills for their use. So £479 / MWh... (I accept I have ignored the export aspect). I admit I'm not 100% on this thought so please let me know where I am wrong - I accept I could be mistaken. It would be appreciated.
The big success that FiT always claims is driving down the cost of solar power by creating a demand. Well maybe but this also has to be tempered with the reality that one country benefited, China, and they are more than willing to restrict access to critical goods if it serves their interest. It also glosses over the massive technology theft (and other morally difficult things) that led them to drive costs down. I worked for a company that partially owned another company called Hemlock Semiconductor that opened a large polysilicon for solar factory in Clarksville, Tennessee. The story I have heard is that the factory never opened because 1. The Chinese stole the tech and built their own copies and 2. Whilst building up the efficient factories they put tariff protection in place to prevent the import of polysilicon into china to be assembled into panels. So not 100% a good news story.
There is also the unfairness of this within UK society where generally younger poorer people with smaller houses are transferring cash to older richer people with bigger houses which doesn't sit too well.
This was the main reason I didn't get solar panels fitted to our house when they were available even though it was ideal with a south facing roof. Why should I get my electricity for free when the cost of that electricity goes on the bills of people poorer than me?
We have solar panels as part of the grant the house got. I might export, but I don't get any money for it, so I don't really know what happens to the spare energy.
I think as you say, the blunt truth is that energy is just too expensive. Taxes are too high, unemployment rampant: it's utterly demented that we have a hard Left government lying continually while making everyone worse off - from their own spiteful actions!
The grant has to be paid from somewhere and it goes on other people's electricity bills as do the costs of all the other energy saving gizmos the Government get fitted as part of "improving the housing stock". If it's a free lunch for me (or a subsidised one) someone else is picking up the tab.
Oh I know - however it also goes on *my* electricity bills too. I consider it a tax rebate.
To be clear, I asked SSEN to bring a gas pipe in. I would then have paid for a boiler, radiators and the solar and batteries from my own pocket. We were refused the gas pipe.
I wasn't prepared to buy a heat pump as the cost was higher than moving and when the grant came through I despaired as we both earn too much to qualify but after I basically begged. The first winter my wife moved out it was so cold - 8'c downstairs and 70p an hour for heating meant we simply couldn't leave it on.
I'm trying to explain that I didn't want it. When the equipment went in it bought us time with a liveable house. It was the best I could get in the circs. When the chaps said 'About £15k per house has been spent' I thought, why didn't you give us the choice and invest that money in offering a gas main?
I firmly believe in the market. The state took that from me.
You have to give it to the Wests liberal politicians for promoting decarbonisation on a global scale and subsidising it to the hilt for the prime beneficiaries have been the Chinese. Then you have the union barons who stood on the touch line in able support for the policy until they realised they'd been had. Now they try and switch horses when its too late. Im no fan of NZ but its been utterly despicable how so little of the largesse has found its way into the UK economy yet our impotent politicians and media can't see any of this.
I have to admit I feel a bit sorry for unions representing manufacturing industry in the last 20 years. All their immediate power has been destroyed by globalisation more than negating the power of strike action and the political party they pay into basically do nothing to support them. I feel that in the past labour would have seen a factory in financial trouble in terms of the workers whos livelihood depend on it, now labour looks on it as a dirty source of pollution that's been under invested in by greedy corporate overlords that is a relic of the past. Nevermind that the corporate entity is investing billions where it makes sense in other parts of the world... Once they lost their power it feels like even though they pay into labour, the labour party has completely ignored them. A lesson maybe for public sector unions - labour don't respect the money they are given, only the pain you can cause by going on strike. So there is probably no point in giving any money to them.
I can't feel sorry for the unions. They wanted control over the politic through holding up industry and are now obsolete. EU law made UK workers almost too expensive to employ and robotics forced efficiencies to break them completely.
They're now bastions oif the public sector and ruining that.
Labour's introduction of the climate change act - more EU policy - has done catastrophic damage to our economy. We simply will not recover until that has been abolished. The unions had an opportunity to stop Miliband but they didn't. At the end fo the day, the EU has more cash than the unions do.
It's a little more complicated. If a homeowner was treated as a normal generator then they'd sell all their output on the grid and buy back what they needed for their own use. Where the purchase and sale volumes and prices are matched there is no real flow of money or power. But they are mostly getting paid a premium to grid value, so the premium is the subsidy. They still buy in extra power when solar output is inadequate/zero at a normal price. When they export there are two different regimes.
The early FiTs did no export metering unless the installation was at least 30kW. They simply assume that 50% of production was exported, and pay an additional bonus on top of the normal FiT rate for the deemed export. Using more of your own production by running the tumble dryer at midday only avoids paying to import power. You can effectively regard the tariff paid as the base rate plus 50% of the export premium on all generation.
Later ones do have export metering, and the payment for exports is at a much lower rate.
The Chinese are duplicitous and dishonest. My brother worked for Thyssenkrupp Uhd. They tended for 10 chlorine plants in China. They built one. The Chinese, having no respect for intellectual property and design clauses , built 9 themselves. They are disreputable thieves. Some stupid people align themselves with China - fools.
At least the scheme is running off but it was largely designed to provide a tax break for wealthy people disguised as saving the planet. Im surprised Milibrain hasn't gone after it but hes so blindsided by his NZ goal that he will do whatever it takes and whatever it costs.
You End: "We simply cannot afford to keep this scheme running in its present form." If you know it, They Know it too & now we know it, They Knew already. Looks like "impoverishing" us/commernce/industry is a goal doesnt it !
Miliband has acknowledged this by at least going as far as reducing indexation to CPI from the contractual RPI. It will be interesting to see if it gets subjected to judicial review, as previous changes in the FiT regime were, resulting in contractual historically agreed tariffs being upheld. Only new connections were at reduced rates.
I think a different tack is needed, which is to charge a grid connection fee for solar export. The Dutch are doing this. Actually, there are fees for embedded generation already in TNUoS charges that are highest in the solar SW.
Most commercial leases use RPI. Certainly the ones I ever been privy to have used RPI. To switch to CPI is both commercially unusual and a tacit admission by Ed the Shred that prices are high.
The current year has a further 3.5% RPI linked increase. It remains to be seen if DESNZ will avoid judicial review of their plan to move to CPI indexation for 2026-27 onwards, which they are also aiming to impose on ROC indexation. If the courts let them get away with it the path to more radical reform of renewables subsidies opens up.
Although the report shows unchanged scheme participation compared with the previous year it is evident that the lower than RPI rise in average unit rates paid reflects relatively lower output from better paid older installations due to faster efficiency deterioration and end of life systems well short of their 25 year contracts. Perhaps there is no means of recording attrition due to house fires/demolition etc., and it is hard to believe there weren't any such cases.
Here is byzantine structure of just one of these FiT entities Guston C Solar Farm Limited (5MW solar accredited in Dec 15 located in East Kent). Originally setup in 2013 and owned by Wirsol UK Ltd a German solar farm developer. German owners file for insolvency and it ends up with a Singaporean backed company Conergy West Sussex Ltd. They then offload it in 2015 to Magnetar Solar (UK) Ltd an entity controlled from Luxembourg. Come 2016 Magnetar Solar creates a new entity Perpetual Power (UK) Ltd to hold its UK SPV assets. This is then sold in 2017 to RFE Gen Co Ltd an entity controlled by Rockfire Resources an investment company. RFE Genc Co gets renamed Toucan Gen Co as does the controlling entity to Toucan Energy. Toucan Gen Co gets put into a Toucan Holdings Energy 1 Ltd in 2022 prior to its sale to a Schroders Greencoat entity as a result of administration. By this time this little FiT co is part of big holding company owning 53 solar parks and being financed by the inept West Thurrock BC.
Anyhow back to our Fit which cost c5M to construct has managed to rack up losses most of the years its been trading. As is usual with these entities there's more financial engineering than real engineering where upon the owning companies charge exorbitant admin and finance charges to keep them in loss. All financed by consumers to enrich others.
Fascinating. Is there any significance to the fact that so many of these entities go bust? Is there some kind of shell game going on here? Is it feasible that each entity can claim new subsidies, or what?
Nothing is going to improve in Britain or anywhere else as long as grids are loaded with intermittent wind and solar power. The German energy transition was officially dead in the water in 2018, but it took almost a decade for Merz to accept that dropping nuclear was a disastrous mistake.
Still, Britain and Germany are persisting with wind power, doubling down to set obscene targets for new projects despite the sheer impossibility of the project.
Late in the day, we find that severe dunkelflautes have been recorded for sixty years on the oil and gas platforms in the North Sea.
How was that kept secret by the meteorologists? And since the story has been told by Ivor Williams, why is it not on the front page of all responsible newspapers and substackers?
There is no excuse for continuing blindness on this topic since Paul Burgess released a hypnotic video at Christmas to bring the news about wind droughts to the northern hemisphere.
To make the point more sharply, most of the analysis of the power problems around the western world is like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. Quite fun, especially if you are paid to do it, but the ship has to change direction or it will hit the iceberg.
Yeah, but see my comment poiting out why the increase in the average paid over is less than the indexation increase.
Typo “The average payment peaked at £310/MWh in 2022/23” - probably should say 2012/13
Quite right. Fixed now.
An aspect of this that always blows my mind is that yes we (bill payers) are paying £229 / MWh but the users who have this generation installed are paying nothing to use the electricity. This is like if a big factory had it's own power plant and the public paid (over the odds) for the electricity it made, the factory used the electricity and paid nothing! People would be outraged! The average cost of electricity supplied to your house was around £250 / MWh last year so I think that should be added to the FiT cost "to the public who aren't FiT generators" because without it we wouldn't be paying the FiT and the current FiT users would actually have to pay full bills for their use. So £479 / MWh... (I accept I have ignored the export aspect). I admit I'm not 100% on this thought so please let me know where I am wrong - I accept I could be mistaken. It would be appreciated.
The big success that FiT always claims is driving down the cost of solar power by creating a demand. Well maybe but this also has to be tempered with the reality that one country benefited, China, and they are more than willing to restrict access to critical goods if it serves their interest. It also glosses over the massive technology theft (and other morally difficult things) that led them to drive costs down. I worked for a company that partially owned another company called Hemlock Semiconductor that opened a large polysilicon for solar factory in Clarksville, Tennessee. The story I have heard is that the factory never opened because 1. The Chinese stole the tech and built their own copies and 2. Whilst building up the efficient factories they put tariff protection in place to prevent the import of polysilicon into china to be assembled into panels. So not 100% a good news story.
There is also the unfairness of this within UK society where generally younger poorer people with smaller houses are transferring cash to older richer people with bigger houses which doesn't sit too well.
Thanks again for a read Sunday morning Dave
This was the main reason I didn't get solar panels fitted to our house when they were available even though it was ideal with a south facing roof. Why should I get my electricity for free when the cost of that electricity goes on the bills of people poorer than me?
We have solar panels as part of the grant the house got. I might export, but I don't get any money for it, so I don't really know what happens to the spare energy.
I think as you say, the blunt truth is that energy is just too expensive. Taxes are too high, unemployment rampant: it's utterly demented that we have a hard Left government lying continually while making everyone worse off - from their own spiteful actions!
The grant has to be paid from somewhere and it goes on other people's electricity bills as do the costs of all the other energy saving gizmos the Government get fitted as part of "improving the housing stock". If it's a free lunch for me (or a subsidised one) someone else is picking up the tab.
Oh I know - however it also goes on *my* electricity bills too. I consider it a tax rebate.
To be clear, I asked SSEN to bring a gas pipe in. I would then have paid for a boiler, radiators and the solar and batteries from my own pocket. We were refused the gas pipe.
I wasn't prepared to buy a heat pump as the cost was higher than moving and when the grant came through I despaired as we both earn too much to qualify but after I basically begged. The first winter my wife moved out it was so cold - 8'c downstairs and 70p an hour for heating meant we simply couldn't leave it on.
I'm trying to explain that I didn't want it. When the equipment went in it bought us time with a liveable house. It was the best I could get in the circs. When the chaps said 'About £15k per house has been spent' I thought, why didn't you give us the choice and invest that money in offering a gas main?
I firmly believe in the market. The state took that from me.
You have to give it to the Wests liberal politicians for promoting decarbonisation on a global scale and subsidising it to the hilt for the prime beneficiaries have been the Chinese. Then you have the union barons who stood on the touch line in able support for the policy until they realised they'd been had. Now they try and switch horses when its too late. Im no fan of NZ but its been utterly despicable how so little of the largesse has found its way into the UK economy yet our impotent politicians and media can't see any of this.
I have to admit I feel a bit sorry for unions representing manufacturing industry in the last 20 years. All their immediate power has been destroyed by globalisation more than negating the power of strike action and the political party they pay into basically do nothing to support them. I feel that in the past labour would have seen a factory in financial trouble in terms of the workers whos livelihood depend on it, now labour looks on it as a dirty source of pollution that's been under invested in by greedy corporate overlords that is a relic of the past. Nevermind that the corporate entity is investing billions where it makes sense in other parts of the world... Once they lost their power it feels like even though they pay into labour, the labour party has completely ignored them. A lesson maybe for public sector unions - labour don't respect the money they are given, only the pain you can cause by going on strike. So there is probably no point in giving any money to them.
I can't feel sorry for the unions. They wanted control over the politic through holding up industry and are now obsolete. EU law made UK workers almost too expensive to employ and robotics forced efficiencies to break them completely.
They're now bastions oif the public sector and ruining that.
Labour's introduction of the climate change act - more EU policy - has done catastrophic damage to our economy. We simply will not recover until that has been abolished. The unions had an opportunity to stop Miliband but they didn't. At the end fo the day, the EU has more cash than the unions do.
It's a little more complicated. If a homeowner was treated as a normal generator then they'd sell all their output on the grid and buy back what they needed for their own use. Where the purchase and sale volumes and prices are matched there is no real flow of money or power. But they are mostly getting paid a premium to grid value, so the premium is the subsidy. They still buy in extra power when solar output is inadequate/zero at a normal price. When they export there are two different regimes.
The early FiTs did no export metering unless the installation was at least 30kW. They simply assume that 50% of production was exported, and pay an additional bonus on top of the normal FiT rate for the deemed export. Using more of your own production by running the tumble dryer at midday only avoids paying to import power. You can effectively regard the tariff paid as the base rate plus 50% of the export premium on all generation.
Later ones do have export metering, and the payment for exports is at a much lower rate.
The Chinese are duplicitous and dishonest. My brother worked for Thyssenkrupp Uhd. They tended for 10 chlorine plants in China. They built one. The Chinese, having no respect for intellectual property and design clauses , built 9 themselves. They are disreputable thieves. Some stupid people align themselves with China - fools.
At least the scheme is running off but it was largely designed to provide a tax break for wealthy people disguised as saving the planet. Im surprised Milibrain hasn't gone after it but hes so blindsided by his NZ goal that he will do whatever it takes and whatever it costs.
You End: "We simply cannot afford to keep this scheme running in its present form." If you know it, They Know it too & now we know it, They Knew already. Looks like "impoverishing" us/commernce/industry is a goal doesnt it !
Miliband has acknowledged this by at least going as far as reducing indexation to CPI from the contractual RPI. It will be interesting to see if it gets subjected to judicial review, as previous changes in the FiT regime were, resulting in contractual historically agreed tariffs being upheld. Only new connections were at reduced rates.
I think a different tack is needed, which is to charge a grid connection fee for solar export. The Dutch are doing this. Actually, there are fees for embedded generation already in TNUoS charges that are highest in the solar SW.
Most commercial leases use RPI. Certainly the ones I ever been privy to have used RPI. To switch to CPI is both commercially unusual and a tacit admission by Ed the Shred that prices are high.
Yet he said, when introducing the climate change act that 'Paying more on our bills is a small price to pay for saving the planet.'
Of course, he then slapped his bills - 3 times the average for his street - on the tax payer via expenses.
Pseudo-Messiahs are dangerous people....
The tariff unit rates were increased by RPI change of 5.2% for the financial year 2024-25
https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/data/feed-tariff-fit-tariff-table-1-april-2024
The current year has a further 3.5% RPI linked increase. It remains to be seen if DESNZ will avoid judicial review of their plan to move to CPI indexation for 2026-27 onwards, which they are also aiming to impose on ROC indexation. If the courts let them get away with it the path to more radical reform of renewables subsidies opens up.
Although the report shows unchanged scheme participation compared with the previous year it is evident that the lower than RPI rise in average unit rates paid reflects relatively lower output from better paid older installations due to faster efficiency deterioration and end of life systems well short of their 25 year contracts. Perhaps there is no means of recording attrition due to house fires/demolition etc., and it is hard to believe there weren't any such cases.
Here is byzantine structure of just one of these FiT entities Guston C Solar Farm Limited (5MW solar accredited in Dec 15 located in East Kent). Originally setup in 2013 and owned by Wirsol UK Ltd a German solar farm developer. German owners file for insolvency and it ends up with a Singaporean backed company Conergy West Sussex Ltd. They then offload it in 2015 to Magnetar Solar (UK) Ltd an entity controlled from Luxembourg. Come 2016 Magnetar Solar creates a new entity Perpetual Power (UK) Ltd to hold its UK SPV assets. This is then sold in 2017 to RFE Gen Co Ltd an entity controlled by Rockfire Resources an investment company. RFE Genc Co gets renamed Toucan Gen Co as does the controlling entity to Toucan Energy. Toucan Gen Co gets put into a Toucan Holdings Energy 1 Ltd in 2022 prior to its sale to a Schroders Greencoat entity as a result of administration. By this time this little FiT co is part of big holding company owning 53 solar parks and being financed by the inept West Thurrock BC.
Anyhow back to our Fit which cost c5M to construct has managed to rack up losses most of the years its been trading. As is usual with these entities there's more financial engineering than real engineering where upon the owning companies charge exorbitant admin and finance charges to keep them in loss. All financed by consumers to enrich others.
Fascinating. Is there any significance to the fact that so many of these entities go bust? Is there some kind of shell game going on here? Is it feasible that each entity can claim new subsidies, or what?
Nothing is going to improve in Britain or anywhere else as long as grids are loaded with intermittent wind and solar power. The German energy transition was officially dead in the water in 2018, but it took almost a decade for Merz to accept that dropping nuclear was a disastrous mistake.
Still, Britain and Germany are persisting with wind power, doubling down to set obscene targets for new projects despite the sheer impossibility of the project.
Late in the day, we find that severe dunkelflautes have been recorded for sixty years on the oil and gas platforms in the North Sea.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-curious-tale-of-the-north-sea-winds/
How was that kept secret by the meteorologists? And since the story has been told by Ivor Williams, why is it not on the front page of all responsible newspapers and substackers?
There is no excuse for continuing blindness on this topic since Paul Burgess released a hypnotic video at Christmas to bring the news about wind droughts to the northern hemisphere.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-180089713
He also describes the black hole that Britain is about to plunge into people in Number 10 and Whitehall come to their senses.
To make the point more sharply, most of the analysis of the power problems around the western world is like moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. Quite fun, especially if you are paid to do it, but the ship has to change direction or it will hit the iceberg.
SIMPLIFY THE GRID
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/its-time-to-simplify-the-grid
We are losing the war on CO2.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/losing-the-war-on-co2
What energy transition are you talking about?
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-green-energy-transition-is-all
FOUR ICEBERGS FACING THE RE TITANIC IN AUSTRALIA.
Circulated to 800+ politicians and 100 journalists in June 2020.
1. Wind droughts.
2. No grid-scale storage.
3. No nuclear power.
4. No international connectors.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/20-2-four-icebergs-in-the-path-of-renewables-titanic
Another classic recently uploaded by the National Emergency Briefing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-sPkaELPCA