D’oh!
Robert Skillen, who was the director of the firm when Mr Thompson bought his system, said Mr Thompson’s panels would make him money.
Mr Skillen is now in business claiming to help people who have been missold solar panels. He did not want to be interviewed.
By Ed Hanson BBC Inside Out, North East & Cumbria
- 9 September 2019
Thousands of people who bought solar panels have complained to a financial watchdog that they are not bringing them the returns they were promised.
Many people took out loans to pay for panels on the promise they would save thousands of pounds in electricity costs and make money generating power.
They say they have not had the expected savings, and the Financial Services Ombudsman has had 2,000 complaints.
Barclays Bank has put aside £38m to deal with potential claims.
Brian Thompson from Rowlands Gill, Gateshead, told BBC Inside Out he was contacted by a salesman for PV Solar UK but told him he did not want to take a loan on as he was preparing for retirement.
He said he was told the move would provide money towards his pension, which persuaded him, and he took out a loan with Barclays of more than £10,000 over 10 years.
Mr Thompson said the payments he was getting back from the power his solar panels sent to the National Grid did not correspond with what he was told.
“I had to dip into my savings which I was putting away for retirement to pay the loan off. To me it was lies,” he said.
An independent survey of Mr Thompson’s system showed even after 20 years the income from the panels would not cover the cost of the loan.
Barclays offered him some compensation but Mr Thompson said it was not enough.
PV Solar UK went into liquidation in 2017.
Robert Skillen, who was the director of the firm when Mr Thompson bought his system, said Mr Thompson’s panels would make him money.
Mr Skillen is now in business claiming to help people who have been missold solar panels. He did not want to be interviewed.
I penciled it out, solar panels won’t pay for themselves for me here in Arizona, how on God green earth are they going to pay for themselves in England?
Rowlands Gill, Gateshead, is just south of Newcastle in north west England. How anyone believes solar works and will make money at that latitude really didn’t understand how solar works and was, clearly, fooled. 2000 complaints is just the tip of the iceberg. Same thing is happening here in Australia with failing PV arrays that need replacing after 5 years or less.
It’s a scam!!! And people are falling for it!
North East, not North West.
Yes, I also forget the timezone differences between Australia and the UK even though I was born there.
If solar panels need replacing after 5y, you can probably sue for that alone , they should still produce 80% after 20 years. If you buy cheapest Chinese, crap of course, YMMV.
The key thing to realise about UK domestic solar is that most of it is totally unmetered.
You get forfeit payment based on area of panels installed. This means that certain jokers disconnect and use PV output the heat water ( a total waste of electricity ) and still get paid for the “production”.
To understand the craziness of subsidising roof-top PV is one of the rainiest, cloudiest countries in the world, you just need to realise that it is all about creating a guaranteed revenue source which can be used to legally justify a bank issuing a loan.
Everyone pays highly elevated prices for fake “green” electricity in order to allow banks to “create wealth” by issuing loans.
A similar stunt was pulled in France where EDF issue 20y contracts to buy all your output. This is a similar certified revenue source which allows you have a 10k 20k loan to buy: solar panels.
Telling citizens they are “saving the planet” goes down better than saying they are paying to save the banks.
Hi Greg,
This is what I am talking about.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-27/australias-obsession-with-cheap-solar-derailing-market-insiders/11139856
Maybe there is a case for legal action, I doubt it however.
“Telling citizens they are “saving the planet” goes down better than saying they are paying to save the banks.”
Bingo!
Quote of there week right there!
Greg & Partick
it’s not the BANKS that are selling expensive solar PV to gullible customers who purchase by signing a standard vendor contracts without having a lawyer (solicitor) review it first.
I’m a retired old goat CFO here in FL. Any project over $5,000 and I write my own contract, which Vendor has to sign if he wants my business. In 7 years (probably 20 projects), only one vendor refused.
Worse than not getting a lawyer to read it there a pretty high probability they did not even read it themselves. I don’t know anyone who reads anything before signing it.
From the ABC article it seems that people have a 10y warranty and expect 25years service.
There is a real problem with crap cheap PV. It is exasperated by the people who purchase this ( chinese ) junk and put quality manufacturers out of business. Look at what happened to floppy disks. Prices got forced down so much they were no longer a valid storage medium. You could not even buy good ones because anyone who made them went out of business.
Soon there will be no more silicon actually made in US or Germany ( the last vestige of EU production ) and China will have a monopoly.
It is not the banks who are selling PV it is the PV salesmen who are selling credit. I know a young guy in Belgium who got a job selling PV, after a year I saw him again and asked how his new job selling bank loans was going. He said ” yeah, that’s about what it is “.
Here in the South West we are one of the sunniest parts of the UK and get around 1750 hours a year. The North gets substantially less.
There is no way solar is viable in this country and has to be heavily subsidised. We are an island with thousands of miles of coast and nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. So the obvious renewable should be….no NOT solar, tidal!
tonyb
70 miles from the sea and back in the 80’s we built a light house just in case the sea rises this far
All attempts at tidal have been blocked by …. ecologists.
Tidal is still intermittent and suffers with silting, it also does affect the local ecology.
It is also a very small amount of Electricity for the size of the structure.
The Swansea Tidal Lagoon was an ecpensive boondoggle.
Various tidal energy schemes have been put forward in Alderney over the years, this being the latest. Alderney has a dwindling and ageing population of 2000, so spending between £40 and £70m doesn’t exactly seem like good value to me. https://gsy.bailiwickexpress.com/gsy/news/alderneys-tidal-power-could-finally-be-harnessed/#.XXebNShKjIU
Tidal suffers from the fact that your reservoir keeps losing pressure head and thus diminished power extraction. You’ll get 6 hours (6 hrs 12.5 min) of ebb flow at which the tide goes slack and returns. This will be the maximum pressure head that will be created. While the tide flows back your head reduces as your reservoir drains.
The further north you go the more tidal head you’ll receive and local coast geometry can increase the benefit (or not), but you’ll still only get 6 hours of ebb flow regardless.
There are methods for extracting energy from tidal flows that have an estuary to concentrate the flow that permit extracting energy during both ebb and flow, but the velocities are cyclical and varying. and the very low head will compromise the energy available for extraction.
tonyb
Yes.
But – tidal/wave energy is, obviously, extracted from the sea.
The sea is salty.
Salt and electrics do not play together well.
Salt and most iron-based metals [like steel] also play together rather poorly.
The kit needs to be big to capture much energy.
The kit needs to be robust to survive storms [15 metre/50 foot waves every winter].
The kit is, unsurprisingly, expensive.
And it doesn’t take much of a failure to stop all generation from a unit.
There may be solutions in the future, but, to date, none seem to be truly commercial.
Even with (reasonably) some grant money to ‘prove concept’ and demonstrate engineering feasibility.
And, of course, tidal is not loved by ecologists (again, possibly reasonably).
And wave power kit, to date, is simply not robust enough, it appears – even if the loonier greens would actually not spit out their dummies at the idea.
There may be solutions in the future.
Auto
Student Loans:
“You will surely find a job! Follow your heart and study whatever you want!”
Now, we have major portions of the populace believing a great platform for running for president is to wipe out those very same loans.
The banks make money off of the student loans. Student loan bail out = Government gives the banks the money they would have gotten from the student.
Change student loans. Make them available based upon earning potential. Engineering = 80% of education costs; Elizabethan Literature Studies = 20% (just to be nice).
Then, you no longer have our entire cohort of suburban kids extending their directionless adolescence into the years where, historically, humans have launched into work, marriage, and kids, turning them into members of society, concerned for their home and kids, instead of indebted ungrateful complainers with a head full of nonsense, in mid 20s, with no ties to any family or social institutions, and so willing to listen to the sales pitch of Communist Revolution.
Can you imagine the number of left wing educators who would no longer have jobs if kids had to pay for their own education?
What about the earning potential of a degree in underwater basket weaving? Or even better, Feminist Glaciology?
○¿●
Are those Liberal Arts Degrees, same as is Community Organizer?
And the salaries must be great.
Didn’t Obama pay off his horrific “student loan debt” after graduating from Harvard ……… by working as a Community Organizer in Chicago?
Underwater basket weaving would be a quite lucrative career, as an almost necessary predicate to a degree in such would be all of the skills needed for complex underwater servicing, including mixed gas, rebreathers, welding, etc.
The Navy paid a lot of money to teach me some of those (de)construction skills, which directly translate to potential employment.
I know it’s a joke degree, but there’s a core trade skill there.
+100. Sad but true.
Okay, besides the educator and banker layers, you could introduce the lawyer layer which targets the manufacturer/seller for solar cells or education endowments causing bankruptcies. That triggers government bailouts that are paid with personal taxes. That is an amazing amount of debt for nothing. Well, it looks like another industry targeted for regulation to be unprofitable.
Better yet, as has been stated here before, make the colleges co-signers on the loans. I doubt it would take long to straighten out most of the problems with student loans.
Uh, what banks? Or did you miss when Pelosi and co were grilling the banking CEOs and were embarrassed to learn they got out of that business in 2009-2010.
Those loans are all in the hands of the feds. You bet your ass those slackers will get bailed out, unless the rest of us finally put our collective foot down and say hell no, pay back your loan.
TheLastDemocrat
As of 2010, banks no longer make money off student loans:
Pre- & Post-2010, all public (ie Federal) Student Loans in the US have ALWAYS been guaranteed by issuing banks (aka: taxpayers ate the losses).
However, in 2010 the US government stepped in, eliminating the banks, and started issuing loans directly.
There are a tiny number of “private student loans” issued by banks, most of which require a co-signer (about $100B, in addition to the federal student loans of $1.6T)
Oh crap, a correction:
“Student Loans in the US have always been guaranteed by ISSUING BANKS (aka: taxpayers ate the losses).”
should have read
“Student Loans in the US have always been guaranteed by THE US GOVERNMENT (aka: taxpayers ate the losses).”
I would bet that there are many more that realized they were taken in by the scam but were too embarrassed to admit it.
I don’t know, I think you’re overestimating the intelligence of the Climate Faithful. Some of them probably think that Climate Change has caused all the cloudiness that is making their solar less effective.
Most probably haven’t noticed. They were told they would save lots of money, so they must be. If they seem to be going broke for no reason, that must just be that income inequality that the Left is always taking about.
Or maybe it’s the global recession that the Media say Trump is totally causing. There has to be one, right? The Media wouldn’t just make stuff like that up.
~¿~
I bought mine and after 5 years got my money back. Now with FIT are doing well. They were certified and checked by a competent person. If you borrow for something you paid over the odds for then it will take at least ten years to break even.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/11/pge-wins-court-case-allowing-it-to-renegotiate-34-billion-in-renewable-energy-contracts/#comment-2721666
Told you so – 17 YEARS AGO!
The four most beautiful words in our common language: “I told you so.”
– Gore Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July 31, 2012
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/07/23/irony-can-be-so-ironic-grid-storage-increases-carbon-emissions/#comment-2412177
We published in 2002:
“THE ULTIMATE AGENDA OF PRO-KYOTO ADVOCATES IS TO ELIMINATE FOSSIL FUELS, BUT THIS WOULD RESULT IN A CATASTROPHIC SHORTFALL IN GLOBAL ENERGY SUPPLY – THE WASTEFUL, INEFFICIENT ENERGY SOLUTIONS PROPOSED BY KYOTO ADVOCATES SIMPLY CANNOT REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS.”
Source:
DEBATE ON THE KYOTO ACCORD
PEGG, reprinted in edited form at their request by several other professional journals, the Globe and Mail and La Presse in translation, by Baliunas, Patterson and MacRae.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/KyotoAPEGA2002REV1.pdf
Wind and solar power do NOT contribute significant economic (dispatchable) electric power to the grid.
This is a simple, proved hypothesis, yet tens of trillions of dollars have been wasted globally on this green energy nonsense.
So next time, good people, please listen to your Uncle Allan, who cares for your well-being, and does not want you to waste trillions on foolish green energy schemes/scams – just to drive up energy costs, reduce grid reliability, and needlessly increase Winter Deaths – that is the job of our idiot leftist politicians – if you ever voted for any of these leftist idiots, please just do not vote anymore because you are ‘way too stupid to vote – thank you for your kind consideration!
To try to get this message across to the lower-end of the intellectual spectrum, especially our politicians, I rephrased the message about a decade ago:
“WIND POWER – IT DOESN’T JUST BLOW – IT SUCKS!”
“SOLAR POWER – STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON’T SHINE!”
It seems to s-l-o-w-l-y be working! 🙂
____________________________
When an active engineer in the South-West of England driving all over the place, I would occasionally look out the window & see hundreds (at least) solar arrays, & hundreds of windmills (when even turning not necessarily generating much more than a hill of beans ) Iwould marvel at the arrogance & stupidity of the Greenalists, some large landowners, getting taxpayer/billpayer subsidies toenjoy their new found income source! Robin Hood in reverse, stealing from the poor to give to the rich! An ecoSocialist acquaintance of mine thought it was perfectly legit, when somebody like former Premier David Cameron’s father-in-law, earned around £300,000 (c$450,000) per year from the scam, err awfully sorry slip of the tongue, I meant highly ethical & moral energy production scam err sorry again, scheme! Nil carborundun illigimi sub!
Surprisingly, the damn things don’t work well in Northern Ontario, Canada either for some reason:
https://ottawacitizen.com/feature/how-solar-energy-dreams-became-a-nightmare-for-the-small-ontario-town-of-blind-river
Yes, for reference where the guy in the story lives is at the same latitude as Alaska. The only way for solar panels to be financially viable is through government subsidies (direct or by forcing local electricity providers to overpay).
I have had a solar installation in Southern England for 8 years. It pays me about £1800 per year in tax free cash and also heats my water. I have another 12 years of guaranteed tax free indexed payments to come from the feed in tariff. My initial investment was £10000. I will get a total return of over 350%. What is he problem?
Solar panels would break even for me in CA. after 32 years IF there were Zero Maintenance expenditures and Zero Replacement costs associated over that time span. I would Break Even at age 89.
If the lunacy surrounding ambient intermittent power generation in CA continues, you will certainly see the time for payback on solar reduce. I expect CA to be challenging Germany, Denmark and parts of Australia for the worlds highest electricity prices.
Any payback analysis should include inflation factor for the level of dingbatitis infecting your State legislature.
Typical familial-Genus classification of the Ca Legislature… Ignoranus Dingbatus Inflatus
How about the inverter?
Wouldn’t that be covered under “zero maintenance expenditures”?
And if, after 32 years, the panels were still producing the same amount of power as they did on day 1.
It is not so bad, I’m long time thinking about PV panels for heating of water. I’m in country with similar number of hours of sun during year as UK.
I can buy 280W panel for 115E. Assuming 50% efficiency and 1500 sun hour during year it is making 210kWh yearly. Price here is 0.12Eur/kWh. So I can get 25.2Eur savings yearly. That means that this panel is paying off after 4.5 year. It is not terrible.
I’m planning connect solar panels directly to heating element, not needing inverter. Other expenses like cables are not so high. 4 panels are giving around 120V which is high enough for heating and heating elements are available for this voltage.
If you want hot water, this is not the way to do it.
Take a look at solar water heaters. These either directly heat the water as it flows through them, or, to reduce corrosion problems, use a closed circuit containing a heat exchange medium (similar to the coolant in your car).
Much more efficient, and at least in the summer will give you more hot water than you can use.
During the days of Jimmy Carter MANY rooftop solar collector water heaters were installed here in Las Vegas, NV. You can still see them on some roofs in some LOWER middle class neighborhoods. They mostly quit working within 5 to 10 years but were subsidized by tax credits.
The only legitimate residential energy saving method in my opinion is increased insulation and window quality. I have used credits for both. I still don’t think it is right to have those credits, but it would be stupid to not use them.
The local utility, through coercion from the state government, has provided rebates for buying LED lamps. I used those rebates also. I don’t think those rebates are necessary since most people that can afford LED lights will quit using incandescent on their own over time, even if just for the longer time between changing the lamps. They will see the savings on their electric bills.
Most commercial panels are more like 10% efficient, and that number starts dropping as soon as they are exposed to the sun.
In a country where it is usually cloudy and/or raining most of the daylight hours, it is hardly surprising that solar panels do not produce sought after results. Even in Australia’s south, they are marginal.
I installed a 4kW system in Melbourne ages ago. Before I purchased, I got information about solar insolation figures for my latitude/longitude, built a financial model in Excel, taking into account cost of capital, blah blah blah. I calculated that ROI would be achieved at approximately 6.5 to 7 years. Then I tracked it rigorously and recorded all the kWhr of production, blah blah blah. I reached break even just after 6.5 years, right on track and am now about $2300 in the black. Perhaps I’m lucky, as I haven’t had any maintenance costs so far. I own a small property in Cumbria as well. No way I would put solar panels on it. Waste of time. I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me that!
Thanks for showing a well recorded factual account. PV in most of UK is a joke which is all about subsidising banks by creating a market for loans and creating manual jobs installing pointless rooftop solar. That is the truth behind the apparently illogical programs.
I suspect one big difference in you ROI is that you purchased the equipment outright and did not have to service a loan. If you don’t have parasites on your back, you will have a better ROI.
Thanks for actual system numbers. The only thing missing is the total cost of the system and current years in service. The question is will the $2300 plus future income cover maintenance when it is finally required. Output will slowly decrease with time and you will eventually have to replace the system.
Frosty
I got you beat:
6 years ago I paid $36k for 11kW of solar PV (enough to off-set 66% of my usage); 90 days later, after activating, I received a $22K state-mandated public utility rebate; when I filed my 2013 taxes in early 2014, I received an $10.8k federal tax credit.
Net cost of my system” $3.2…and I save about $2K/year…so roughly 1.6 year pay-back.
Even I admit this rebate/tax-credit stuff is ludicrous.
@Javert Chip “…for 11kW of solar PV (enough to off-set 66% of my usage)”.
That’s a lot of PV, what’s your yearly usage? I have a 6.7kW array in SE Michigan that handles 100% of our needs, and even rolls a bit into the next year.
What !?
I’m looking at nothing but (what appears to be) CLOUDY SKIES in the pictures above …. solar cells/panels – really?
Duh!
There is a lot of misinformation in the UK about solar panel output on cloudy days, one recent letter in a newspaper saying that daylight is guaranteed every day, implying healthy output on cloudy days. My experiments with a small panel and an ammeter suggest only 10-20% ENERGY output on cloudy days, relative to sunny ones. The panel on a cloudy day gave around 10% of PEAK sunny output, but the light comes from the whole sky, it does not vary with angle to the sun. Over a day you will get more than 10% ENERGY, because that 10% persists for many hours of daylight.
Good point about diffused light. That will broaden the usual cosine dependence on angle of incident illumination. Maybe you get about 4h at a continuous 10%. But bottom line it will not change much when you are down to 10% peak at normal incidence.
Even Gordon Brown pointed out that thermal solar made much more sense than PV in the UK ( it is at least 4 times more efficient at capturing incident energy ). However, a thermal panel with not qualify you for a bank loan !
That “…cosine dependence…” is STRONGLY & unequivocally reflected in my daily PV power generation. It’s a (roughly) bell shaped curve, starting as soon as the son light up the panels, increasing to “high noon” (AKA close to 90 as possible), then tapering off in the afternoon.
Don’t agree? Above the equator, try mounting your panels on the north side of your roof.
No wonder ER had to use a diesel generator during their protest in Manchester… How can the greens expect the whole of england to go on to wind and solar if people have to take out big loans to pay for everything, on top of the panels, we have to now buy electric vehicles, so that’s at least another 20 thousand pound loan on top of the solar panels, also we need a new non gas heating system and food cooker…. We will all be in massive debt..
“We will all be in massive debt..”
That’s a feature, not a bug! lol! I live in sunny Arizona & have run the numbers! PV is a scam!
They also had “drug and alcohol free zone” signs on the stage. D’oh!
Ed Hanson’s gonna get sacked by the Beeb. Counter narrative.
Even the most insulated and blinkered employees at the Beeb must get out and get hit by reality.
Speaking as someone who has relations working in the BBC, I can assure you they do not go out into the real world. Their concept of reality is what the BBC says it is.
He can probably get away with it, so long as he plays the evil banks and big business cards.
Perhaps we need to focus on that as well, rich land owners and business make money from subsidised PV and wind farms.
One of the two major American political parties think that we should just continue handing money out to companies that virtue signal with solar panels. One of the two major American political parties. How can anyone elect these people? Take off the blinders. Someone’s gonna have to pay for this bill, possibly your future social security or life savings. Good luck then.
People who buy from a snake-oil salesman are surprised when they end up with snake-oil!
Caveat emptor used to mean something, but not with today’s dumbed-down education system.
But but Griff said it was a good idea.
I don’t recall griff ever saying that he’d actually bought one.
“I don’t recall griff ever saying that he’d actually bought one.”
He can’t figure out how to install them in mommie’s basement.
You don’t need PV for the rock Griff lives under….
Renewable energy is all about a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to wealthy (read: billionaire) investors who invested early in the solar and wind scam. Now as a business expense, they are funding a massive sophisticated, propaganda campaign to prop it all aup.
– Buying politicians.
– Buying media outlets (and ensuring paychecks flow to reporters who write climate porn)
– Funding coordination center.
– Funding University climate communication propaganda education centers.
The big problem now for these Green Slime billionaires is that Marxist-Socialists (true Greens the GreenBlob) they tolerated for so long on the fringe are now taking over the message with “social justice” issues.
Which of course exposes the entire “Save the Planet” Green energy scam to rejection and collapse.
People really are wising up to the true purpose of Climate Change alarmism. The Green Slime is coming after the middle class’s savings, their disposable income, and their retirement 401Ks/IRAs.
Solar panels made economic sense in England when the feed-in tariffs (subsidies) were scandalously high.
But it meant that the rest of us are paying three times the economic rate for our electricity.
Politicians are catching on to this & proposing to tax residential solar PV
Bad year for “bird choppers” too…
“Barely Legal: Victorian Wind Industry Furious As Noise Affected Neighbours Finally Get Justice”
https://stopthesethings.com/2019/09/10/barely-legal-victorian-wind-industry-furious-as-noise-affected-neighbours-finally-get-justice/?fbclid=IwAR1TtlSReWpVSRAyFf5oz5eSX3LYEPcsb14X_aYr3RR
“The wind industry’s Victorian onslaught has hit the wall, as lawyered up neighbours pursue noise nuisance cases against their tormentors.”
Wind and solar have both proved themselves expensive and useless in the UK. As usual subsidies have bent the market to such an extent that a few have made a lot of money and the rest of us have paid a lot for our necessities. Such is the power of the mob!!
No sympathy whatsoever.
The initial feed in tariff was too generous and early buyers got a very good deal. Obviously, they didn’t “make money” i.e. make a profit but their electricity bills were substantially reduced. Borrowing to fund the installation was always financially stupid.
I looked at the position a couple of years after introduction and concluded that it would never be viable with the reduced tariffs let alone if borrowing was involved.
Caveat emptor!
Let the buyer beware of not just the deal but the government involvement, the industry lobbyists pushing in wrong directions, and the NGO virtue signaling mixed with significant warping of policy in many areas at once. It takes a nation to uncover (later) all the damage done in so many areas of policy and implementation.
Solar in England?
The lyrics in the song “The Last Farewell” tell me why not.
“There’s a ship lies rigged and ready in the harbor
Tomorrow for old England she sails
Far away from your land of endless sunshine
To my land full of rainy skies and gales”
Ahhhhh! Roger Whittaker.
That Mr. Skillen seems quite the enterprising gent. First he scams his customers by selling them the PV system and then helps them recover their money, by how exactly? Claiming they were scammed? Well, he should know.
I expect it is more a case of he pretends he will recover their money, and charges them for his “services.”
I noticed that immediately too; does that not fit the definition of ‘racketeering’?–Skillen first generated the problem, now he sells the solution?
Something is clearly wrong with the size of the installation and the amount of the loan too in the featured example; one does not justify the other. I have room in interpretation for the possibility that a lot of the solar customers were knowingly part of a scam to justify a large loan and now want the taxpayer to pay it back. And how convenient that the company that sold the installation is bankrupt and gone from the picture, leaving….Skillen. Any bets that he’s a lawyer?–like, what a surprise, Al Gore?–the man who peddled An Inconvenient Truth/A Convenient Lie and then traded carbon credits?
Certainly the window allowed in this one between being really stupid or really clever is quite narrow.
10,000 pounds for a 5 panel installation? Ye gods. That is 10 pounds a watt or more.
Now multiply that by 10 million and you get a $15 million estate at the beach with the Obamas in celebration of the rising seas.
Assuming 150W per panel ~ 750W makes about 75 million pounds per MW installation cost. Compare that to nuclear cost about 6 million dollar per MW and can deliver on demand.
That was my first thought when I saw the roof with 5 panels being at most 200W panels but probably 150W each. So not even 1 Kw output daily for the 6+ hours typical sunlight average every day, if that. And nothing to write home about for the winter production at all. If it snows, is it even worth it to bother risking your life to clean the snow off in the winter? For maybe what’s worth 25-30 cents worth of electricity per day.
For this to cost 10,000 Pounds is part of the problem, which is ultra high mark-ups on the equipment and even higher on labor. And then add interest on top for a loan? Besides being practically useless, except maybe to run a dedicated UPS for a computer and TV, it is also 10X more expensive than it should really be. I have the exact same set-up on my RV trailer, and while it is nice to have quiet electricity when summer camping in the great outdoors, it cost me about $1000/USD to set it up myself, not counting the 2000W inverter or a bank of deep cycle batteries I can also charge up with solar or the onboard propane generator. $2500 if I count the batteries, panels and inverter. And I thought that was expensive.
Once again rooftop solar is a bad idea and by far the most expensive version of solar installs (i.e. no economies of scale). Juice that up with car salesmen tactics, lack of competitive bids, and government incentives to make bad decisions and you have bad overall outcomes. Now if they can just add back a virtue signaling valuation credit it might work out. Who would know the difference looking up at them if they were even functioning.
Roof top solar water heating in Australia actually works and is proven. You have to own the roof first though.
They should be thankful Tesla Solar did not do the install job and set the whole place ablaze.
Those that realized they have been hoodwinked, will be even further discussed when they have to pay more money when they replace the roof due to the solar panel obstacles.
A lot of people are getting heated up over this issue.
We need to remember that we have all been scammed by Big Green, due to government involvement. Big Green has had its filthy Greenie hands in all ratepayers and taxpayers pockets, pulling out wads of cash, and we’ve been essentially powerless to stop them. So the folks who thought that they could benefit from Big Green at everyone else’s expense, who could virtue signal to their heart’s content, and who idiotically thought that if everyone did what they did, they too would save money, because money grows on trees, no I have zero, zilch, nada pity for them.
To quote a cousin “I don’t need it don’t want it. As for me putting anything with the qualities of a sail and trapping heat on my roof is not going to happen.
“A fool and his money are soon parted.” — Thomas Tusser
Add another couple of hundred billion onto costs paid by the public purse. Frankly, I don’t need (nor does anyone visiting this site need) to do a spreadsheet on solar, even assuming manufacture of highest quality if you are north of ~40° lat. forget about it (avg wind speed, temperature, cloudiness, thickness of atmosphere traversed, snow on panels all effect photovolt power). Saudi Arabia gets more than 10x amount of average solar power /m^2 as Midlands of England.
Solar power sales exploit the same fear created by governments and even subsidies from governments (woeful taxpayers) makes them complicit in this brand of snakeoil, this along with deliberately making grid power expensive and unreliable.
We put in a solar system for our travel trailer that cost us $3800. There is no way it will ever pay for itself. We didn’t put it in for that reason. We put it in to have freedom from the need to have an electric hook up so we could take our travel trailer to remote places. We also have a method to hook the system up to our stick house to provide some power during an emergency. We have enough power to run lights, a radio, keep our computers and telephones charged, keep the travel trailer house battery charged, and use a low wattage kettle to heat enough water for a cup of instant coffee. We can do just that and no more. We had to replace our fancy $800 glass mat batteries after only four years. (We replaced with old fashioned deep cycle ones.) And in November in our area when winter is coming, the days are cloudy and there is usually only about 9 hours of sunshine, we can’t do anything with our system. It doesn’t put out enough power to even run our radio. For our purposes, solar has worked wonderfully well and it sure was nice to have when an EF4 tornado wiped out our power lines. However these things DO NOT make money. They cost money.
“They were very, very persuasive. Everything they said was plausible. It was a no-brainer.”
You have to respect a man who can admit his shortcomings like that. Just another useful idiot and grist for the mill for the climate changers I suppose. How did Griff’s loan go by the way?
I have bought 2nd hand off cast panels for my system, in the UK the 2nd hand prices are really low as some many of them are being dumped due to the bad returns and also the difficulty in selling your house with them still on the roof so best taken off and then sell up. All up I pay £450 per Kw including cables and inverters, labour is mine and free 😉 and the pay back is 5 years. However there is no way on earth to get these systems to pay for themselves if you have to pay the market price. I do not sell the excess, I dump it to a hot water heater so end up using less oil in the oil boiler.
That should be enough panels to power a mini apartment, mini appliances, and a mini lifestyle. But it still may be too much for the micro style planned for them at the UN and Brussels.
England is far to the North of the United States. (Paris is just a tad North of the USA.) Can’t imagine why solar is not doing well there.
Maybe those rooftop solar panels will provide some shielding for household electronics under them in the event of a CME or an EMP. Nah, they won’t.
“Mr Skillen is now in business claiming to help people who have been missold solar panels. He did not want to be interviewed.”
Can you define the word, “chutzpah”?
well, if you can put the load 3mm from the panel……..
I bought mine and after 5 years got my money back. Now with FIT are doing well. They were certified and checked by a competent person. If you borrow for something you paid over the odds for then it will take at least ten years to break even. I have a 3.99kw system and produce about 4000kw hours a year. You can only reduce your electric bills by about 8% a year by using the solar instead of the grid supply. Nothing like the 50% that some falsely claim.
Strange it makes me wonder what you paid for these systems.
) I bought a system and upgraded it two years later. Total cost £11000.
Its returning £600 on the feed in and a similar saving in energy usage from the sun instead of the grid, I have saved around £1000 a year so that’s £20k over a twenty year period nott accounting for inflation.
OK I’m not going to be a millionaire but I have easily covered the cost and made the same again. The trick is to adapt to taking maximum advantage of the sun and using it when it’s there, addad a gadget to heat my hot water for free, it only cost £100 on ebay and there’s so many other ways.
I can only assume these people who lost out paid too much, did not adapt, failed to keep the panels clear of bird poo etc.
Don’t get too excited about paying off your solar in 7 years. Considering the opportunity cost and the rule of 72:
“Measured by the S&P 500 index, stocks return an average of about 10% annually over time.May 15, 2019”.
The same amount invested in solar panels, invested instead in the S&P may have doubled in value. Taxable, tax rates, past performance no guarantee of future returns, blah, blah, but an important consideration.
I’ve got a roof half covered in solar panels. My out of pocket? $0 Vivant owns the thing, I just pay for the electricity it generates at a guaranteed rate for the next 15 years. My electric company bill is now 1/10 of previous – or less – and my Vivant bill isn’t bad. Roof top solar for free is the way to go.
I’m sure Vivant is the recipient of all the subsidies and tax breaks I would have gotten had I bought the system, but I’m fine with that. Besides, I’m betting that inside of 15 years Vivant goes bankrupt and those panels really will be free.