Solar Panels – what’s in it for me?

Unless you’ve been living on another Planet for the last year or so, I expect you must have heard something or other about the UK governments’ incentives for installing Solar Power for your home or Solar Power for businesses. Known as the Feed in Tariff, the latest incentives were introduced in April 2010, and cover many different types of renewable energy, but for now, I’ll stick to Solar PV.

What that means for us is that we can now “have our cake & eat it” – not only can solar panels give us free electricity but we can also get paid for generating power from a solar panel installation.

My Utility Company charges me an average of 12p to 15p. Per unit, I use 80% of my power in the evening at the rate of 4.83p, so I’m lucky, but if that was the other way around and I used 80% of my power during the day I would be paying over 20p per unit – so depending on when you consume your power you could save quite a bit of money by generating your own.

When you add some of the numbers together it becomes clearer - not only do you get 43.3p per unit for generating electricity, you also get the saving of not buying it, so using the numbers above, the financial benefit would range from 48.13p to 63.3p per unit. A good 4kwp solar panel installation could produce 3,200 or so units per year so you could end up benefiting by £1,500.00 or more per year. The Feed in tariff is index linked and guaranteed for 25 years so the combined financial benefit can be quite large, in this case £37,500 .(and you can add inflation to that).

What’s in it for you? As an investment, it’s hard to beat – tax free income, index linked & guaranteed for 25 yrs.