I thought I’d use this month’s blog to show you from a personal perspective what the Rise of Renewables looks like. As I sat pondering what to say, it dawned on me why I got into renewables and energy saving in the first place.
In 2003, we moved to Norfolk. Mother-in-Law sold her house, we sold ours. Three generations under one roof. To grow our own food, to look after our own. To be more independent and self-sufficient. Plus when you have an oldie in your house, you get free insulation and a free TV licence so it was a win-win all round. And it’s cheaper buying for five people than it is for a family of four and another single person household. Cheaper to heat, cheaper council tax, cheaper bills as they’re shared. It really is a better way of living all round.
Within weeks, it dawned on me that the oil central heating system was going to be a problem. Old house, leaky windows and as draughty as it gets. Coupled with sitting down to watch the news night after night and seeing young men and women arriving home in body bags at Royal Wootton Bassett after dying in the Oil fields of the Middle East, just so we could fill our kerosene tank up at 40p/ltr or car at £1.20/ltr
So I quit everything and became a salesman for a national home improvement company. We needed 23 windows and couldn’t afford them on my wages, so quit a life of wearing suits and sitting at a desk to sell windows and doors etc until I built up enough brownie points to get 23 windows installed at cost price. Immediately we noticed the difference. Warmer, less wasted heat, cheaper running costs and best of all, I had met some really great people in those 18 months, learnt a lot about insulation and heat retention as well as low flow rates and boiler management.
So it seemed only natural when a mate suggested I chat with Dave who ran a solar company. That was back in 2008. Oil prices were soaring, the Oil wars waging and economies crashing like we’d never know before. Banks collapsed and governments fell. I had a little think and thought, yep, Thermal solar systems for hot water will save people money on buying oil and gas to heat their water. And what better than a free hot bath, heated by the sun and if we can reduce the need for Oil, we reduce the need for War.
So solar it was. I learned, I studied and I sold. Boy did I sell. But who didn’t want a free hot bath and as Oil prices rose, climate change began to be discussed more in the mainstream rather than just the developing social media platforms where the news is made in today’s age. Free Hot water was our aim, so in time honoured fashion, I built up enough brownie points to get a cost price Thermal Solar system for our own hot water needs. That first day of free hot water, with no emissions from the oil boiler felt like a whole new world. Yes, cleaner and greener but it was the feeling that we had, knowing we had done our bit. Both to reduce the Oil demand and also the pollution it causes.
This was in 2009, and I was just about to start in kitchens and bathrooms, after all, I needed new ones and thought if I worked for the companies that supply them, like I had in windows and solar, I’d get a cost price kitchen and bathroom. But then Dave, the boss at the solar company showed me a Government policy document that said the following year a ‘feed in tariff scheme’ would be introduced and pay people for generating electricity from PhotoVoltaic panels. I laughed, ‘electricity from the sun, in England?’ Yeah all right Dave.
Dave was right. First results from clients told me this was a no brainer. Free electricity, just for putting panels up and in those days, get paid for doing so. So, in for a penny, in for a pound I stayed with Dave, The Labour government introduced the scheme and solar started to become a must have for investors. Solar saved ppl money and also provided an income, but at £20k a system, it needed something to encourage people to take it on.
And they did. Within a few months I had a solar system for electricity installed and started bringing clients back to the house and workshop to see the products in action, to demonstrate there is another way. Within a few years, we had converted the workshop, insulated it, new windows and doors and opened up to the public as the UK’s first dedicated solar only shop and advice centre. From a 250 year old fisherman’s shed, nestled into the banks of the river Great Ouse.
The River is where we get our solace. Watching the tide come in, and watching roll out again, twice a day, every single day. This got me thinking about tidal power, so we started monitoring and measuring the flow rates and looking at how we can generate energy from the tidal river, which is still ongoing.
Over time, solar systems have got much cheaper and with the introduction of batteries, that was the holy grail for us, we had already jumped in with an all electric car 5 years ago and was using more electricity to run it, so getting solar and big old battery on the house was the final piece of the jigsaw. In May 2018 we finally had our 3rd and final system installed.
In a nutshell. We use solar energy to heat our hot water 9-10 months of the year. We use solar energy to provide electricity and that which we can not use, is stored in batteries for use overnight. We can use £2-£3 worth of electricity a day and take extremely little from the grid. We save around £1200 a year in electricity costs and I haven’t got a clue how much oil we’ve saved in 12 yrs since getting the thermal solar system, and when you’re soaking in a piping hot free hot bath, you tend not to care either. Driving an all electric car for as many years as we have tends to normalise this technology for us, but we understand that to many people it’s new and they may not be of the understanding of what solar and battery tech can do. But that’s fast changing as more people become familiar with the technology and with so much on the news about energy and climate change.
There IS ANOTHER WAY, and we’ll hear a lot of waffle and bluster through-out COP26 in Glasgow, but right here, on this windswept rock in the North Atlantic that we call Great Britain, the answers are rising with the sun, moving with the tides and blowing in the wind.
We have the solutions, what we need is the political will to speed the changes up with policies and structural change that negates the need for war, that reduces the amount of carbon we spew and to encourage homeowners to speed up the transition as quickly as we can.
Because we have to.