The Home of the Future
We look at the technology that will come in the next-generation of family homes
HARVEST THE SUN
While a smart meter and energy monitor are great devices for helping you become more power efficient, you’re still pulling all that power from the national grid. If you really want your house to be eco-friendly and save you money, it really needs to be producing some power by itself. This doesn’t mean buying one of those wind turbines from your local garden centre – they’re rarely efficient and seem to be popular only with people who want show their neighbours how environmentally friendly they are. If you really want your home to create power, you’ll need to pull it out of the sky.
Solar power is nothing new; it has been touted as the answer to dwindling fossil fuels for some time now. It’s an infinitely abundant, clean power source, just waiting to be put to good use. Unfortunately, while the idea of solar power has always been an attractive one, in practice it has proved too difficult and expensive to harvest, but not anymore.
The latest photovoltaic (PV) solar panels, like the Kyocera KC200GT, can be fitted to almost any residential home and won’t require a second mortgage to cover the cost. That’s not to say that a solar panel installation is cheap – it’s not – but it’s not prohibitively expensive, especially when you consider the benefits are both environmental and financial.
A serious installation like this will be beyond most budgets, especially since the government scrapped its 50% solar grant
Solar panel installation specialist, www.evoenergy.co.uk, estimates that a solar panel installation for an average residential home will cost around £10,000 including VAT. That cost includes the supply of the panels, the roof mounting system, the inverter that turns the solar energy into electricity and all labour costs. The government used to offer a 50 per cent grant for residential renewable energy installations, but unfortunately that has now been scrapped.
You can still get some help with the cost of installation, though. A Low Carbon Building Programme Grant will pay up to £2,500 towards the initial cost of your installation. Just bear in mind that certain aspects of your home also need to be compliant in order to receive the grant. But the real financial benefit will come once you’re solar panels are up and running.
You might be thinking that the point of solar panels is to create and use your own power, but there’s more to it than that. Going some way to redress the scrapping of the 50 per cent grant, the government has recently implemented Solar feed-in tariffs. This means that your utility company is obliged to buy every unit of power you produce from your solar panels at a set rate, even if you’re actually using that power in your own home.
If you produce more power than you need in your home, you can have it fed into the national grid and get paid at an even higher rate. The point of the feed-in tariff is to encourage people to invest in solar power, by making the panels pay for themselves over a shorter period of time. The feed-in tariffs will only be enforced for the next 25 years, which the government hopes will encourage consumers to invest in renewable energy sooner rather than later.