What if the FIT was kept at 43p

[Somecamel]

With the industry in turmoil, many folding or changing direction, how hooked were we on the 43p.

The market was getting out of control, mainly with the 'Free' Solar (remember them ) brigade taking advantage.

What if they had kept the 43p and done nothing and even god forbid allowed the 37p to come in naturally in April, how crowded would the industry be and how crazy would the customer returns be? I had quotes with a 20% ROI for the customer.

What if they hadn't given any notice of the cut and used some ambiguous part of the energy act to say that don't need to give notice?

Looking back I now agree with the cut from 43p to 21p, but it should have been left there. Maybe the constant court cases and the small window of opportunity to people that installed before the cut become Law used most of the budget?

Was DECC's bill paid for from the FIT or did the Government pay it? Maybe EDF chipped in?

Maybe this is punishment for not sitting down and taking it quietly.

Where now?

Returns are silly again but we're still quiet?

[h=2]Based on the details above we estimate your annual income and overall investment payback to be:

Investment in 4.00kWp System:	£ 6,774.00
First Year:	Income from Feed-In Generation Tariff @ 16.00p/kWh:	£ 604.40
	Income from exporting energy @ 4.50p/kWh:	£ 127.49
	Electricity Saving:	£ 135.99
	Total Benefit:	£ 867.88
Payback Time:	6y 9m
Total Profit Over 20 years:	£ 19,430.29 14.34 % per year (6.76% AER)

[/h]

 

[jerriais]

Just had a look at your figures. Your export income seems high compared to FIT income. Was it based on 50% export at 4.5p?

Sent from my HTC Desire S using Tapatalk 2

 

[Somecamel]

I was taking figures from the solar calculator on my website, the one solarguide provides, had put usage in a 25% which screwed the figures, moved it back to 50% (deemed), seems to be a error on it, gives some crazy electricity bill savings if you put the usage at 50%. I always say around £150 a year ish

anyway

on my basic excel spreadsheet, cant work out the AER but roi still @ 12%

Install Cost £6,774.00
Est generation 3778kW
Income from total Generation 604.48
Income from Export £85.01
Est Savings on Bill £150.00

Total income £839.49

Equivalent Interest
rate 12.39%

Payback Period 8.07

We shouldn't be arguing over ROI though, however you run the variables, it still makes sound economic sense to install solar, hence the thoughts above.








[h=2][/h]

 

[Eco Deal]

Well I said this all along !!! maybe having 43p in the first place was a bad idea !!!

If there was a ad campaign to tell the public that fits is still out there then we night get busy for a while.

but theres nobody looking those who are to much choice the customers are deciding how much to pay not the installer!

thats like going to asda and saying I only paying £30 for my weekly shop this week

 

[Gavin A]

I've had someone spending the morning working up estimates for all our systems at our new pricing, and the best we've got for domestic now is 14.2% internal rate of return - that means we're taking off the entire cost of the system from the 20 year returns, so is actually based on the cash in the pocket at the end of the 20 year period averaged over the 20 years. On top of that the customer ends up with a solar PV system saving them hundreds of pounds a year in electricity bills, plus export payments once the FIT payments end.

I'm now a lot more confident about the medium term future of the industry, as sooner or later these sorts of figures are going to start filtering through into the public conciousness again.

I think we can all play our part in that though, by getting prices and rates of return front an centre on our websites - I feel pretty silly now for taking our performance estimates down after the last cut then never reworking them, but will be recifying that shortly.

One positive thing is that I can't see any way there's going to be a cut in January now, which means we'll have 6 months to run at the next FIT rate into the spring, and returns should still be very attractive as it's only a 3.5% cut and the FIT now makes up only a little over half of the returns in reasonably high daytime energy users situations.


figures are for 4kW cheap as chips system and assume 50% energy consumption in the house, which we will be labelling as being for relatively high daytime energy users, but we are starting to get some figures back showing some pretty hefty reductions in energy consumption from some customers that show that 50% consumption could well be realistic for some customers.

We also assume 2.5% RPI, and 5% energy price rises. I'm thinking about changing this to 9% energy price rises for the next 5 years, then 5% after that, as I think that's more realistic, based on the average of 9% ish for the last 7-8 years, and a big 6 high up was quoted recently as indicating they were expecting 80% price rises between now and 2016-17 or so, which would make 9% conservative. We've got half the coal plants going offline in 2016 whcih is bound to cause a spike in prices IMO.

I seriously think we need to have another go at EST and which over their figures, as they're causing a lot of doubt in the public mind with their supposedly impartial figures.

 

[Worcester]

When we had our REAL audit earlier this year (joke ... she said she would with us for the day, gone by lunchtime) the only thing they could find was they didn't like the inflation figures I used and that we should use the EST's ..

I see now that the EST have gown down the current day price route, i.e all based on todays prices, even then their calculator shows a good return - They use 25 years of energy savings and 20 years of income, 25% consumption.

So how to market it .... Well we have just been talking with our local private hospital's TV station - all demographically AB's with cash , 5 deals in a year would pay for the advertising.

 

[Worcester]

Here's the EST reports:

 

[Worcester]

Scary stuff this as you dig deeper, SolarJuice.com that powers the EST calculator hasn't updated their blog since .... April 15th 2012 So Iguess they reckno nothing has happened of note inthe PV sector since then..

Recent Posts - New Feed In Tariff 21p

 

[Gavin A]

another issue being that those predictions, and SAP are around 10% below what we'd predict for a well set up TL system using PVGIS.

FWIW, I refuse to use SAP for performance predictions, it's the worst prediction tool anyone could possibly come up with. We guarantee our performance predictions anyway, so I'd love to see REAL / MCS argue the ---- on that in court.