Free wind turbine

[tut]

Mikey put me onto this yesterday from a company called EvanceWind, who have now been taken over by Britwind, a subsidiary of Ecotricity.

They operate a lease system, if your house is suitable they will install a Wind Turbine for free, you get all the electricity that it produces and they get the FIT. They obtain planning permission etc, and I can not imagine a more suitable location for one than Tut End. Just called them so they have all my information and will get back to me. Mike is aiming for zero carbon emissions, zero operating costs for his new house. Iain Thomas is coming out for a survey to install a GSHP for which he can get a 0% interest loan, and the RHI will both pay off the loan and also give him an income as well. Unfortunately I can not get the RHI for ours as it was installed before 2009.

However the turbine will supply all the kW hours electricity that we need, so along with the GSHP we will have a zero electricity bill. TT cost £7,000 for the past twelve months in oil and coal, so a nice little saving along with half the mortgage repayments, and a big lump sum from the sale of the house in the Bank. Bugger is we have nothing to spend it on, apart from Verian taking a couple of holidays a year we have all we want, and I do not even have N3 for six months.

tut

[PhilA]

Thanks tut.

Mikey, you are the man I need to speak to...

I have sold my house, and want to build a zero operating cost house next. I have the time, and the desire to complete this project.
I need the inside knowledge to know
What builder
What architect
How to finance

I am willing to do lots of investigations, reading up, but dont know who is good and who isnt.
In my industry, there are people who say they are good - then there are those who are actually good.

[Mikie711]

Phil,
we looked at building but eventually gave up as the right plot proved near impossible to find. Hence we are now going down the renovation route. The builder will likely come from your architect and needless to say that is the single most important part of the project, get him wrong and the rest will just unravel. Spend time finding and if necessary waiting for the right architect. Find one that specailises in your type of build as he will have the knowledge of what does or doesn't work.
Hendeg would be able to help with what you are planning as his misses just built a small energy efficient house. Sorry Gary couldn't resist BTW the international space station just called to say everything looks OK at the house!

The Finance is either complicated or easy. The easy ones are when it's a conventional build, bricks and mortar or timber framed usual stuff, you have a sizable deposit or have already bought the land, and your bank offers self build finance deals.
The complicated is when you are building non conventional such as SIPS system, the banks really don't like anything out of the ordinary. We looked at a timber house, Canadian built, hurricane proof same as they build them in Canada but because of the non standard construction for the UK our bank wouldn't look at it so would have had to go specialist lender.

[tut]

Just realised that I do have something to spend the money on, going to buy the new Macbook on the 10th and pass over the MBA to Verian.

tut

[hendeg]

I'm sure Pauline would be happy to share her experience. She did a lot of research and ended up building to the Passivhaus standard (http://www.passivhaus.org.uk). It's not zero operating but it's very cheap. It could be zero operating but she decided that many of the renewable technologies would develop significantly over the next few years and could be added later.

She's away until the weekend but I'll ask her to have a look at your questions.

[robin]

Mikey put me onto this yesterday from a company called EvanceWind, who have now been taken over by Britwind, a subsidiary of Ecotricity.

tut

Tut, I am sure your contact is legitimate. A word of warning, however. I was once offered a very similar sounding deal. On the face of it perfectly reasonable. When I looked into it in more detail, I discovered that it was only free for so long as the FIT exceed the cost of whatever finance had been put in place to cover the installation costs. As soon as, for whatever reason, that ceased to be the case I would be on the hook to make up the difference. Thus should the government change the FIT my electricity would start to look pretty expensive!!!

Cheers,
Robin

[tut]

Good point Robin, not going into anything without my eyes wide open. Any clause like that and it is out of the window. The turbine would be the Evance R9000 5kW so should give good output at our location.

At present there is a guarantee that the rate of FIT/RHI will not be changed after installation, Graeme Lovie is still on 42p for his wind turbine which he installed years ago when the rate was at its highest. Of course the guarantee could be worth the paper that it is written on with Government changes. However they seem to be actually increasing rates at present as they are really pushing renewable energy.

Our postcode on the national wind database gives an average annual figure of 8m/s which Evance says should produce 19,000kWh/annum, but that is probably an optimistic figure. They are contacting me next week after some research, so will have a list of questions for them.

Our new address is :-

Tut End
Deerhill
Glen of Newmill
Keith
AB55 6UE

So we still have a Tut and a Deer in it.

tut

[graeme]

More like somewhere between 6.3m/s and 7.1m/s Tut. It's only 7.9m/s average at 45m above ground level, which is one pretty huge tower!



It's also not clear to me how the FIT calculators take account of the different cut-in speeds for different turbines (3m/s for yours)... I'm not sure they do, so I'd take any FIT calcs based on 8m/s with a laaaarge pinch of salt.

[graeme]

Straight-line interpolated values for the available tower heights:

10m = 6.3m/s
12m = 6.4m/s
15m = 6.57m/s
18m = 6.73m/s

So I wouldn't work on a value higher than 6.7m/s for your sums.

Looking at this graph




the steep slope between 6m/s and 8m/s means quite a difference... 1200W vs 2800W. So, 2m/s difference in wind speed doesn't sound like a lot, but means more than double the output. Of course it doesn't follow that total output will double as the average windspeed doubles, but it's interesting to look at the performance of the turbine at the lower inputs because the cut-in point will have more of an influence on total output at lower average wind speeds.

Sounds like an exciting deal though, and I'm sure they won't install if they don't think it will pay out (unless there's a gotcha clause like Robin's).

[tut]

Mixed up agl with asl. However if you look at a picture of the location of the house, it should make a big difference to the wind speed compared to the valley below which is the actual location given by our post code. Also converting to a grid code for the wind database uses the valley, whereas we are at the top of Deerhill. I asked the owner what the wind was like and he just pointed to the trees outside which had a distinct bend to their tops.

One of the conditions of installation is a mean speed of at least 6ms so they would not go ahead unless they were going to get their money back. As long as there is no clause of the type that Robin mentioned I see it as a no lose situation.

http://www.propertypigeon.co.uk/propert ... 1953902537

tut

[graeme]

The windspeed database isn't very granular. I stuck a pin right on your roof (NJ 44234 55690), but the OS grid ref gets chopped down to km squares, not 100m or 10m, so being up the hill you might well get a bit more puff.

If their cut-off is 6m/s I think you can safely show you'll be above that, so

[tut]

Thanks for all the technical info Graeme, really useful. It would not even come into the equation if I had to pay for it, around £30K for the installation.

The same with solar energy, give it me for free as ashadegreener does in England, but not worth paying for, especially as I have a GSHP.

tut

[tut]

Bent trees........



tut

[graeme]

It can't be that windy; I've been watching that photo for 5 mins, and the clouds haven't moved at all!

[Dominic]

It can't be that windy; I've been watching that photo for 5 mins, and the clouds haven't moved at all!