Five years on

In our regular critical review, Hannah Bullock revisits stories we identified as interesting back in 2000 – and checks where they’re going now.

Completing the microgen circuit

We hailed ‘net metering’ as a breakthrough for solar photovoltaics five years ago, when energy company TXU Europe started paying the owners of a solar powered adventure playground in London for their excess electricity [Net metering takes its place in the sun, GF23] But, even after all this time, it still hasn’t been taken up by that many of the country’s growing band of ‘microgenerators’ – the people with power of their own and some to spare when conditions are right.

So what’s the hitch? There are various tariff packages out there that should, in theory, make it easy. The original Solarnet package, for one (now run by TXU’s descendant, Powergen), or Going Solar with RSPB Energy, or signing up for Npower’s ‘solar account’ – or even selling power from house-mounted Windsave turbines to British Gas. But – problem one – it’s not always profitable.

In the US, net metering is understood to mean that when a house is producing more electricity than it is using, the customer’s meter spins backwards, ‘banking’ it at its full retail value until it’s needed. Here, though, we need Variwatt machines to measure production and consumption. If you’re with Npower for example, you can sell them your microgenerated power at 5p per kWh, but the electricity you buy from the company will cost you more than that on their regional tariff.

If domestic customers do manage to make a profit on their homemade power, they even have to pay income tax on it, which Rebecca Willis, a Green Alliance associate, finds it hard to believe. Problem two – it’s a hassle. Or, as Louise Gilchrist, Npower’s renewable product developer, diplomatically puts it, “It’s a long customer journey.” She’s found that even the 150 committed green PV owners taking part in the company’s pilot ‘solar account’ scheme find it complicated to get grid connected.

They’re “quite frustrated at the amount of time it takes looking for accredited installers and then searching for suppliers to give them a deal. They haven’t got much incentive to do that at the moment.” The only reason for producing your own power in the current regulatory framework, agrees Willis, remains “wanting to do the right thing”. We should be looking at the German model, says Green Alliance in its Microgenation Manifesto.

Germans with domestic installations are simply paid ‘feed in tariffs’ based on a standard generation and export ‘profile’ of each technology – which works out at a hefty 15-30p per unit. Anyone with a system smaller than 50kW should be allowed to ‘sell’ electricity like this, it argues, rather than having to invest in an expensive metering system whose costs are barely covered by what is sold. Only wind power, which is affected by variations in speed, should really need metering.

Things could be looking up, though, for Brits with solar photovoltaics and the like, or even one of the new Swift mini-wind turbines [see page xvi of our Special Supplement, Light Emerging]. For the problem has registered on the government’s radar. Ofgem, the gas and electricity industries regulator, is currently consulting on the “regulatory barriers to microgen”, and hopes that the forthcoming microgeneration strategy will make it much easier to sell surplus power to the grid.

But Willis is concerned that there’s little mention of changes to personal taxation, and the German model seems to have been ruled out... Meanwhile, for those domestic producers whose systems are so small that they’ve never even considered selling to the big wide world, Trade Link Solutions offers to bring in a little extra money. The company is offering to act as an agent, pooling and trading the Renewable Energy Certificates which every renewable generator should claim – if they can get through the red tape...
Green Alliance, 020 7233 7433, www.green-alliance.org.uk
Npower, 01905 340760
Trade Link Solutions, 01923 285583,  www.tradelinksolutions.com

Sea legs

There’s a touch of romance about timber-laden boats sailing across the Kyle of Localsh. But in fact they’re part of a serious government push to curb heavy lorry miles, and thereby to cut CO2 emissions.

127 tonnes of freight by water
97 tonnes of freight by train
50 tonnes of freight by road

Waterborne transport is miles better in terms of energy consumption [see box]. And the timber boats aren’t such a rare sight now, either. Since the Forestry Commission dipped its toe in the water five years ago, funding the shipping of timber across the Firth of Clyde [Timber all at sea, GF23], a whole fleet of ships has joined the mission to help keep trucks off Scotland’s rural roads. A trial run, to deliver 1,500 tonnes of Scottish-grown spruce logs by boat to north Wales’s Chirk mill, has become a permanent crossing, with over 3,000 tonnes of logs a year heading that way via Scrabster Harbour.

So what stops everyone else putting their freight on the water? It’s not the actual cost of shipping, or of fuel, says Mike Elsom, director of the UK’s water freight forum Sea and Water. It’s the transhipments – the process of getting stuff from where it’s produced, to the waterside.

Elsom argues that this can be addressed through policy, and he’s keen to see water freight included in the ‘Company Neutral’ scheme. As currently applied to rail, this provides for a government payment to neutralise what would otherwise be the cost advantage of road transport – effectively “buying the environmental benefit” of the more sustainable solution. The EU, too, is keen on getting goods to take to the sea. It is investing in the vision of four maritime corridors linking the different parts of the continent – and hopes to have British boats riding the westernmost of these ‘motorways’ down the Atlantic Arc to Spain by 2010. Watch this space.
Forestry Commission Scotland, 0131 314 6507, www.forestry.gov.uk/scotland
Sea and Water, 020 7928 9090, www.seaandwater.org

If you go down to the woods today...

Follow the sound of chinking hammers and rasping saws, and you’ll find craft workers breathing new life into local timber and traditional skills. The Forest of Avon wood co-operative was little more than a twinkle in someone’s eye back in 2000 [Craft work in the woods, GF23], but it now supports 38 individual traders and nine local companies. The chairs, candlesticks, bowls – even timber frame buildings – all started off as trees growing within 25 miles of the forest boundary.

Better still, all the woodland is sustainably managed, much of it with funding from the Forestry Commission’s environmentally focused Woodland Grant Scheme. The co-operative is looking at introducing its own ‘chain of custody’ for products, which would be cheaper for smaller woodland owners to buy into than the Forest Stewardship Council’s international certification scheme. While the Forest of Avon shop isn’t a household name (yet), project manager Jim O’Shaughnessy thinks they’ve done well to corner a niche market. “People say to us that we sell things they can’t buy anywhere else.

It’s difficult to find a heavy, well made table – either in Ikea or antiques shops.” The shop’s online presence from this autumn is expected to boost sales, too. This autumn will also see the millionth tree planted in the woodland since it was created as a Community Forest in 1992. Across Britain, the growing Community Forests continue to paint the map greener. The partnership has planted 10,000 hectares of woodland over the last 15 years – over 15% of the overall target. The vision is a chain of green pockets in and around our towns, recreating forests in true medieval style – as places not only for exploring, but for living and enterprise. Community Forests, 01684 311880, www.communityforest.org.uk
Forest of Avon shop, 0117 9532141, goodwood@forestofavon.org.uk,
www.forestofavon.org.uk

20 July 2005

Hannah Bullock