Renewable Energy Installer December/January 2016 | Página 15

Opinion
Bill Wright, head of energy
solutions at The Electrical
Contractors’ Association,
bemoans the government’s
lack of direction in energy
policy
Brave new world
Selling ‘energy independence’
must be the new strategy for PV
installers facing a downturn in
PV-only customers, argues Steve
Pester, BRE
y the time
you read
this, the
government
will probably have
announced its final
decisions on how/whether
it will support solar going
forward.
However, it is really
starting to look as though
the cavalry might be about
to arrive in the form of
whole-house energy solutions, at least for some in the industry.
These solutions are in the form of practical energy storage and
clever control products, and are arriving on the scene in droves
at the moment. Some of these may be regarded as new and as
yet unproven, but others have been rolled out in countries such
as Germany for some time.
The key message is that no longer will it be sufficient to
sell PV in isolation, as a bolt-on investment to a house. The way
forward in this ‘brave new world’ is to sell energy independence,
offering fixed energy costs for the next 25 years. Solar by itself
can offer that to a limited extent, but with the addition of battery
storage, the proportion of self-consumption can be radically
increased.
Small scale heat storage is an even easier sell, with lots
of energy diverter products for water heating now being sold
to new and existing PV customers. This connection between
apparently separate energy systems is really just the tip of the
iceberg. Factor in the potential for systems using PV, batteries,
electric cars, heat storage, heat pumps, PV-T and top-up heating
systems and it becomes clear that building energy systems are
starting to merge via intelligent controls, another part of the big
up-sell.
A new guide on installing battery systems will be available
from the National Solar Centre in the next few weeks.
B
O
nce again it’s been rather bemusing
month on the energy front as it appears
government wants to encourage
investment in energy while cutting off support for
industry at the same time. Confused? You will be!
On the one hand we are facing cuts in
subsidies, while on the other the government is
intent on increasing the percentage of renewable
energy in our supply mix.
Surely this is illogical? Instead of building
new power stations would it not make more
sense to improve the efforts to get people to
invest in becoming more energy efficient? It
must be cheaper to reduce power consumption
than to build power stations. Despite this we’re
spending more money on keeping fossil fuelled
power stations online than we are in investing in
encouraging energy efficiency, or enticing people
to invest in renewables.
In the short term, combining renewable
energy sources with bulk energy storage must
be the way to get the best out of the energy
sources at our disposal. It would also go a long
way to combating the risk of winter blackouts
- something that has been given as much press
over the summer as the comings and goings of the
football transfer window.
The UK appears to be on the cusp of an
energy storage revolution, and this presents a
golden opportunity to invest in research to make
the UK a world leader in this area. Let’s grasp it
before it becomes yet another opportunity we
miss and our competitors take.
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