Future Gazing

We’ll soon be billing British Gas

As anyone who’s opened an energy bill will agree, the rising costs of gas and electricity are something that can’t be avoided. Bills have risen a whooping 45%* during 2008 alone. Britain’s biggest supplier, British Gas, even raised the price of its gas by 35% over night.

And it seems that, if the fat cat energy companies get their way, prices like these could be here to stay.

Nevertheless, for those households living in fear of their fuel bills (which it is safe to say is probably nearly every UK bill-paying resident), there is a faint light at the end of the tunnel.

Fast-forward a few years and we could all be generating our own electricity using small-scale wind turbines and roof top solar panelling. We may finally have the chance to get our own back on the greedy energy suppliers. It’s a warming vision. Just imagine, by the year 2012 we, the little people, could be billing the big six with our own equally high bills.

While it may seem hard to believe and a little far-fetched at the moment, according to the media this may well be a reality in the not-too-distant future.

Mounting public pressure is forcing government to sit up and taking note, and most recently, energy companies have been urged to pass on savings to their customers in the wake of massive falls in oil and gas prices.

Prompted by rising fuel poverty figures, energy regulator Ofgem has said it wants to see proposed price cut commitments from the “big six” by 1 December. Energy minister Ed Miliband has even jumped on the bandwagon, saying he will consider legislation to force suppliers to pass on price cuts, if this deadline is not met.

So far though, there’s only been a vague mention by Scottish and Southern that they are “considering” cutting prices, and the five other energy giants seem to be resting firmly on their profits.

So how are we going to get our own back on the energy suppliers?

A proposed amendment to the energy bill could support localised energy production, allowing households to generate enough power to serve more than 1,000 people. It could also see the introduction of feed-in tariffs – a new tariff that would give customers a better rate for generating their own electricity.

Translated, this basically means we could all set up a few solar panels, generate a bit of green energy, and sell whatever we don’t use to heat our homes, back to the power companies.

Yes, you read correctly – in the David and Goliath battle of the people versus the provider, the energy giants could finally get their comeuppance. What’s more, the cherry on top of this particularly satisfying cake is the price we’ll be able to charge the big boys for the home-grown energy we sell back to them.

While the idea may seem a little preposterous, there is living proof that it can be done. For example, electricity at Will Anderson’s house in Clapham is produced on the roof by 30 square metres of solar photovoltaic panels. Their output peaks at about 4.3kW, and even on a cloudy day the panels can produce more than 5KWh by mid morning.

The panels generate a 4,470kWh of electricity a year, which Anderson uses to power his lights, appliances and a heat pump which provides underfloor heating throughout the house. Any extra energy he makes – which was a whooping 118KWh last year – is sold back to the national grid.

The microgeneration myth

The sharper among you may have already seen a few potential drawbacks to the almighty “green scheme,” and these are things that can’t be addressed lightly.

Obviously there’s the issue of space for some households. A couple living in one-bedroom fourth-floor flat, whose nearest thing to a garden is a pot plant in the living room will undoubtedly find it hard to employ a renewable energy system in their home. The solution would be to get the entire building to agree on a community project that would enable each separate flat to use power supplied from a large renewable source, such as a wind turbine on the roof.

For some homes, community energy schemes will make the most sense, suggests the consumer energy Energy Saving Trust.

However, this then leads on to the other major constraint: the cost. At the moment the cost of installation and equipment is a huge factor limiting people from putting solar PV panelling on their rooves and biomass stoves in their kitchens. But in a few years time, who’s to say that the price of installing a microgeneration wind farm in your garden will be nearly as expensive as it is now? With improvements in technology, costs could be considerably cheaper.

And of course, there is one other major flaw that cannot be overlooked. The simple fact that there has been no timescale assigned to the introduction of the feed-in tariffs. While the concept behind feed-in tariffs looks good on paper, some experts are sceptical. Ed Matthew of Friends of the Earth UK said: “Unfortunately the Government’s woolly proposals are fundamentally flawed and will not guarantee that an effective scheme will be introduced.”

Rarely are environmental concerns in line with financial concerns, any underpaid eco-warrior will wholeheartedly agree. Just this once though, all those campaigning for renewable energy and reduced carbon emissions may actually have a point: What bigger incentive is there to go green other than a cash incentive?

* based on figures of a British Gas dual fuel average user

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