You Could be Losing £500 Year by Not Installing Solar

Whether you're building a new property, want to add value to a property, or are planning on staying in your current home for the foreseeable future. If you don't have solar, you could be loosing as much as £500 year, by paying for your electricity through energy suppliers. The average home can generate an estimated 3816 kwh of electricity, per year using solar panels. If the average cost of electricity is 0.14p per kwh, your solar panels could generate around £534 worth of electricity each year. Making a Solar Installation a cost effective investment. Installing quality Solar Panels can mean a big spend initially. But not only do they cut down your energy bills, you can get paid for generating energy too. Even more good news, the cost of solar is beginning to plummet and the typical household can expect to see a 17.98% return on investment for solar over 20 years. That's better than any ISA I know of.

How To Recoup Your Investment

Installing solar can be a big upfront cost, but there are 3 ways you can recoup that outlay:

1. Electricity Bill Savings

The electricity your panels generate, you can use to power your home, in turn reducing your electricity bills. A typical 4kW system can knock off an estimated £70 from a family's electricity bills each year, say The Energy Saving Trust. Of course your savings will depend on the size of the system you install, your electricity usage, whether you're at home during the day, and a few other factors. For example, if you use more energy during the day time when your panels are generating, you use less electricity from the grid, saving you more money.

2. The 'Feed-in Tariff'

The Feed-in-Tariff is a payment from the Government, which you receive via your energy supplier, to households in England, Scotland and Wales for all the electricity you generate, whether you actually use it or not. It's called a 'generation tariff'. Even though the Government cut the funding to the Feed-in Tariff, reducing the rate from 12.03p/kWh (from February 2016), to 4.14p/kWh. The feed-in tariff can still make you money. It's income tax-free and The Energy Saving Trust estimates that panels registered at a typical home can earn up to £150/year under the feed-in tariff. If your application is successful, you’ll get a set amount of money for each unit (the current rate being 4.14p/kWh) of electricity you generate. This gets paid quarterly by energy suppliers and is guaranteed for 20 years.

3. The Export Tariff

This is a payment for energy you don't use, which is sent back to the grid, at a rate of 5.03p/kWh. The 'Export Tariff' works with the 'generation tariff', so as well as making money from the electricity you generate, you can sell the extra units you don’t use back to your electricity supplier. You can expect to be paid around 4.85p per unit of electricity you give back to the grid.