I think back to the first online adverts that I used to see for renewable energy systems like Solar Panels and wonder if they were the reason for a lot of scepticism.
Those adverts promised free electricity without mentioning the investment needed to generate said free electricity.
Now to the uninitiated the word ‘free’ conjures up easy street life with no worries and no special skills required.
I recall also the start of loadshedding 1.0 in South Africa – the number of quotations that I did every day was simply horrendous. Almost as horrendous as the strike rate of less than 1%.
I tried mightily to increase the strike rate by pre-qualifying client enquiries and warning prospective clients that in order to kick Eskom to touch they would need to spend – in those days – a minimum of R340 000 if they wanted battery storage of 14 kW plus an inverter and solar panels.
But, the desire to get FREE electricity blinded them to the real expenses.
Our country missed a really good opportunity to get rid of loadshedding much sooner if only they had heavily promoted my ‘hippy’ option, and introduced some form of incentive encouraging property owners to install Grid Tie Only – my ‘hippy’ option.
Grid Tie only is not only much cheaper but also shows a far quicker Return on Investment. The equation is simple – produce more than you use on any given day and that will reduce/negate your night time usage.
The ‘hippy’ option was quite straightforward:
- Install and over panel with Solar Panels only
- No battery (i.e still subject to loadshedding)
- Allow your excess production to go to the grid to help support Eskom
If we had a 50 000 households each sending 10 kWh per day into the grid we could have gifted FIVE HUNDRED Megawatts per day to Eskom – not to mention the even larger savings from self consumption.
Eskom produces tens of thousands of megawatts daily, but a precise single number isn’t fixed; it’s a dynamic range, often in the 30,000-40,000 MW band, heavily impacted by plant performance and system constraints, with peaks and troughs daily.
For a solar system with batteries and enough capacity to be called off grid you will be paying around R300 000 today – this for a system at least three times in size of the first battery driven systems.
For most of these large, redundancy focused systems you can expect a return on investment to kick in in year 7 after installation.
The above ROI represents a 23% year on year Compound Annual Growth Rate – numbers that are horrendously impossible to consistently achieve using normal market investments.
Why Snake Oil Salesmen?
- There is no such thing as a free lunch – even free air and food demands an investment.
- Our loadshedding turned the purchase of a Solar System into an emotional grudge purchase.
- Loadshedding drove the demand for a NOW solution rather than an informed solution.
- Solar Salespeople more often than not promised the world and then delivered a small patch of sand.
- Due to the pressure many fly by nights entered the industry and failed to understand the long term commitment required to service clients thereafter.
Links:
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Alan Straton
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