Cornbury Park Solar Farm

Fri 21 Jan 2011, 20:20

What would be nice would be local investment participation in the project by local people. Liz Reason has taken upon herself to have already held a meeting with Lord R, according the the representative at the consultation, on just this issue. The lesson from Denmark is very clear where it comes to alternative energy investments - where local people have a stake in the investment and income resulting there is little or no serious objection and it fertilises the ground for more investments locally of other technologies and in further areas.

For example there are a lot of unremarkable tile rooves in the outlying estates of Charlbury just begging to be covered in rolls of Unisolar PV rolls (not hard panels that are much heavier and can impact roof construction strength, i.e. 17kg/M2 compared to 6Kg/M2 which is less than a fall of snow and well within the capacity of any roof - including snow!).

Already in the USA and Germany some financial companies are offering mortgages based upon the surety of the PV array's value and its Feed-in Tarriff (FIT) for supplying electricity into the gridas an income stream. A bulk purchase project of this nature on a couple of hundred houses in the town would make a big contribution to meeting our collective electricity needs and would have a reasonable payback time even at current costs and prices.

With overproduction capacity of PVs seeming to be in the pipeline due to some enthusiastic investments in plant capacity construction which will come online for production in the next couple of years (the roaring bull market before '98 has some silver linings to the clouds) and developing technology making PV installation to rooves even easier, then a community commercial enterprise could look very interesting in a handful of years into the future.

To cap things off the purchase of a few megawatt hours of Nickel Iron batteries (almost indestructible there are many 100 year old examples in use on things like the Southern Region rail) would allow us a significant degree of off grid self reliance in the case of grid cut offs and smoothing out the flow from inconstant supply technologies for steady FIT inputs into the grid. Why not think big?

Liz, what did you find out in your meeting?

Malcolm