Some like it hot… (From Bournemouth Echo)

Some like it hot…

7:00pm Tuesday 2nd March 2010 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
• Comments(0)

WITH its homely decor, ’60s-style kitchen and well-tended gardens, this detached house in Hynesbury Road, Christchurch, is hardly your archetypal power station.

Yet despite its lack of concrete chimneys, as far as Npower is concerned, it is as much a power plant as Fawley.

“When they send me correspondence it’s addressed to Hynesbury Road North Power Station,” chuckles Colin Dewsnap, the retired chief executive of Christchurch council. “Officially it has to be classed as a power station.”

That is because the roof of Colin’s house is home to 14 solar panels, which turn sunlight into electricity, some of which is fed to the National Grid via a small unit in the garage. The unit siphons off all the electricity Colin and his wife, Marilyn, need and they are paid 12p for every kWh that goes into the grid – and it does not even have to be that sunny to generate electricity. “It works out at around £230 a year, tax free,” explains Colin, who invested £9,200 to have the solar panels installed a year ago.

On top of the £230, Colin is paid £144 for what is called a standing allowance, which is basically a financial pat on the back for being green. Add this to the money he saves in electricity and he is looking at a five per cent return on his investment.

“When I had this installed last year, high interest savings accounts were only offering around two per cent,” says Colin.

But he is not in it for the cash. “The environment has taken over my life, because I’ve got six grandchildren and I don’t like the way our planet is being degraded – we’re producing far more CO2 than nature can absorb.”

Scientists say that enough sunlight falls on the earth’s surface every hour to support the world’s population for a year, so if homeowners and businesses followed Colin’s example then polluting power plants would be defunct.

Even the global warming sceptics can’t ignore the financial advantages of a system like Colin’s, which will be even more lucrative for homeowners when the Department for Energy and Climate Change introduces new feed-in rates.

“From April 1 the scheme will pay 36.5p for every kWh generated and an extra 5p for every kWh exported,” says Colin, who understandably thinks the new rate is an April fool joke because it does not apply to existing generators.

“We’re being penalised for being visionary,” he says. “If I’d waited another 12 months I’d have got three times as much.”

Despite this, Colin agrees it is about time such an incentive was introduced in Britain.

“It’s great, although this is where Germany was about 15 years ago,” he says.

“From April 1 anyone generating electricity will have a tax free return on their investment of around 9 per cent – you’d be mad not to.”