Filtration for the Electrical Interference

The engineer has been today to connect some filtration equipment into the control cabinet at the foot of the turbine. We turned it back on and...................it’s still the same! Oh well, back to the drawing board.

The Clean Energy Cashback Scheme

As with the Ofgem application, I have been working on finding someone to buy my exported electricity and pay me the feed-in tariff income for months. Our electricity supplier is currently Scottish Power, so I thought it might be less complicated to use the same company for the FIT, or the “Clean Energy Cashback Scheme” as they call it. All of the main retail electricity companies are required by law to offer the FIT, so it shouldn’t make any difference. The FIT rate and the 3p per kWh rate for exported electricity are also laid down in the regulations, so there is nothing to be gained from shopping around. There is a provision to opt out of the 3p export rate and strike a separate deal, but I have found that any alternative buyer insists on supplying as well as purchasing, and I am half way through a contract with Scottish Power.

In the Scottish Power application form, there is a box to enter the Ofgem registration number. Ofgem told me that it would be sufficient to enter “pending” before my application was processed. However Scottish Power’s “computer says no!”, and even after I had my Ofgem number, Scottish Power were still unable to process my application because they needed the completed registration document, which Ofgem are still unable to provide. It seems the procedure is that Ofgem produces an electronic document which is transmitted for completion to the purchaser, and without this virtual paper trail the Cashback scheme cannot be activated. This actually all makes perfect sense, but again it is very frustrating when it doesn’t work.

Another unresolved issue is the export meter. When the new transformer was installed, it was effectively a new supply with switchgear, fuses and metering equipment. A brand new, state-of-the-art, multi-function programmable meter was provided. However because the Cashback scheme was not activated, they could not program the new meter to record exported electricity. So Scottish Power Retail is now trying to get Dataserve (a Scottish Power company) to re-program the meter, so far without much luck. At one stage it looked as if they were going to have to install a new separate export meter because no one could authorise the re-programming! However they do seem to have got over that particular piece of nonsense now, and hopefully we will have the existing meter programmed correctly.

To give them their due, they have promised that if actual export data is not available, they will negotiate an estimate for which they will pay, and they will back-date all payments to the turbine commissioning date. Fortunately I am recording electricity usage by various parts of the farm business, so I can calculate exported electricity as imported electricity plus generated electricity less usage.

Perhaps the lesson of all this is to avoid having anything to do with Scottish Power! We have been trying to deal with Scottish Power Energy Networks (Manweb), Dataserve and Scottish Power Retail, and they just do not talk to each other despite the fact that they are all part of the same company, Iberdrola of Spain. I now have direct telephone numbers for the relevant people in each company so it is not too bad, but when I had to try to get in through Customer Services it was often actually impossible to speak to the correct department.

Ofgem Registration

As a “small wind” generator, that is with a turbine with a rated output of between 50 kW and 250 kW, I have to register directly with Ofgem in order to obtain the Feed-in tariff payments. If the generator is less than 50 kW, so long as your installer is registered with the MCS (Microgeneration Certification Scheme), the Ofgem registration is done for you.

I have been working on my application for registration with Ofgem for months, in fact I started researching when the government first announced it was consulting on introducing a feed-in tariff scheme last year. At the time, we thought we would have the turbine up and running by April 1st 2010, the date that feed-in tariffs were to be introduced, so I wanted to get my application under way. Ofgem suggested that I apply under the ROC (Renewable Obligation Certificate) scheme, and then transfer to the FIT as soon as it became available. They even set up a specific email address called “ro2fit”. I applied using a complicated on-line form that requested far more information than I was able to supply, and was clearly designed for industrial wind farm developers rather than farmers putting up one turbine.

However today is registration day. A series of phone calls and emails has resulted in my application being successful, and I have today received an email confirming my registration. The exciting bit is my number with Ofgem, FWD00001EN. This may not look exciting, and I’m not sure what the letters FWD represent, but EN stands for England, and 00001 means that my turbine is the very first to be registered.

Just to dampen my enthusiasm a little, all I have is an email because “software issues” are preventing the issuing of the actual certificates themselves. One fact jumps out at me from all of this, is that the whole industry of “small wind” is brand new, and everyone, from the manufacturers, the installers, the electricity retail companies, all the way up to the government themselves, are flying by the seats of their pants, and making up the procedures as they go.