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.