Farm Owner, Jonathan Samwells recently made the smart move to make the roof of one of his farm buildings into a financial investment.
Jonathan had previous dealings with the Efficient Energy Centre as we had also recently installed a HDG Compact 200 Woodchip Boiler and a small domestic solar photovoltaic installation on his farmhouse meter.
The chosen barn, pictured above, had space for a 100 panel array. We decided upon a 99 panel array with one spare panel as a backup in 5 rows of 20 landscape panels. 3 inverters were used, all Fronius IG Plus 100 8 kW 3 phase inverters, which were mounted in the barn.
The installation itself took just over a week from the scaffolding being assembled to commissioning.
The array is a 24.75 kW peak array and will produce 21245 kW of electricity per year. Mr Samwells will be paid at the current tariff rate for every kW that his array produces, and it will be tax free and APR linked.
Taking into consideration the cost of Mr Samwells investment, the money he will gain from the Feed in Tariff and save on his current farm electricity bill, his annual payback is equivalent to an 13.8% investment. With the banks offering such low rates for savings in today’s economic climate, solar photovoltaics are an investment well worth considering.
