Smallholders could benefit from wind turbines (From Smallholder)

Smallholders could benefit from wind turbines

9:23am Friday 5th February 2010

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The Government has announced the level at which the ‘feed in tariff’ (FiT) will be paid to those people and companies generating electricity from small scale renewable sources (wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, hydro power etc).

The FiT works by paying the generator for every kilowatt generated, whether it is used by the generator in their house, school or business, or not. When excess generation is fed back into the grid, the electricity supply company will pay a further amount for the electricity fed back into the grid.

When generated electricity is used on site the generator saves the cost of buying that amount of electricity from the electricity supply company.

This means that the generator not only gets paid for generating, but saves the money that would have paid for the electricity used, and gets paid for any amount exported to the grid. And all these savings and payments are tax free.

Andrew Lovering of Greenthinking welcomed the announcement: “This will create a real incentive for people to invest in small scale renewable schemes. With the South West being such a windy area some sites are achieving payback periods of as little as 3 to 5 years, after which payments are welcome extra income. With the payments guaranteed for 20 years there has never been a better time to consider investing in renewable energy.”

For the government and the South West it has the added benefits of boosting green jobs in an already attractive industry, increasing investment to help get the economy moving and going some way towards the target of reducing our CO2 emissions.

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