We are connected

We are connected! Our photovoltaic array has been installed for several weeks, but has been sitting there on our roof completely uselessly until the electricity company, ENEL, came to connect it all up. This they finally did last last week, a day of great excitement, and now we are our own little substation, generating electricity during daylight hours and feeding it into the national grid.

We continue to use electricity drawn from the grid – so when there’s a power cut, we still go dark, despite the high-tech array above our heads – which seems perverse but saves us having to set up an enormous quantity of batteries to store the electricity the panels generate, and is also the only way we get the government subsidy. The subsidy, or “incentives” as they call it, runs for twenty years and allows us to take out a loan to pay for the panels and to pay it back over ten years using the income from the incentives, meaning that the second period of ten years will be all profit (though we’re not talking huge sums here, and neither is it inflation-linked). The principal benefit to us will be that we’ll no longer have to pay an electricity bill, which will be a great relief as prices go up and up.

The greater and infinitely more significant benefit of course is that by not using fossil fuel-based electricity we are avoiding C02 emissions and thus helping a tiny bit in the fight against global warming. This feels good.