My parents moved to Portugal recently, after living in Spain for the past 25 years. In fact, I had quite the surprise one morning a few weeks ago when my Dad whatsapped me with a quotation for a solar installation and wanted me to check it was a good deal before going ahead -all within a week of the move. We’d only had video call a few days ago, and all of their stuff was still in boxes, and they were telling me about all the renovations which they planned on doing, which pretty much amounted to a total refurbishment – a massive amount of work- so I was quite taken a back that they were looking at solar energy already, even though it made perfect sense: it was literally the first thing they were getting done there!
Now, doing the solar before anything else, is of course the smartest, most logical thing to do. After all, if you do the solar first, that pays for pretty much every other home improvement you do thereafter. Over time, it will pay for that new kitchen, bathroom, patio, garden, windows & doors, etc, etc. Saving 1000-2000, even 3000 or 4000 pounds each year, it effectively pays for a rather nice holiday as well. Of course, it doesn’t work the other way around. Your holiday or your new kitchen will never pay for your solar panels. So absent any major structural work, or a front door that wont lock or anything else you can imagine that simply cannot be put off, it makes good sense to do the solar first, any way you look at it.
When my parents first. Moved to Spain in their early sixties, they built their own villa, and installed a solar hot water system but no photovoltaics (solar electricity). They thought this was great – a reliable bit of kit that was reasonable to install, produced more than enough hot water pretty much all the time, cost little to maintain, and saved them hundreds of pounds a year. ´Great´, I would tell them. ´Why don´t you get an electrical system installed as well? It will save you a fortune over its lifetime, paying for itself many times over.´ They replied that they cost too much to install and that they didnt want to borrow the money -this was in the early 2000´s and a 4Kwp system would have cost 25-30,000 Euro´s (I remember selling my first ever 4Kwp system in early 2010 for £20,000, and that was an incredible deal we did for the customer with a very small margin in it for the company -just to give people an idea of how much prices have come down).
Of course I refused to believe they couldn’t borrow the money if they wanted to: what they lacked was will, not means, to do the solar. They weren’t seeing the bigger picture; their inaction was making them worse off; they could do a singularly good thing, it would provide them with energy security going forward (they already had their own water supply, and they´d effectively be paid for doing it. Hell, my Dad’s little peasant friend from the village who brought him this special bread and organic, proper range eggs from his own chickens, even he had solar, FFS!
Two years ago, Mam and Dad finally relented. They’d had some inheritance money themselves, and thought it was at last time to get a solar PV and battery system installed at La Granja. In the end they had a little car-port built to accommodate the modules in a propitious position which would maximise the system’s annual solar yield. Of course they were absolutely chuffed with it. My Dad loves checking out how much power its generating under different weather conditions, often really surprised at how much the system seems to generate even on somewhat cloudy days -“it mounts up really quickly”. He says!. The savings were approximately 3000 Euros each year. My Dad reckoned that if they had done when I first started nagging them to get solar, investing the money they saved each year in shares or ISA´s, they’d have had an extra 100,000 in the bank at this point.
So at least they didn´t make the same mistake twice. Even if they had to pay interest on a loan to cover the up front cost, they’d have still had an enormous sum of money left over, with the savings on electricity making the interest on a any loan utterly insignificant.
The system design produced by their installer seemed all well and good. I asked them about their usage because a 5.5kw system didnt seem particularly big, they have all the usual appliances, and of course a large air conditioning bill for keeping the apartment nice and cool, but of course every Kwp of power installed at their location on the Atlantic coast of Southern Portugal, generates as much power as 3Kwp installed here in South Wales, and so they’d actually have plenty of power to export as well, which can earn them even more money.
In fact the only change I advised them to make was to get a bigger battery. 10Kwh wasn’t remotely enough for a system that would generate approaching 100 Kwh on a bright day in the middle of summer! There didn’t seem to be any tariffs akin to Octopus Flux available in Portugal, so at present there wasn’t a terrific incentive to size the system beyond the amount required to back up power for about a day, in the event of any blackouts similar to the one they’d experienced in Spain not longer after they’d had their first PV system installed. So in the end they opted for a 20 Kwh Hyundai battery and requested the installers to fit an EPS (Emergency Power Supply) system, with a dedicate circuit which could provide power to the home independently of the grid, in the event of a power failure. They remembered how during the blackouts on the Costa Del Sol, all of their friends had been sitting in the candlelight, sweltering in the heat, with stuff going off in the fridge, while they pretty much entirely unaffected.
It’s fair to say that Mam and Dad are absolute solar converts now. They haven’t properly unpacked yet, and they’ve already got their brand new PV system with battery storage and emergency power supply feature, as well as a brand new hot water system, which they reckon is massively more ´futuristic´ and ´efficient´ than the old one they had in Spain. “Of course we wish we’d done it sooner”. My Mum says. “But we’ve got it done this time at the earliest possible date. We’ve learned our lesson. If we’d waited until January (from mid October), that would have been a thousand pounds lost that we could never get back.
So what lessons can be learned? There’s no time like the present. The benefits of solar are so profound, and without any drawbacks, that every day you don’t have them is an opportunity to make yourself better off, lost forever. Even if you don’t have the money (as was then case with my parents 20years ago), borrow it, and use the savings from your bills to offset the re-payments on the loan. People don’t throw good money after bad in perpetuity renting their house, when a mortgage is available. Getting solar on credit really is no different. But the benefits aren’t just long term -in many instances people borrowing their money will immediately have more money in their pockets each month than they would without solar. It really is just a question of will.