Planning permission for solar panels

We are getting a lot of questions about planning permission for solar. There is added confusion for people living in period properties, historic houses, listed buildings or in a Conservation Area. The correct guidance can be hard to find, so we have written a short summary here.

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Open publication - Free publishing - More consent

Introducing ... the Ocean Source Heat Pump?

A few months ago I put up a post about how a Ground Source Heat Pump works. But here's an interesting twist on the same idea: the Ocean Source Heat Pump. *

As David Mackay has pointed out, the risk with ground source heat pumps is that you eventually extract enough heat to freeze the ground around you. Essentially, the ground is a good store of heat because of it's low thermal conductivity, but for the same reason it's also hard to replenish the store. Which means that if you're constantly take heat from the same hole in the ground, eventually you get to a point where you've taken it all.

Of course in the ocean you have a different situation, first of all because you're working with a liquid heat store, and secondly because you can more easily float your power station around to different locations. In the video clip I have linked to above, Dr Ted Johnson, Director of Alternative Energy Development at Lockheed Martin who are developing the prototype, says:

"I dream of thousands of floating OTEC ships, roaming the seas of the world and providing an inexhaustible supply of clean energy, fuel and water for all people of the world"

Well, it's a wonderful vision and I agree with that. But presumably the problem is how to store the electric power that the floating heat pumps generate, or more precisely how to do that without destroying the economics of the thing completely. Bear in mind that electric storage is REALLY expensive: even a small 24 KWh battery for a state of the art electric car costs about $10,000 - $15,000, and Ted is talking about ocean pumps with 10 or 100MW capacity. So even without having done the math on this (which at some level is against all my principles), I'd assume that the energy storage costs do this project in.

BUT, hang on a moment. Things would be different, wouldn't they, if you had something useful you could do with all that power right there in the ocean? And if you think for a minute about the applications of clean energy generation in close proximity to the ocean... well, it doesn't take long for desalination to jump to mind, i.e. the highly power-intensive conversion of salt water to drinking water.

Perhaps Dr Johnson has come up with something unbelievable after all, the answer to the world's water wars of the future. And clean water is of course, much easier to store and move around than clean energy.



* Of course, I noticed that this technology is not exactly a heat pump, but it's a close cousin. So let's get on with it and not be too pedantic.

We can organise your insulation now

Loft or cavity wall, whatever you need.

• Typical jobs cost £150-200, and pay back within 1-2 years or less 
• One of the most cost-effective actions you can take
• Some people can get insulation completely for free 
• VAT on home insulation is  only 5%

If you've had a survey in 2011, we'll have talked to you about this already. But if we came to your property last year then we'll need to have another quick chat to explain how you can take advantage. Fill out the form below and we'll be back in touch to explain the next steps.

Who gets free insulation these days?

People keep asking us this, and it's strange that it's so hard to find out the right answer. Hundreds of millions of pounds a year are spent on this, but it's not very transparent at all. If you want to know exactly who gets what, well then you have to pick through a bunch of horrendously complicated government documents. 

Anyway, we've done the work for you and here for the record is the answer. To be considered a "Priority Group" for energy saving, you must be :

1. Age 70 or over, or 
2. In receipt of 
• council tax benefit
• housing benefit
• income support
• an income-based jobseeker’s allowance
• an attendance allowance
• a disability living allowance
• a war disablement pension including mobility supplement or constant attendance allowance
• a disablement pension  which includes a constant attendance allowance
• state pension credit, or
3. Earn under £16,040 and be in receipt of
• child tax credit
• working tax credit

So there you go. There aren't actually any hard and fast rules about what you can get for free, exactly, but in practice if you're in one of the Priority Groups above, then you can usually get your insulation for free, and if you're not you can get about a third or a half of the cost paid for.

There are also some "Super" priority groups now too, but I think we'll come back to that another day.