What are you going to do when the lights go out!

This week millions of homes in Northern India were plunged into darkness when the grid system was overloaded. Ha! How does that affect the UK, well don’t scoff too loudly as it may not be as far away as you think (in all contexts). The likely hood of power shortages in the near future due to increasing demand due to a lack of UK Power infrastructure and a growing reliance on imported gas and other fossil fuels used to power our aging generating stations is very real. George Osborne announced this week that we are increasing our reliance on gas power stations, where has he been!! Gas is running out and where it does exist it is controlled by countries we are not really friendly with – the taps have been turned off before and they will be again George!! So

“what are you going to do when the lights go out?”

is not an unreasonable question especially if you have a family or dependents to take care of.

We, (apologies for generalising, but it is a fact), the citizens of UK rely on government to plan for these eventualities any only find out that the country has been let down when the disaster strikes. Take the recent floods as an example – where are the flood defences? Look at the chaos caused when it snows and are we are all surprised when it snows (every winter!).

Reliance on central government to cater for our needs when the going gets tough is therefore not always the wisest option.

A second reason for raising the question is that there is also a belief amongst those of us that have installed Solar PV systems that they will be OK as their PV System will provide them with electricity when the rest of us are in blackout – this is not so, when the power goes off so does all ‘grid-tied’ PV systems. Their name gives it away i.e. they are ‘grid-tied’ systems which means they need power from the grid to work.

So what is the answer? – with the falling feed-in-tariffs (FiTs) for grid tied systems, it is becoming more sensible to install an ‘off grid’ PV System. This

WILL

provide power when the lights go off (and it also benefits from the Off-Grid Stand Alone System Feed-in-Tariff . Off grid systems are not new and are the fastest growing sector in the PV Market place – developed to provide power to remote locations and where national grid systems cant (or won’t) reach because it isn’t practical or economical. (See attached article from PV-Magazine

System such as the Antaris Solar ekiss system (supplied by Puragen Dorset) have been developed for this eventuality.