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Written by Alan Shaw
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Tuesday, 17 October 2006 |
Customer Services Scottish Power (Please refer a copy upward to your Board of Directors with my compliments)
I write as one of your dual energy domestic customers, as a chartered
electrical engineer of forty years experience in the UK electricity
supply industry and holder, together with my family, of investments
currently in the shares of four of the main British electricity supply
companies.
I see that B&Q superstore is about to offer micro wind turbines for roof top installation and also solar panels.
Before I make serious enquiry into this can you please comment on the following points:
1. Any generator connected on my side of my meter will tend to reverse
the meter reading. My understanding is that this is illegal. Are
legally reversible meters currently on the market and about how much do
they cost?
2. The modern trend in home building , certainly to England and Wales
building regulations , during the last ten years or more, is to base
mass construction of new dwellings on closely designed and certificated
factory mass produced roof trusses. So tight are the safety
margins that NHBC warranty booklets forbid the placing of anything in
roofspaces ('lofts") The explanation given by builders (no doubt
tongue in cheek) is that it saves the planet by reducing the volume of
timber to about a third of traditional methods. No doubt it also
reduces the cost of building, a saving not necessarily passed on to
customers as houses are sold on market value, which has nothing to do
with the cost of building
Also many homes no longer have brickwork chimneys affording a measure of buttressing. to at least one outer wall.
To mount a wind turbine on such a roof structure or the outer wall
brickwork would therefore appear to invalidate the ten-year
warranty on any new house or bungalow of such modern construction.
3. The apparently government supported advertising campaigns
encouraging domestic electricity consumers to install many thousands of
such microgenerators nationwide into the 230V domestic supply will
inevitably cause severe deterioration in the quality of electricity at
domestic level, in transient voltage swings and harmonic
transients transgressing the obligation on electricity suppliers
to provided a continuous and stable electricity supply of the quality
required which must now include for home computers and many other
sophisticated electronic devices in common use.
4. I am aware that Scottish Power in common with other suppliers has
now a huge commercial interest in the ROC system of subsidy to
developers of wind power and renewable energy generally. This huge
promotion of windpower with its user - unfriendly characteristics of
intermittency and uncontrollability , a pattern completely
incompatible with the 24 hour/365 days per annum pattern of of domestic
and industrial electricity demand, must inevitably de-stabilise the
national grid at every voltage level.
5 The pursuit of profit by the renewable energy subsidy route on the
scale presently being promoted by government and the electricity supply
industry threatens to destroy transmission and distribution stability
and the , until now, carefully regulated quality of UK electricity in
the long term and in the not too distant future
Yours faithfully,
Alan Shaw BSc CEng MIET |
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