Newbie info about FITs set up!

[phoenixfits]

Hi Guys,

I live in the city but have recently purchased a very nice property out in the countryside, with lots of land etc and a very big barn at the bottom of the land.

I would like to find out information about setting up a 1.8Mw wind turbine on my property. If put planning permission and all that nonsense to one side for a moment. I would like to know who would certify the installion for the purpose of me receiving Fits payments from my electricity company. Would it be MSC or ROO Fits?? what is this roo fits about as I have never heard of them?? would it be a normal connection to the grid or would I need a transformer or something??

advice would be much appriciated. thank you in advance

 

[TedM]

You could elect to be paid either under FiTs or ROCs. As it is over 50kW then it falls outside the scope of MCS and would be a ROO-FIT accreditation (that's the name of the OFGEM process). FiT can cover a system up to 5MW in size.

Such a size of turbine would need a dedicated connection to the grid and the cost of that would need to be covered in with the financial assessment of the project as a whole. If your local grid cannot take that load then the costs of upgrading it to cope would fall on you and this could kill the project from a financial viability point of view.

The planning permission would be the largest concern. Hopefully you have no neighbours living with a mile or so of the potential site.

You really need to contact a specialist wind turbine development company.

eta - almost goes without saying - but the site needs a viable wind resource as well. If the annual average wind speed is OK and the planning permission situation looks OK then there will be plenty of companies willing to bite your arm off for your contract. Someone putting that size of project in would probably want to measure the wind speed on site for a year or two before committing though.

 

[phoenixfits]

HI,

Thank you for that. I have already spoke to my neighbours and talk to them about my intentions and they are happy for me to carry on.

How difficult is the ROO-FIT Process? what do they ask for? and what do they check for?? if is better to get paid in FITs or ROCs?? I know that the ROCs are earned per MW produced and then auctioned off?? but the Fits is a solid regular payment which can be used for regular calculations.

When you talk about a dedicated grid connection, are you talking about a something like G59/2 connection???

thanks Ted

 

[TedM]

Have you told your neighbours what size turbine you are thinking of? A 1.8MW turbine is going to be about 400 feet tall overall with blades of 300 feet diameter. Why do you think a turbine of this size is the right choice for your site?

The ROO-FIT accreditation process is straight forward. The installer simply has to fill in and submit the right forms. This is a detail that you don't need to worry about at this stage.

Deciding on whether to go for FiTs or RoCs should form a core part of the financial analysis of the project.

Feeding 1.8MW into the grid is a big project just on its own. Exactly what will be required to achieve it would need to be discussed in detail with your DNO. It all depends on the current state of the grid in your area and what other plans are in progress.

 

[sparkless]

would you consider Solar instead

 

[Gavin A]

how far from houses will the turbine be?

I can't remember the exact formula, and am not up to date, but I'd think it wouldn't be allowed closer than about 400m from housing or work premises (I think there's a 4 x height rule, but as I say it's a while since I did anything in this field).

Then what is the distance to the nearest Medium / High Voltage grid connection, and what sort of capacity does this have, and are there any other significant turbines or solar connected to it? You will need to get a proper grid connection study done by the DNO and a cost for the connection, but you can get a bit of an idea if it's likely to be viable from this information.

That really is a massive turbine, so you're going to need to engage a specialist in largescale wind turbines - not that many smaller wind instalaltion companies are competent to touch something that size, as that's pretty serious engineering.