Grants:

The following project relates to an electricity generating system - at time of writing there are no grants available to generate your own electricity, but if they do become available in future you will not be able to avail of them unless you go through a registered installer. That means that although someone may "do it all" for you, you will pay more for it. Of course the grant will offset a significant part of the cost, as would be the case if you were to install, say, evacuated tube solar panels or a wood pellet boiler. I will expand on these concepts in due course, but by their very nature they will be more "hands off" than on.

Grid Options:

Let's begin: so I decide I want to generate my own electricity. What's the best way to do this? The first question to answer is whether you want to channel the electricity into your GRID supply or not. This is very important as it essentially drives the type of system you will put together. If you want to connect it to your house "mains" supply then you need special equipment - recently this cost upwards of EUR10,000 so was possibly outside the realms of the average homeowner. Also, historically the ESB has not been overly conducive to allowing this practise, unlike in the UK where the market is more divergent and multiple utility providers are keen to have your business. But the main point is this - if you connect to the GRID you fall into a system called 'net billing'. This means that you sell the surplus energy you supply to the electricity company, so that the surplus is used elsewhere. It also means all energy produced by your system is either a) used by you there and then or b) used by someone else; in both cases you are ultimately receiving payback towards the cost of the system. I have also heard of a 'half way' house, where you are plugged into the mains but do not benefit from net billing. This would be a perfect situation for the utility company, who could benefit from extra capacity that you create, without having to pay you for it! I cannot see the benefits of this outweighing the disadvantages, can you ?  

Off Grid Options:

For now, connecting to the GRID in Ireland was not an option, so I explored what I could do in an off-GRID solution. There are two options here:

- generate electricity and use it immediately, or

- generate electricity and store it for use later.

Of the two, option 1 is much cheaper, as it requires no storage solution. However, it is generally impractical unless you can guarantee electricity for a given task at a particular time. For example, you could run a small TV if you had a suitable wind turbine generating electricity on a windy day, but it would mean when the wind stops, your TV stops. Not the best solution if it shuts down during the final episode of 24!

Which leaves us with option 2: an electricity generating storage solution. This would allow us to harness the electricity and store it for future use - taking the above example we could watch TV whenever we like, not just on a windy day (subject to sufficient storage power being available). This is the system I opted for - a solution which combines electricity generation and storage, so that the stored electricity is available when I want it. 

Electricity Generating Sources:

Wind, Sun and Water are the obvious ones - there may be others but I suspect the majority of people would have access to at least one of these.  Let's look in detail at the system I chose: