Micro Generation – An Introduction

Posted on 03. May, 2006 by ashleys in Featured, Micro Generation

Micro-Generation -  generating renewable energy at home

Welcome to the first in what will become a series of articles on the micro-generation of renewable energy. This article is an introduction to small scale generation of renewable energy with a focus on the UK (although the information should be relevant anywhere). I hope you find it useful and please feel free to provide feedback.

Micro Generation – The Government perspective

The UK Government has signed up to the EU Renewable Energy Directive, which commits the UK to target of 15 percent of energy from renewables by 2020. According to the government this target is equivalent to a seven-fold increase in UK renewable energy consumption from the 2008 levels, and is the most challenging of any EU Member State!

The Government has said that it believes that micro-generation, which has been defined as under 50kW for electricity, has the potential to make an important contribution to these targets.

Secondary Benefits

Of course in addition to helping governments meet their targets, the micro-generation of power provides a number of secondary benefits such as:

• Reduced CO2 emissions
• Increased robustness of national grids
• Generation of power where it is going to be used, which will eliminate wastage due to transmission losses
• Potential for creating significant new employment opportunities
• Visibility of the uptake and use of the micro-generation of power

Government support

The UK government’s support is currently provided in the form of a Feed-in Tariff (FIT). The FIT is paid to encourage installations of solar PV, wind and micro hydro schemes of up to 5MW capacity, and this includes home micro generators!

The FIT is the subject of a another article. (coming shortly)

The Business Case

If micro-generation is to become widespread the value to the individual needs to be clear and this will be the subject of a later full article.

Technologies

The required technologies certainly exist with a significant number of companies manufacturing small wind power turbines in the UK alone. This of course increases dramatically if you expand your search outside of the UK. There are a number of different technical approaches being developed for micro generation and these will also be the subject of a full article.

If you feel this article has been useful, or is perhaps missing some key information please let me know by commenting below.

Tags: Article, Micro generation