Part ownership of a Ripple Wind Turbine, fancy it?

[nowty]

Sarah Merrick (CEO of Ripple) has posted Dec official numbers being validated tomorrow. The person who validates the data lives in Scotland so had an extra Bank Holiday.

I interpret that to be they are probably too hung over to do it today.

[Joeboy]

92.5% (57.92kWh personal) capacity yesterday, that is astonishing.
All the more so that it was a beautiful no drama day. A good test of the blade pitch sensors.

4th January is a Bank Holiday, not a reason to be hung over.

[NikoV6]

Probably been covered before but it is a long thread!

How do I factor in 10Kw solar and 13.5Kw battery storage, 75Kw EV battery?

While we have not done a full year with this setup yet, we anticipate to be largely grid free from April to October. Would we build credit with Ripple for this period of time?

Looking for an option to minimise cost during the "dark" months.

Is Ripple the answer to this?

[Joeboy]

Probably been covered before but it is a long thread!

How do I factor in 10Kw solar and 13.5Kw battery storage, 75Kw EV battery?

While we have not done a full year with this setup yet, we anticipate to be largely grid free from April to October. Would we build credit with Ripple for this period of time?

Looking for an option to minimise cost during the "dark" months.

Is Ripple the answer to this?

Answer is yes if you are with Octopus energy or happy to transfer over (Ovo too now). You would keep an eye out on Ripple website or here for Project 3 going live. For £25 you can get an early in by reserving a spot. Gives you a week in advance to invest before open to public.

Once project three goes live (to you), there will be investment sliders up to 120% of power use. You can set your home parameters and go for it.

The energy generated is sold and cash funds accrue in your power supplier account. We call it the VB (Virtual Battery), build it up in the good months, deplete it in the poor.

[NikoV6]

Probably been covered before but it is a long thread!

How do I factor in 10Kw solar and 13.5Kw battery storage, 75Kw EV battery?

While we have not done a full year with this setup yet, we anticipate to be largely grid free from April to October. Would we build credit with Ripple for this period of time?

Looking for an option to minimise cost during the "dark" months.

Is Ripple the answer to this?

Answer is yes if you are with Octopus energy or happy to transfer over (Ovo too now). You would keep an eye out on Ripple website or here for Project 3 going live. For £2/ you can get an early in by reserving a spot. Gives you a week in advance to invest before open to public.

Once project three goes live (to you), there will be investment sliders up to 120% of power use. You can set your home parameters and go for it.

Thanks, yes already with Octopus on the Go tariff.

My only other concern is the tax implications, I am a PAYE tax numpty

[Joeboy]

Potential to be a 93%+ capacity day. Outstanding performance.

Gon the Turbine!

16.00 hrs, damn jinxed it.

Still looking good.

Is it a PB day ?, must be close if it keeps going near full tilt till midnight.

EDIT - I'm still waiting on the official numbers for Dec so I can update my capacity factor graph.

I have Dec down as a 34.41% capacity month. Interested to see how that compares with the official count (up baby, UP).

I deem that to be on a first pass 'pish performance' but then again my expectations of Dec winds are skewed by a life in Scotland. Wales just isn't that. So in fairness I'll happily take my 668kWh generation and adjust my expectations downwards a little. I did see GF beat Kirkhill site a few days ago which was great (but rare).

In the next five days there should be peaks of 25.5mph(KH) & 18.6mph(GF) which bodes well for January going forward and KH investors in particular for later in the year.

[Joeboy]

Probably been covered before but it is a long thread!

How do I factor in 10Kw solar and 13.5Kw battery storage, 75Kw EV battery?

While we have not done a full year with this setup yet, we anticipate to be largely grid free from April to October. Would we build credit with Ripple for this period of time?

Looking for an option to minimise cost during the "dark" months.

Is Ripple the answer to this?

Answer is yes if you are with Octopus energy or happy to transfer over (Ovo too now). You would keep an eye out on Ripple website or here for Project 3 going live. For £2/ you can get an early in by reserving a spot. Gives you a week in advance to invest before open to public.

Once project three goes live (to you), there will be investment sliders up to 120% of power use. You can set your home parameters and go for it.

Thanks, yes already with Octopus on the Go tariff.

My only other concern is the tax implications, I am a PAYE tax numpty

I don't bother with thinking on the tax. It is what it is, I'm just happy to be involved with the projects. A bit of a free and easy outlook admittedly but it works for me.

[Mr Gus]

Niko.

The watts slider is still there, to get an idea of watts / investment you would care to see outputted, it can be a git to find sometimes.
If you can find the home sizing choice of 4 follow that down & play with the slider control or input some £ numbers to familiarise yourself with the set up.

[Yuff]

Morning Nowty

I am interested in this but the ripple site is in Welsh for the latest Turbine.
In practice how does it work, do they give a rebate via my energy provider, which is Octopus?
Anything that reduces my use of the peak rate I am very interested in!

Grab a hot drink & read the thread yuff, there is a lot of salient info in there, the ripple site also covers this, but elsewhere folk who rushed in without research are going to shout a bit due to their own beliefs as to how much discount per kWh produced / ripple watts bought is concerned.
But yes, discount applied straight through Octopus, based on monthly w/t performance & some other companies, others pending sign up.


"Do I get free electricity?
No, the electricity from your wind farm isn't free. You need to pay the wind farm's operating costs, as well as grid charges, levies, taxes and supply costs associated with your tariff. We estimate the electricity from your wind farm will be around 23% cheaper than your regular tariff"

@Yuff, its a bit of a tall ask for you to read this whole thread, you'll probably need more than a hot drink.
You can read the Ripple Energy website blurb (obviously a bit biased), or there is a Ripple Energy Owners Group facebook group but to be honest that's full of rambling numpties and the Ripple community is not much better either.
If you want an honest independent view of folk who "generally" know what they are talking about, your better off here.
On this forum we have at least 9 members of WT1 (Graig Fatha) and 21 members of WT2 (Kirk Hill).

A quick overview can be had on the second posting of this thread (by me ), linked below and recopied below with some annotations highlighted in yellow as we now have some hindsight advantage.
https://camelot-forum.co.uk/phpBB3/view ... 8&t=20#p60


"I thought I would add some detail to Joeboy's post because it is a little complicated. I also make nothing from this in terms of others joining the scheme.

Yes, my secret list from the old forum had 7 members who had admitted being part of it, well actually only 5 others as Joeboy and I are included in the 7. I wont mention the forum by name but it starts with how you get from A to B, and ends with the name of on old 1982 Sci Fi film starring Jeff Bridges who got stuck in a video game. Dont worry this is an old joke about the old forum, too much history to say any more.

I have paid just over £5k to buy exactly a 3kW share of the 2.5MW turbine so I will own 1/833 of it. Its forecasted to generate me 8017 kWh's a year. It might come in a little under that in the first year but not much and we have had some strange weather this year with more high pressure systems than usual. And there have been a few bedding in outages which is to be expected.

Some months ago it was unclear if the actual turbine would happen. It had planning permission but circa £4m was required to build it. Ripple was having difficulty persuading enough energy customers to buy in, but now it’s happening as the Welsh Government has intervened and is taking an equity stake and the Welsh Development Bank is providing a variable sized loan to fund the rest if required. If more people are persuaded to join, then the loan might not even be required. The turbine is a 2.5MW Vensys has been ordered for November delivery to the UK and operational circa December 2021. Estimated life 20 to 30 years.Well after all the naysayers it was fully built by Dec 21 but could not be switched on till mid March due to Covid / DNO delays, etc.

https://www.vensys.de/en/wind-turbines/ ... ensys-121/

https://developmentbank.wales/news-and- ... -following

Basically you can invest almost anything from a mere £25 to the amount that it would cost to generate up to 120% of your normal import of leccy. I think this is for tax reasons, because there is unlikely to be any tax to pay on the returns because you are paid via a monthly rebate on your energy bill directly proportional to the actual performance of the wind turbine. But from what I gather no evidence seems to be requested if you buy up to 6999kWh’s worth which is about £4,536.The 120% seems to be for two reasons, the first is that there needs to be a true trading relationship to get the Coop status so there is no corporation tax to pay. The second is that Ripple attempted to bring this in line with the Microgeneration status and therefore be tax free to domestic investors, not a hope in hell in my opinion. Personal taxation is via the standard Coop rules and the dividends (or rebates) are classed as "interest" which is helpful in most cases because of the separate tax allowances.

Ripple is just a facilitator so if Ripple Energy goes bust it wont really matter. The turbine is being built by CleanEarthEnergy and will be owned by a Co-operative company which everyone who joins will be a shareholder in. And although you will own a pro rata amount of the wind turbine its a single vote for each person so no matter how little you buy you still have the same say of what happens.Not sure if CleanEarthEnergy ended up building it as they took it off their portfolio website, but no matter as it got built.

https://cleanearthenergy.com/tenacity-p ... plication/

So the way it works is,

Octopus Energy buys the leccy for the cost price of the generation through a Power Purchase Agreement. The difference between the wholesale price and the cost price is given back to you as a rebate on your energy bill a month in arrears. Currently the rebate is estimated at 4.5p per kWh. And as I am only paying an average of 5.6p per kWh on my entire import which is basically charging my battery bank on the Octopus GO tariff in winter, my bill will be very very low.This is the rub, we ended up with 9.6p per kWh when it went live and that is increasing to 27p / kWh in March 2023.

However, its not for everyone, there are some Pros and Cons with this.

PROS
Nothing has been done anywhere in the world like this, yes there are some community windfarms, but you just get paid a dividend. In this, you own the windfarm and you are supplied via your Energy Supplier who buys the leccy direct from the Co-op company. So be part of something new and innovative.I since found that at least one solar park in Dorset already had an option for either a dividend payment or a bill reabte with Octopus so it was not a first although it might be a first for a wind farm.

You can be on any tariff with Octopus, so even Agile or Go is OK.There initially was going to be a restriction with a Octopus Tesla tariff but that got ditched so any tariffs are fair game. Also there are some other supplier partners coming onstream as well as Octopus.

You don’t have to match your usage with the wind turbine so for me its fantastic, as I import practically nothing in the Summer and tons in winter for my heatpump, home battery and EV charging.That works very well and you don't even need to use it or lose it, you simply build up credit which can be removed for real cash in your bank account.

A solar panel on your roof will generate the same as a solar panel at a solar farm and mostly in Summer. A small wind turbine on a domestic house will generate practically nothing, but a small share of a big one in a windy place will generate tons and mostly in the Winter. So its a nice balance.Still is.

Probably no tax to pay on the bill rebates. Its classed as interest but we all (depending on out tax rates) have an allowance in addition to our personal income tax allowances. Also there is an accounting quirk where for the first 20 years part of the rebate is classed as a repayment of your capital, therefore that part is not taxable. And since domestic solar FIT income is tax free, its possible the taxman will allow this as being tax free too.As I said earlier very little chance of being tax free and the missive increase in rebates will push many into paying extra income tax through self assessment. Also there now is the spectre of the Generating Energy Levy which WT2 looks like being hit with and probably project 3 as Ripple needs larger and larger projects to be become profitable themselves.

If by some quirk you end up in big credit, say you go traveling and not use any leccy, then you can request a transfer out to your bank account in the same way if you overpay your leccy or gas supplier.Still true.

The estimate of generation has been based on a pessimistic basis, so it may generate more than forecasted.From what we have seen its not far off the forecast for WT1. Our own monitoring of the WT2 site suggests that the WT2 forecast might be better than predicted.

If you move house, it moves with you and if you die, you can pre nominate someone else to own it. I think they are allowing a similar transfer if you end up in a long term care home.As its turned out to be significantly more profitable than expected, there are more folk wanting more so there is no issue if you want out for a reasonable reason.

If leccy prices rise in the future, the returns will be higher.Yep

The life of the turbine might be longer than forecasted, so again the total return may be higher.I note more commercial investments are now forecasting their basecase asset life at 30 years.

You can buy or sell some or all of your watts for the residual value to other members of the scheme.It has already been done in some cases even before the min holding period.

CONS
Its not built yet, so there could be a delay, or there could be a construction disaster.It was built with a small connection delay but cannot say WT2 or project 3 wont go south.

The construction may cost more that forecasted, so more cash may be requested or you may lose some of your share.Didn't happen for WT1 but cannot say that for WT2 or the forthcoming project 3 yet. You pays your money and takes ya chances.

Ripple may go bust which may make the future power purchase agreements more complicated.Ripple recently raised £2M easily so should have enough cash for another couple of years. Even if it did there are no shortage of takers for energy from the Coop.

The forecasted generation may be too optimistic and generates less, so less rebate.Looks not far out so far.

The future cost of leccy may fall, therefore the returns would be less.They may well fall long term but then so does your bills.

The turbine could have a major breakdown and be out of service for some time.So far only minor outages have been experienced.

The life of the turbine could be less than forecasted.Possible but more chance on the upside.

Your stuck with Octopus Energy for at least 1 year after it goes operational and maybe forever if no other Energy company wants to participate in the scheme.At least one other company has joined.

You can get a similar and less risky tax free return in you invest in an existing windfarm investment company and keep the investment in an ISA.Thats still true and I have a lot more in such investments.

The buying and selling of some or all of your share may not be as simple as it sounds, for example, if it turns out to be a good investment, there will be more buyers than sellers and vice versa.Looks like more buyers than sellers at the moment."

Thanks Nowty,

That is really helpful, I have a cappuccino in hand and about to read your reply

[Adokforme]

Don't know if anyone else has checked their WT1 output for yesterday but according to our figures it was the highest output to date.
OK, so it was only by another 1kWh in our case but a record is a record and who knows, when the generation data arrives it may even receive a small boost.
According to my questionable maths I believe it represents a cf of 92.52%!

Edit. Ooops! Apologies Joe hadn't spotted you beat me to it!