If you are not British, you probably don't know what a Smart Export Guarantee is. And if you are British, you still might not, if you do not have solar panels, or less ubiquitous ways of generating renewable power. But I am generating quite a lot of power that I'm not using, and that's where a SEG comes in.
As things stand, the energy that I'm generating through my panels and that I am not using, goes straight into the grid, and I'm not even getting a thank you for that. In the olden days, you could get quite a lot of money for the power you fed back into the mains; it was called a Feeding in Tariff (FiT), and I think you would get more than half the money for a feeding a unit of electricity into the grid than you would pay for drawing one out. But we have had a Tory government for a long time now, and there is no way they would incentivise people to turn renewable like that. So the FiT scheme was closed a few years ago, and now one depends on an SEG to get at least some diminutive financial reward for helping the country to come off hydrocarbons. If you get an SEG, you get about an order of magnitude less money for a unit of energy that goes from your house into the grid, than you pay for for one that that travels the other way. But at least it's something!
You would hope that if you have panels installed, you would automatically get this financial reward, but that is of course not the case. You need to apply for it. You don't need to apply with your own energy company. Stranger still; my own energy provider does not offer you that option, even. So I just picked one recommended by the newspaper.
So what do you need to apply? You need to have a particular certificate of your panels, you need to provide evidence that your smart meter can measure the amount of energy you're feeding into the grid, and you need to tell the energy company responsible for your neck of the woods (which may very well not be your supplier) through some particular form that you have your panels. They then have to send you some form back, and that form you also need to supply. For some reason, the energy company responsible for Wales is Scottish Power. Not sure why that makes sense.
One Sunday I forced myself to get this tedious job done. I combed through the documentation the installer of my solar panels had sent me, be it many weeks after actually installing them, and I retrieved the form that had to go to Scottish power, and the form that could go directly to the energy company that I had chosen to provide me with the SEG. I scanned them both in. Then I needed to Google how on Earth you get your export reading from your smart meter. I sent off the form to SP, and got everything ready to apply for my SEG once they would respond to me. They basically only sent me an email thanking me for my form! In it, they also explained they will not send me any further documentation. So I had a little choice but to just supply that email response in my application.
All I can now do is wait! I hope it gets approved. These panels were quite expensive, and getting a little bit of compensation in the form of a SEG would help my bank account recover. And I know that I might very well choose to use that bank account for frivolities like a Hanging Jenny (explanation coming up), but I might also use it for decarbonisation measures! For instance, that EV does not come for free. So stay tuned…
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