Solar Success: Cloudy with a Chance of Bird Poo

I'm fortunate enough to have a little house in the Costa Almeria region of Spain, and whenever we go there I am constantly surprised by how cheap everything is compared to here in Britain. 

We were at our local Mercadona supermarket recently (think ASDA in the sun), when I found my wife staring wide eyed at our brand of toothpaste. "This is €2.20!", she exclaimed. "We pay £5.00 for the same thing back home!"

It was the same story with vegetables, fish… and don't even mention wine or beer! Even our Spanish utility bills look sensible when you compare them to what we have to pay here.

Since Covid, everything here seems to have doubled or tripled in price. A perfect example is our business electricity bill, which pre-Covid wasn't insignificant, but tripled in 2021/22, as most peoples' did.

We were told that it was down to the war in Ukraine and that global wholesale prices were through the roof. And then British Gas posted profits up from £75m the previous year to £900m in that current year.

Ermm… I think I am going to have to politely call 'BS' on that.

I read recently that in the UK we have some of the highest industrial electricity bills in the world, at least four times higher than the US. We're being ripped off on a biblical scale.

Luckily (or with good foresight, we could perhaps claim), seven years ago we decided to cover our entire production roof with 176 solar panels and they generate around a quarter of our electricity usage, which as you can imagine, has been invaluable over the last few years.

Then late in 2024 something changed.

It all started in October. The electricity bill came in and it was higher than usual. I put it down to increased production or maybe it was that old power-hungry compressor the guys turn on every now and again to give it a run. But November was the same - much higher than usual. Now I'm concerned. What's going on?

I'd just started my investigation when I chanced upon an article, titled ‘The UK village that saw just 12 minutes of sunlight in 11 days'. So instead of pointing the finger at random pieces of equipment, I checked the control panel for our photovoltaic system and there it was: due to the sheer gloominess of the weather, we had generated hardly any electricity in the last two months.

It became very apparent to me in light of the impact of reduced generation that we needed to look after these energy producing panels and maximise their potential yield. If a layer of cloud could impinge the efficacy of the panels, then so could a layer of grime. So, short of importing some Spanish sun, I contacted a company to come and clean them.

A guy turned up with a cherry picker and what looked like Storm 2 from Robot Wars after a change of career. The result was immediately evident on the control panel, but more importantly than that, how cool is this?