Another big piece of our original plans for living at The Secret Acre has finally fallen into place, after only ten years in the planning!

We are declaring our energy independence. No more hostage to Putin, dirty fossil fuels, or uneconomically expensive nuclear, and all the evil dinosaur corps that continue to peddle them.

Our solar PV, now the world’s cheapest form of modern electricity generation, with storage batteries has been installed, sized to our actual annual electricity consumption, including charging the car.

The kit itself is a thing of beauty, and today’s solar market has developed so much in the last ten years, that everything is now modular plug and play, taking just 48 hours to install and become fully operational.

Yes, it’s all a far cry from ten years ago, when as early adopters you couldn’t even get an answer from the Grid about permission to connect your solar panels. Now, thanks to changes in legislation helping facilitate the huge take up of PV on roofs, there is a standard form to fill in to simply tell the Grid you are doing it.

Long term followers of The Secret Acre may remember that our original eco-makeover of the property only left enough roof space for our hot water solar thermal system, leaving future plans for PV dependent on a planning application, to put the system which would have gone on our roof, on the ground in the paddock instead, which back then, lumped us into the same planning process as a commercial concern.

Fortunately, like the tech, all these grid and planning permissions have greatly improved in the last ten years, to meet the demand from homeowners for action to go green. Thus, finally, despite the local Council taking twice as long as the statutory time limit to approve our application, instead of being one of the first on the street, we have become some of the last people on the street to get solar panels. But better late than never.

No doubt, over the next year, we will now also become one of those people who will bore you to tears at a drop of the hat about how much we are generating on good days, even in winter, how small our bills are, or indeed how much we’ve earned in some months. There’s a cool app for all that, obviously. Sorry, we’ll try not to, but I suspect the temptation will just be too great!