Ripple Energy
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Flawed model for power generation
Since the cost of energy to domestic consumers is largely due to non-generating costs (tax, grid, etc.) this is like getting someone to grow your crops abroad and having to pay them for delivery to the UK. I toyed with the idea of investing in a Ripple project when they were still able to develop onshore wind capacity. Such projects don't help the fact that the grid lacks capacity for dealing with surges of production (wind turned off to turn gas turbines on!) but the crop analogy is with something you can't grow yourself and which doesn't take up much land. Now, presumably Ripple have had to diversify into solar because of Government-enabled nimbyism. But solar projects do make land unproductive and - by the crop analogy - many people can "grow" it themselves and save on delivery costs! A genuinely "green" initiative would be to reduce the cost of getting solar installed on the myriad roofs that are otherwise going unused. The payback time for such installations is far lower than Ripple's estimate, they're not uglifying parts of the countryside, and they make a public statement that you recognise the importance of renewables. In response to the point made below Ripple continue to misrepresent the relative cost/benefits of domestic solar. On their website, for example, they maintain that “Ripple's cost for the same generation amount 2,700kWh is approximately £2,492, making Ripple 62% cheaper than rooftop solar.” As ever the devil is in the wording: “cost for generation” is not cost to consumer because it doesn’t include grid costs etc. I pointed this out to Ripple a year or so ago but they continue to use this figure. To continue with my analogy, it’s a company telling you they can grow crops cheaper for you than you can grow them yourself but not telling you that you’ll be charged for delivery!