JUDGING by Money’s inbox this week, it is solar panels, rather than stock markets, that we should be writing about every week. Ross Clark’s piece last week about his experience with his energy supplier SSE triggered a huge reaction.
Most of you have been extremely positive about the panels, and you can read a flavour of the emails we received in Have Your Say, a column in which I also commend the love letter to our pensions minister, from an ardent fan in Surrey.
But this outburst of enthusiasm — for solar panels, rather than Baroness Altmann — might turn to something more like fury for those more recently motivated to join the club of happy solar panel users.
As Ross explained in his story, he installed photovoltaic panels on his roof in 2011, “taking advantage of a very generous feed-in tariff of 43.3p per kilowatt hour — a rate that rises with the retail prices index each year”. Four years later, he is now getting a rate of 48.84p per kilowatt hour, by the way.
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He went on to state: “It looks as if the panels will earn back their capital cost of £12,254 in less than six years, leaving me to enjoy many years of tax-free income. The deal I took out in 2011 was for 25 years.”
But, lo, the sun might be about to go behind the clouds (again — well, it is August) for people hoping to follow his lead, according to a consultation document on the feed-in tariff published last Thursday by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
In its executive summary, the department sets out its stall in a commendably straightforward way. “Feed-in tariff schemes have exceeded all renewable energy deployment expectations . . . however, this deployment success has also come with costs exceeding our projections.”
The feed-in tariff for small domestic schemes — that is, the amount of money you are paid for your efforts — could drop sharply from just over 12p per kilowatt hour to possibly as little as 1.63p in January and eventually fall to zero in January 2019, subject to the decision at the end of the consultation.
That is the sort of drop even the FTSE 100 might struggle to achieve in the space of just a few months.
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These lower tariffs are obviously for new households planning to install the panels, rather than those who have already joined the club, but they do send out quite a signal.
If you’re keen on the sunshine, don’t hang around before getting on the sun lounger — though there have been warnings of a huge rush to get your towel down first.
I SUSPECT I pressed the “refresh” button many more times than normal last week in order to monitor the unpredictable path of the FTSE 100 and other stock markets around the world.
Hunter Davies has made his feelings abundantly clear about such behaviour in this section, and I acknowledge that there are, indeed, many, many more beautiful things to look at than the rises and falls of a stock market index.
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He can look at his “treasures”, from LS Lowry and Beryl Cook to the Beatles — although admiring a Spurs share certificate is not something that everybody would take pleasure in.
The only hitch is that the generously proportioned ladies in Beryl Cook’s wonderful, life-enhancing works do not pay a dividend twice a year.
They can manage the capital growth aspect of investing in shares, or the slide in the opposite direction, depending on whether the celebrated English artist is currently popular with buyers, but it is not, alas, possible to take a slice from the painting each year to pay your gas bill.
THE biggest winners of the bonus bonanza handed out by bosses to their workers do not have to make the choice between art and equities.
The figures, published last week by the Office for National Statistics, show £42.4bn was handed out to workers between April 2014 and March 2015 which, for many of the recipients, means they can use their full Isa allowances, pay off their mortgages, invest heavily in the market and cover their walls with their favourite artists (in both their homes — and the yacht, too).
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Now, the average bonus for a private sector worker is about £1,800 — so they might have to make do with actual matchsticks, rather than one of Lowry’s paintings. But we all know that average figures are just, well, averages. There will be a lot of lucky folk who got £18,000, £180,000 or even more than that.
Bankers and other financial as well as insurance workers typically got £13,100 per head, by far the highest sector average, of course.
The average public sector bonus is a paltry £100, and it drops below even this if you exclude financial services workers. It’s a figure that might thoroughly depress the saintly nurses, doctors and midwives beginning yet another Sunday shift today.