This is the promised Ripple Energy follow-up video
covering in more detail my story of buying into shares of wind turbines. So stay tuned.
Let's start right off the bat by stating I'm not a financial advisor. With any kind of investment
do your own research and investigations. I don't really plan to go in depth,
a sort of end-to-end explanation of the Ripple share offer. How it works, or what your returns
are like to be. If you do invest you can find all that information on the Ripple Energies website
in the share documentation. There's a link below in the description under this video.
So pop and go and have a look at that if that's the level of detail that you're interested in.
What I'll cover is why I bought into Ripple. How much I invested.
How things have been so far. What information you see on the Ripple dashboard and how much
my first saving payment was from the first wind farm. What is Ripple Energy? It's a cooperative
where you buy into part own of a wind farm. You decide how many shares you want to purchase.
Your energy supplier buys your share of the wind farm's output at a low operating cost.
The turbine's energy is fed into the grid which means it doesn't matter where you live and how
much electricity you use. Savings are credited automatically to your energy bill. If we log on to
my Ripple Energy online account you can see what I can see on my dashboard. On the homepage of
my account this is the first turbine Graig Fatha sorry if I've mashed that up and that went live on
the 15th of March 2022. This dashboard is actually very very new it's only a couple of weeks old. As
you can imagine it is constantly evolving so new data and graphs are planned to be added here.
At the moment there's just the basic amount of information and data.
This particular chart is user specific so it shows your amount of generation based on the
number of shares or to put in a number another way the number of watts you've invested into.
We have the news feed here which is regularly updated with the latest information about
turbine and the Kirk Hill project. Scrolling down the page this will show us Kirk Hill.
This is the second cooperative wind farm up in Scotland. As you'll see I've invested in that
too my total ownership is 100% of my electricity needs. So it's 3,978 watts
of wind farm purchase and this is based on our annual electricity consumption of 12,000kWh.
That's split between the two locations so 26% comes from Graig Fatha and 75% from Kirk Hill.
As you can tell Graig Fath was a sort of toe in the water test. Whereas at Kirk Hill it was a full
jump in and swim about a bit. So here's my wind farm page. My capacity owned which as you can see
there's 3,978kW split between the two locations there as you can see, and the wattage equivalent.
The expected annual generation of 12,000kWh split again between the two locations. More at Kirk Hill
as I've purchased more shares in that and less at Graig Fatha. Total investment to date £7,281.00
and that's again split across those two locations. 5K at kirk hill and 2K at Graig Fatha
and I've already mentioned our annual consumption of 12,000kWh. So based on that the savings for
Kirk Hill the estimated first year savings rate is 6.40p/kWh in the first 12 months it's £572.96.
Again this is based on what I have invested. Estimated average annual savings is 4.3p
estimated annual savings of £384. That's going to fluctuate year on year over the 25 year period.
Graig Fatha first year savings was a princely 9.5p/kWh
and that comes in based on my lower wattage of £293.97p. Estimated average annual savings is 5.3
which works at £164 pounds. And the the Ripple board members aim to pay back the share capital
over 20 years at 5% capital each year or 5% of your capital each year. And as I said a minute
ago the wind farm is expected on an operational life of 25 years. Okay so that's the sort of
numbers and the stats in my investment. But why did I invest. I guess two reasons really.
We needed a way to cover more of our energy bill going forward and give us some sort of long-term
security against price increases. We have solar as most of you all know, but we actually have
no space for any more. And we really needed generation over storage so additional battery
storage wasn't really going to help us very much. Looking around at whatever options there were
there weren't that many to be honest. A house mounted wind turbine was a choice
but it's never really going to be big enough to make a substantial impact to our generation needs.
Nor was it ever likely to get planning permission. I also wanted to do our bit for the planet in
terms of removing our reliance on gas and support the wind generation projects here in the UK.
Moving away from gas means we would use more electricity to heat our home
hence the need to generate more to cover this additional demand. Our first savings
that we we've just had actually through onto our account. At the end of March 2022 we saw
the first saving applied to our Octopus Energy account automatically from the Graig Fatha...
I could never get that name right... from the first wind turbine! If you recall it went live
on the 15th of March at 7pm in the evening which means 17 days worth of generation.
And incidentally any maintenance costs are already taken off before the savings rate is calculated
for members. They reckon the cost to operate the wind farm at Graig Fatha is around 2p/kWh.
This is the impressive bit, during March Graig Fatha members have saved over £16,000
by generating 342MWh just in 17 days. If you're technically minded and the type of
wind turbine at Graig Fatha is a 2.5MW Vensys 100. Perfect wind conditions for this are between 12
and 24 meters per second. It will cut in and start generating a 3m/s wind speed and cut out at 25m/s.
The Kirk Hill is a bigger wind farm Graig Fatha is just one turbine within a wind farm which is
why it's called a wind farm. It's actually only one turbine but it's part of a bigger wind farm,
whereas Kirk Hill will be 8 wind turbines they're the Enercon R-92 turbines. Each rated at 2.350kW
and they work up from 2m/s up to 25m/s. A slightly different profile.
If you want to know more then yeah have a look at the Ripple Energie's website. There's also
an active Facebook group which has postings from the Ripple team members as well as well as the
cooperative members. You don't have to have invested to join that group. I'll
leave a link to both of those down below in the description underneath this video.
If you do decide to invest I do have a referral code which you can choose to use if you wish. This
will give you £25 credit as well as me £25 credit on our account providing you invest over £1,000.
The share offer... I don't really want to sound like a bank holiday weekend sales spiel here for
television advert furniture or anything like that but the share offer is due to close in early May
2022. Don't hang about if you're deciding you want to go for it. Thanks for watching I hope
this is useful to you and I will see you on the next video. All right take... oh incidentally I
will be including including the monthly savings in my normal solar update videos so a number of
people have asked me about that. So yeah there you go, definitely going now. All right take care bye.