Our aim is 100% solar and renewable electricity
If as a tenant you care about the planet then you probably want to live somewhere that shares that philosophy. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to find a landlord who does more than just put a bit of extra insulation in the attic. We want to change that and we are investing serious money to help our tenants and the planet.
Here at Pay4Property we care about the environment and want to minimise our impact on the planet so in the summer of 2021 we launched a project to install solar panels and storage batteries in all our properties with the aim of generating at least 70% of our electric need from sunshine. For the small amount we can’t generate ouselves we use a 100% renewable energy provider so we remain as green as possible.
We partnered with Joju Solar, one of the UKs most experienced solar installers to ensure that our systems use the best and most efficient equipment and are designed to last at least 20 years. Our first property went live in December 2021 with 8.7 kWp of solar PV and a 13.5 kWh Tesla Powerwall.
The Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs meant that the demand for solar panels and batteries rocketed making it much more difficult to get equipment to install, but despite this in 2022 we installed a further 14.4 kWp of generation on 2 of our largest properties bringing our total generation capacity to 23.1 kWp of solar panels. In an average year these should generate around 20,000kWh per year. To put that in perspective, that’s enough to power 5 average houses on 100% sunshine!
Currently the average UK solar PV system is 3.5 kWp and has no battery storage so we are going the extra mile to de-carbonise our own useage. In summer some of our houses actually generate more electric than they use and become net exporters by pushing solar energy back to the grid. This means that other customers can benefit from our excess solar energy, saving even more CO2.
For 2023 we are installing solar generation and storage batteries to another 3 of our properties which will take our generation capacity to around 30,000kWh.
Not only does this investment in solar PV help the planet, in the long term it also helps our tenants both morally and financially. Morally it helps as our tenants know that they are living in a house that is comitted to minimise its impact on the environment. Financially, because we now generate a large amount of our own electricity needs, that helps to protect our tenants from the energy cost increases that many other landlords are now having to pass on in full to their tenants. In the current climate where the cost of everything is increasing, including our own costs, we remain committed to keeping our rents as affordable as possible and having solar PV also helps us to do that both now and in the future.