Giovanni Bricconi

A lot of time has passed since my previous post: now my solar panels are installed and fully operational, but it has been really difficult to reach this stage. Why? Because people many people just say caring about environment, but in reality they care much more of aestetic.

In France you just have to write a request if you need to install a TV antenna or an electric plug to recharge your car, but if you want to install solar panels on your roof it is a completely different procedure. You first need to get an agreement from your coproperty, and installing solar panels is not a priority. You need to wait for the yearly meeting to discuss your request. You need also to be ready to discuss your request! Solar panels are just rectangular black panels that you need to align on your roof, but roughly one half of the owner were just unhappy because my roof would have been different from the others. Some were saing: “if we let you install the panels, then somebody else will maybe want to install them and will chose a different model, and we will end having all the roofs different”. They just don’t care if theirs electricity is made with uranium, petrol or gas, just they must see something pleasant when they wake up in the morning. But why a solar panel is worst than a satellite antenna? An old lady was really upset and was saying me to take care of the my child’s energy and not of silly green energy.

The condo board president tried in many ways to let me retire my request, saing that would have been better to put the panels only on the side of the roof that is less visible from the others. Unfortunately this is technically bad in my case, because it would have reduced a lot the hours when the energy is produced. Moreover I would have had to wait for one year to present again my request. Luckily for me, my request passed for just one vote! Notice that my installation is very small, just 16 squared meters, and just 8 squared meters visible to the others.

Done with the condo, I had to make a request to the town. Any Mayor has is own preferences, in some villages they just don’t want installations that change the “skyline”, so you can forget about solar panels. Luckily for me in my village is not an issue and I had to wait just a couple of months to get the reply. So it passed more that one year since the moment I decide to start my project to the time I got my project approved. Then I had to wait for the supplier to be ready, and since there have been many requests I had to wait for months.

All the burocratic procedure is extremely slow also. Once the panels are in place you need to wait for a paper from the grid authority stating that the instalation is ok, and only with that you can ask to a distributor to sell your surplus electricity. It has taken 6 months more to finish the procedure and I got my first money only this March. Getting subventions also requires providing a lot of papers, and the instructions were not clear. In the end there were 2 kind of subventions but nobody told me that they were mutally exclusive! I still don’t have a reply for one of the procedures 2 years after my request was filed.

I think 3 years passes since I started my project. One third of my electricity bill disappeared, and I am happy that everything is working fine. What is very disturbing for me is all this fake ecologism: everybody sais that green is good, but then nothing in the system helps the very few of us that wants to make a change to realize theirs projects. I did not disturb anybody with my project, it’s all my money except 10% subvention I got, and it will take me 10 years to reach the break even point, but was my decision. It is unfair that so many obstacles are placed on the road.