Feed-in Tariff - winter payment

The Feed-in Tariff payment for winter arrived today - I was expecting it to be fairly paltry, and I was not surprised.

For a total official generation figure of 172.25kWh for Dec/Jan/Feb, we received:

Generation payment -
172.25 x 14.9p = £25.66

They assume we export 50% of what we generate back to the grid, and pay us 4.64p per kWh for that.

Export payment -
(50% x 172.25) x 4.64p = £4.00

So we received a total of £29.66 paid into our account.

Because I work from home and have computers, printers and heaters/air con etc running from 9 til 5, we didn't actually export any of our electricity back to the grid, we used all of it ourselves.  But we still get paid for the assumed 50% export. I've read through all the small print, and there's nothing anywhere to say what to do if you think the assumed export value is incorrect, so I'm in no hurry to tell them about it.

Consequently, you stand to get the most financial benefit from solar panels if you use every drop of solar generated electricity yourself - particularly as electricity prices increase - because that's all electricity you're not having to buy from the grid.

We're with npower, and our electricity tariff has just gone up to 15p per kWh, so we've saved 172.25 x 15p = £25.68 this winter on electricity we would have otherwise had to buy from them.

Added together, this is a total benefit to us of £55.34 for the three months Dec '13 + Jan '14 + Feb '14.

Here's a running total of the overall benefit so far:

Autumn 2013 £92.50
Winter 2013  £55.34
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Total            £147.84