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We are putting underfloor heating using a ground source heat pump in the new house (barn conversion) Next year we hope to add a turbine to power the heat pump. Can anyone see any advantages to adding solar panels to this set up or would we just be buying things for the sake of having them.
We had solar panels for 25 years on the old property and they were great but I don't know whether the expense would outway the benifits with this new set up, given that we are in NE Scotland without amazing amounts of sunshine. Any comments?

you may be pleasantly surprised as to just how sunny it is up there!

- if you are grid-tying a large wind turbine, that's properly sited, it could "balance" your electricity consumption over the year, without additional input from pvs.
One of the problems with wind energy is that it is intermittent and unpredictable, so if you're completely off-grid, pvs could be worth looking at to help "even out the bumps" (but on the other hand, pvs are at their best in Summer, when you least need heating!)
Overall, I'd suggest going for a decently large turbine, grid-tying it, and using "the grid" as a battery!

My understanding is that ground sourced heat is excellent for things like underfloor heating, where you don't want things to reach too high a temperature (ie. heating the whole of a floor at low temperature will put as much heat into a room as a small radiator at a high temperature).

But I'm not so sure it is good at concentrating the heat up to the relatively high temperature that stored hot water is kept at. On the other hand, I suspect that an evacuated tube solar panel would be much better at this (given sufficient sunshine).

Your project sounds interesting - make sure you keep us posted on the progress.

two sorts of solar panels!
As Muddy pointed out, solar hot water is probably best used to heat your domestic hot water, and the gshp left to provide the heat.(again a case of solar panels being at their best in Summer!)
The one thing that gets rapidly glossed over by heat pump salesmen is that they sell the things on their output, and gleefully point out that you're getting "3,4 or 5 times" what you put in - what they don't mention is that the power you put in is the most expensive sort of energy - electricity!
We did the sums for a local property recently - which go roughly like this -
10kw heat required, - existing gas system - 10kw gas @ 2p = 20p, heat pump system - 2units of electricity @ 10p to which you add your 8 "free ones".............the difference being that the heat pump was going to cost £60,000!
When costing a big job like this make sure you take things like this into account!

Thanks for your help Martin that's more or less what we had decided. But I do like to double check :-)

We are looking at 6Kw Proven tied into the grid. Means no electricity in a power cut but the advantages outweigh the problems.

The wind up here is probably more reliable than the rest of the mainland. It's not often we get a day off from the 'cooling breeze'
The chart reckons our winds at 6.5 at 10m, 7.4 at 25m and 8.1 at 45m. I think it is often much higher than that especially in winter so we should get a fairly good output.

sounds perfect - the Provens are damn good machines, and with your sort of windspeed, you should have no problems with producing sufficient for your needs (at those windspeeds, I'd be looking at a mini-windfarm!)

We have a 6kW Proven and a 3kW Ground Source Heat Pump.

The heat pump has a 500 liter thermal store (big water tank) that acts as a buffer so as to improve the efficiency of the heat pump. Basically it means that the pump doesn't need to turn itself on and off too frequently.

This thermal store is hooked-up to a heat exchanger that provides all the domestic hot water for showers and sinks.

The thermal store also has a space near the bottom of the tank where an extra coil can be inserted and fed from a solar thermal panel (or a wood stove). We haven't done this - yet - as we ran too short of money.

But doing this will give you your hot water, certainly in the summer, without needing to have the GSHP running.

At the moment the GSHP is consuming about 3 kWhs a day to keep our 5-bed holiday accommodation extension at about 15C.