Energy saving needs careful thought

It is the way of life that everything seemingly has a consequence. If you become ill there is often a treatment, but there will almost always be a side-effect. Sir Isaac Newton came up with pretty robust laws for the physical world, perhaps the best known of which is: “To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction“.

These inevitable, often unintended, results of setting something in motion seem to catch out our politicians more than anyone else. And it is the burgeoning sector of renewable energy which seems to be on the receiving end of those consequences more than any other part of UK Plc – or so it feels at times.

First there were incentives to install renewable energy which, the Government discovered after the fact, were so generous they were unsustainable and being taken advantage of by the often less than scrupulous elements of the trade. Once that was spotted the payments were severely reigned-in. Of course that had consequences for an industry that was growing rapidly, often on the back of the incentives. And so we go round.

The latest lesson in the law of unintended consequences has sprung from that less-than-stellar initiative, the Green Deal. A significant part of this master plan revolves around a huge promotional push to get more people to better insulate their homes (we’ll leave aside for the purposes of this examination the overly-complex and unrewarding financial structures upon which the Green Deal is precariously built). Better insulation sounds all well and good; less lost heat equals lower heating bills and a smaller carbon footprint. We’re all in favour of all of that.

It seems, though, that even in this there is a banana skin… Because, according to academics who know about these things and tend to look at facts, rather than dealing with a topic through the prism of expediency, you can *over-insulate* a home. This is a particularly bad thing in times when the the climate (because of what we’ve already done to the planet) is becoming more extreme and unpredictable. Suddenly, the older people we were trying to prevent from freezing to death are apparently going to be boiled in their own armchairs. No-one, it seems, had thought of this before.

Because we’re not a tabloid newspaper, we’re not going to try to convince you that this horrendous fate is inevitably going to befall anyone who took up the Green Deal. Besides, it should be easy to send someone round to check on the four of them (yes, you read that right)… The reality for most people nearly always lies in between the extremes, but this is an object lesson in thinking around the subject.

Renewable energy technology is not a panacea, but properly and suitably planned, it will deliver massive benefits to society, gradually bringing down our reliance on fossil fuels and shifting the power to charge through the nose away from the behemoth companies which control those power sources. The problems usually arise when the planning of resources is done with a view to getting re-elected.

It really doesn’t take a genius to realise that if you have a really good method of trapping heat in a house it will get hot. Even Sir Isaac Newton could have told us that, around 300 years ago.

Funding for renewable heat gets a government boost

As we continue to limp towards a properly implemented Renewable Heat Incentive for people’s homes (see our previous comments!), good news reaches us that the stop-gap Renewable Heat Premium Payment has now received a significant boost.

The value of the vouchers awarded under the scheme will, in most cases, at least double, the Department of Energy and Climate Change has announced. There is a small sting in the tail though, in the form of a newly-introduced requirement for a Green Deal assessment to be undertaken in order to qualify for the RHPP.

DECC’s view is that the cost of this should be more than covered by the hike in RHPP voucher values. From a practical perspective, it does seem to make sense to have a thorough view of the energy efficiency of a whole property before an installation takes place, so that the investment in renewable heat sources can deliver maximum benefits.

The RHPP is a way to encourage take-up of renewable heating systems by covering some of the cost of the equipment with a voucher. If the value of that voucher was not boosted, insisting on the cost of a Green Deal assessment could have made the whole investment a lot less attractive.

If you’re not familiar with the Green Deal, the folk at Which? have been good enough to come up with a thorough guide, which you can read here.

Now, if you’re looking to install a renewable heating system, the funding level is boosted to £2,000 for a biomass boiler (up from £950), £600 for solar thermal systems (from £300) and similar scale increases for other technologies.

This is all helpful in the context of the support mechanisms we currently have, though we’re still convinced that what is really needed is the arrival of the Renewable Heat Incentive for domestic properties, allowing people to cost in the value of the incentive over the lifetime of their installation.

So, to sum it up, if you want renewable heat in your home you can now potentially get a £2,000 RHPP voucher (which doesn’t have to be repaid) and a Green Deal loan, which is repaid by the estimated savings from your system.

The new, higher value RHPP vouchers are available straight away.

Extended chills highlight nation’s energy ills

Sometimes it takes extreme circumstances to focus the mind on an issue. The current cold snap has done just that, bringing the rising costs of energy into sharp focus.

It’s easy to bumble along as the price of heating homes and offices and powering industry keeps nudging up quarter by quarter. We grumble, blame the energy companies and governments, but essentially do very little. Most people don’t even shop around energy suppliers because, let’s face it, they all move their prices pretty much in line with each other anyway…

But when there is a consistent freeze, with older people trapped in their homes by snow and ice and forced to keep the heating turned up, then the cost of energy and its immediate and direct impact on daily life really becomes a concern.

According to The Times newspaper, this situation has today prompted a reaction from a group of more than 100 charities, businesses and, er, energy companies. Apparently a letter leaked to the newspaper suggests these organisations are warning the Prime Minister that a fuel poverty crisis looms because of the failures of his Government.

Now, the more cynical among us might have to put aside for the moment thoughts of an agenda by the energy companies in backing such a call (they wouldn’t mind less demand on them to fund sustainable power, for example), but there’s no denying that this group has a fairly strong point overall.

The measures we have had announced so far (the Green Deal and the Energy Company Obligation) seem to be little more than fiddling around the edges, massaging apparent financial benefits for some people, in certain circumstances. They don’t amount to the mass insulation of a stock of ageing homes or the embracing of the more sensible, high technology approaches to sustainable energy. It feels like more of the same old, same old with some frills and window dressing.

There are so many ideas out there either waiting to be tried or which are already tried and tested and are just straining to be put to better and wider use – such as community heating projects and other approaches to more localised collaboration. Anything that causes less reliance on the gang of big energy suppliers might be seen as welcome.

Technology continues to make renewable and micro generation more and more capable of delivering heat and power. We make no apology for highlighting here the amazing efficiency of our world-leading ÖkoFEN wood pellet boilers. They are not just another method for burning wood as a fuel, they are a thoughtfully engineered and tremendously efficient user of the fuel that goes into them and they are just one example of how we can diversify the ways we meet our energy needs.

We don’t exist as a company to be political but we do work very hard to be practical. Unfortunately that’s something our current government is not achieving, with vacillating energy policies that make everyone in the sector nervous of making any firm decisions and which seem to run scared of taking any bold turns.

So if it takes a letter to the PM signed by the good, the bad and the downright ugly who can all see, from their varied standpoints, that we’re not getting this right as a country, the rest of us can only hope that our political leaders are paying attention – for the sake of those freezing pensioners, if no-one else.