As you might have seen in the news last week, the government has restarted the Low Carbon Buildings Programme with a budget of £12 million. Though if this website was your only source of microgeneration news, you would be confused because I didn’t write about it being suspended in the first place. Tsk tsk.
The whole thing followed the usual pattern (official announcement → initial media response → angry industry response), demonstrating once again that these things are nothing if not predictable. But this sense of
Since before even the Major Demonstration Programme for PV, the government’s approach to microgeneration has been to provide a fixed (small) pot of grant funding. While this worked at first, i.e. to set up a few demonstration projects, it is an inadequate model for the wider expansion of these technologies and this was made perfectly clear when the March allocation of grant funds ran out in 75 minutes due to massive public demand. Of course, one solution would be to vastly increase the size of the pot allowing more households to get grants. But this wouldn’t address the problem of the whole scheme running for only a year or two, creating uncertainty for installation companies.
A much better solution would be to follow the example of the large-scale Renewable Obligation Certificate programme and create a long-term market mechanism that values microgeneration. This would give consumers and industry the confidence needed to invest in microgeneration and set the stage for its integration within the wider electricity network. Germany has shown how it can be done by implementing a feed-in tariff, which guarantees the rate paid for microgenerated electricity (fixed, but decreasing over time). And the results speak for themselves (from the articles above):
Since it was launched in April 2006, the LCBP has funded 2,175 installations in homes, including 242 mini-turbines, 313 solar PV projects and 1,467 solar thermal systems. Germany, by contrast has 300,000 PV systems in homes.
Dr Hermann Scheer, head of Eurosolar renewables association, told MPs in Westminster yesterday that the German system had been a success and the industry now employed 214,000 and had created 24,000 new jobs last year alone.
Unfortunately the DTI thinks this approach is too “interventionist” and to be fair, a feed-in tariff isn’t quite the same as the ROC system. But still, I sincerely hope that the upcoming energy white paper acknowledges that a) the public demand for microgeneration and the requirements of industry necessitate a different approach to support these technologies and b) if you’re trying to be a world leader on climate change and hit a 60% reduction target (or greater) by 2050, you might just have to rock the boat a little bit.
