Only four people have so far signed up to a flagship government scheme to make homes more energy-efficient.
Totally stupid idea. WTF is going to buy a home that comes with a debt. Okay, the odd Duke might do it when there are death duties to pay.
Fuck it
Poxy BBC site showing year old stories - again.
Check the date, Oh you have. B-)
Quite. Total waste of time and money, "Fewer than 4,000 households had signed up for 'Green Deals' by the end of July."
If government want to improve household energy effciency they are going to have to pay for it. A scheme that has the householder paying over the odds via something that may affect the value of their property and no gurantee of any savings is just plain daft.
If it had been an interest free loan, or fixed at the BoE base rate at the time of taking the loan, with the abilty to pay off early with no penalty it may have stood a chance.
The Green Deal Home Improvement Fund, didn't get a great deal a publicity but had to be closed early and suddenly due to over subscription. That just shows that people *DO* want to improve their homes energy effcieny and make savings on their energy bills but just don't have the capital available to do it.
I also suspect that as nobody has actually heard what is on offer or understands it,when they have, its hardly surprising. Brian
Yes, but only the other day I got a call claiming to be a company representing the Greene deal. It was blatant marketing and so in my view. the public are distrustful, and are wise to all the spin. I remember that nothing has changed for years. I had loft insulation done back then, yet nobody seems to have realised this or kept the info, so I continually get British Gass wanting to do it. Load of inept idiots. Brian
The most "convincing" green sell I had recently was a company selling gov sponsored air source heat pumps.
It sounded great.
Until I looked up the figures and found the pumping efficiency was about
300% at best which still meant a modern gas boiler was cheaper to run and cheaper to install.
Presumably that would have been under the RHI, if so having mains gas makes you ineligble for the RHI...
RHI another thing they fiddled with between consultation and implimentation. Solar Thermal systems have to be HW only, hybrid solar thermal systems, ie that heat a thermal store that is also heated by a "non-green" energy source are excluded. Yet are included if the primamry energy source is "green" and AIUI you get both RHI payments, the Solar Thermal and Heat Pump/Wood Pellet/WHY payment.
And I wondered why "Tory Green Deal" when all 3 main parties promised such a scheme in their manifestos and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has been a Lib Dem throughout the coalition in 2010 :)
Robin wrote
Did you spot the difference between previous deals and the tory one?
If you mean the switch from grants to loans then I spotted in 2010 that all 3 manifestos* planned pay-as-you-save schemes for energy efficiency. Remem,ber that even Labour knew there was no money left?
But I am happy for you to continue to believe the Green Deal was all a nasty Tory idea, and that Labour and the Lib Derms would have funded grants by (a) borrowing more, (b) putting up energy prices more, or (c) putting up taxes.
*To save you digging out your copies: Labour: We will legislate to introduce 'Pay As You Save' financing schemes under which home energy improvements can be paid for from the savings they generate on energy bills. Lib Dem: Begin a ten-year programme of home insulation, offering a home energy improvement package of up to ?10,000 per home, paid for by the savings from lower energy bills, and make sure every new home is fully energy-effi cient by improving building regulations. Conservatives: Rising energy costs hit families hard, so we will create a 'Green Deal', giving every home up to ?6,500 worth of energy improvement measures - with more for hard-to-treat homes - paid for out of savings made on fuel bills over 25 years.
it's want you didn't spot that is.
and what you didn't spot is that the GD as currently implemented is LD policy implemented by an LD minister.
(though I accept that the Tories bought into it)
tim
The problem is that lots of people are trying to make a profit out of something that's only marginally worth doing at cost in the first place. When you add on the profit for the installers, the profit for the loan company, the profit for the training and certification companies, professional bodies, etc, any scheme has become unviable.
The only way any of these schemes would be viable is as a DIY job, but the government have locked DIY out of all the current schemes, because they take too much notice of industry sectors which are out to profit from it. There's no honest profit to be had, only the handouts from the government or the tax levied on energy sales.
That, or a rolling programme. Street-by-street, doing each house in turn, targeted at the design of houses on a given road (this street is cavity wall, that street is external polystyrene). Big economies of scale in both parts and labour, and put the energy companies' subsidy into making it a no-brainer for the householder (maybe repayment of 50% of the energy saved, can be paid off penalty-free when you sell the house, or something).
There's a lot of homes that need the work, so it's not like doing it efficiently is going to leave lots of installers twiddling their thumbs.
Theo
Yeah! The bastards! Look at this:
Why the f*ck do I pay my licence fee...
bit unfair of whichever set of householders are at the end of the queue
tim
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