RENEWABLE HEAT LOW CARBON, HAS LOWER FUEL COSTS AND PUTS PEOPLE BACK IN CONTROL
Renewable heat - from sunshine, heat pumps, hot rocks, biomass and biogas - offers homes and businesses home-grown low carbon alternatives to polluting and increasingly expensive fossil fuels. Most of these technologies can heat air or water and some can be used in industrial applications such as kilns. As with all heating appliances, they work best in buildings and systems with high energy efficiency standards. The UK needs to do much more to improve our existing housing stock, as well as new builds, to ensure keeping warm is as affordable and efficient as possible.
Heat is half the challenge - You don’t hear or read half as much about renewable heat as you do about wind or solar farms, but it is every bit as important for meeting our renewables and climate change targets and for reducing our dependence on fossil fuel imports. Although the 2020 projection for renewable heat is lower than renewable electricity (12% v 30%), the required rate of growth is actually higher than renewable electricity or transport because it comes from a lower base. We need to get from 1% in 2010 to 12% in 2020 - a 1200% increase. We’re up to 3% now but there’s still a long way to go.
47% of all UK energy is used for heating, which is responsible for a third of the UK’s carbon emissions. Most of this is from gas, which accounts for 80% of the average household energy use, equating to 55% of the average household energy bill. With domestic gas reserves in decline, the UK has become a net importer over the last decade, with over 50% imported in 2013, exposing us to the fluctuating international market and the price spikes that come with energy supply shocks.
The change we need - The UK needs to change the way we heat our homes and businesses. We need to reduce our reliance on markets out of our control and reduce the carbon emissions for half of our energy use.
Heating bills have increased by 40% since 2010, and there are nearly four million homes living off the gas grid having to rely on more expensive ways of heating their homes, such as electricity,
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oil and Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG). Renewable heating lowers ongoing fuel costs, provides energy independence, as well as helping to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions (especially when displacing the more carbon intensive fuels used in off-grid areas).
In 2007 the then government pledged that by 2016 all new homes would need to be “zero carbon”, thus providing industry with a clear target and timetable. However, since then there has been a systematic watering down of the approach, with the most recent proposals representing only a one third reduction of energy use in- and carbon emitted from- the home itself. The opportunity to future proof our new homes is enormous, preventing a need to upgrade standards by retrofit later on. New homes are currently excluded from receiving the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), so incentivising renewable heating in new homes through Building Regulations is the obvious way to go.
The Renewable Heat Incentive - launched in 2011 following a political campaign led by the REA and Friends of the Earth, the RHI is the main tool for delivering the UK heat strategy. New tariffs and technologies were introduced in spring 2014, as well as support for individual households. As with all heating systems, upfront costs can be prohibitive. Just as inefficient boilers have had government assistance to upgrade, the RHI makes it affordable for households and businesses to move to low-carbon heating with fuel savings and RHI payments helping the system achieve financial payback.
We need to ensure that support is appropriate and the policy framework ensures cost effectiveness for the taxpayer, whilst still being attractive for the industry and consumers. The RHI budget, currently only set out to 2016, needs setting out to 2020 to give the young renewable heat sector the policy certainty it needs to plan for the future. The sector also needs sustained policy support beyond 2020, as emphasised recently by the Committee on Climate Change.
This will ensure continued investment in skills development (an absolute must in a new industry) and the development of
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