Clean Energy

With just months to go before Government’s flagship Green Deal policy kicks off, Climate Change Minister Greg Barker has launched a partnership to ensure the UK has the skills required for an effective rollout of the scheme.

According to a report published today by the Royal Academy of Engineering, the UK has no hope of reaching its binding 2050 target for CO2 reductions without a serious shake-up of the way homes are heated. The publication, Heat: degrees of comfort, finds that even with the most modern gas boilers and state-of-the art insulation, we cannot continue to heat so many homes by natural gas and still achieve an 80 percent cut in emissions as laid down in the Climate Change Act 2008.

As each and every one of you is painfully aware, on October 31 this year the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) announced Phase 1 of its consultation on feed-in tariffs, which revealed a 50 percent reduction to the current incentive rates for solar photovoltaics. While most of the post-consultation coverage focused on these cuts, a lot of our readers have also expressed concern over the new potential EPC requirements.