Chapter Summary

Advice and information will enable people to understand their options to save energy and reduce their household’s emissions, and to make informed choices about what action is best for them and their family. Many of the measures available will pay for themselves in reduced energy bills. However, financial support is likely to be needed to encourage people to act now and to ensure that they are able to take up the opportunities to save energy and save money.

By the middle of the next decade, the majority of people will have taken advantage of the cheaper energy saving measures available, with the help of the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) obligations and predecessor schemes. As we look to more significant changes to homes, with higher up-front costs and longer- term energy savings, some households may be able to invest their own money in order to make savings in the long term, but this will not be possible for everyone.

The Government is determined that opportunities to save energy should be available to everyone. We are therefore consulting on options to encourage and enable households to install energy saving and renewable technologies by providing financial mechanisms which spread the costs of these measures over time, so that the costs are more than offset by savings on bills. These finance mechanisms could include subsidies where necessary and effective. This chapter sets out options for how this kind of financing for energy saving and low carbon energy measures could work.

We have already taken the enabling powers to create new financial incentives to promote renewable heat, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), and small-scale electricity, the feed-in tariff. With the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target, we also have in place incentives to promote the uptake of some kinds of energy efficiency equipment. We want to explore further ways to help households with the up-front costs of energy saving and low carbon energy generation measures, and ensure that different financial instruments are joined-up and easily understandable and accessible.

This chapter also outlines the Government’s broader thinking on renewable heat and RHI, and seeks views on whether and how the RHI could provide different levels of support for different sectors or technologies. It also seeks views on whether the RHI should be made available as an up-front payment for small-scale renewable heat technologies, and how to maintain demand for renewable heat before the RHI comes into operation.