Making Domestic Renewables Easy

Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun on the incentives people need to go green:

"People only feel green when they are prosperous. When they have got a mortgage crisis, the last thing they are going to think about doing is putting windmills on their roof."

Britain only produces 2% of our energy from renewables.

What we need is a national programme to make it easy as pie for people to install renewable power technology in their homes.

Instead, since the relaunch of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme in May, the grant money available has been reduced from £15000 a home to £2500 a home. The rules under which money can be claimed have also been tightened up.

The result is sadly predictable. In the six months to 21st September, only 113 households have jumped through red tape hoops for far too little money.

Lynne Jones: "Now the level of the grants has been pitched too low, and applicants are dropping out once they discover what funding they will get. We have gone from one extreme to the other ... Ministers need to ensure that the LCBP is functioning properly before the market for domestic microgeneration is killed off. In the long run, we should switch to the system operating in most other European countries of a favourable feed-in tariff for local energy generation, as recommended in a recent environment, food and rural affairs select committee report."