With the rise in electricity costs making the headlines this week, OFTEC has renewed its call on Government to urgently review current heat policy. In particular, OFTEC believes the focus on incentivising expensive technologies such as heat pumps to reduce carbon emissions from domestic heating should shift to solutions that are more practical and achievable. Even with financial assistance, heat pumps will remain prohibitively expensive to install and run for all except the wealthiest few, according to OFTEC, so take up will remain slow.
Chief Executive Paul Rose comments: “Electrically powered heat pumps, along with biomass boilers, are two of the Government’s preferred low carbon heating options promoted through schemes such as the domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). Enthusiasm for these technologies remains low given that both installation and running costs remain far higher than those for high efficiency oil boilers.
“With further increases in electricity costs expected from September and widely agreed predictions that oil prices will remain low for some time to come, it’s unlikely this position will change in the near future. For this reason we are urging Government to be realistic and work with the situation we currently have rather than pursuing impractical ideals. Consumers need cost effective solutions to start reducing carbon emissions from heating now.”
OFTEC has put forward proposals to Government to introduce a nationwide boiler replacement programme to help the 400,000 households in Great Britain still relying on standard efficiency oil boilers to upgrade to high efficiency models. This would provide an affordable, practical, short-term solution to help consumers reduce carbon emissions and cut fuel bills. OFTEC also seeks to bring to market a low carbon liquid fuel to replace kerosene as a sustainable medium-to-long term solution.
