By Paul Homewood
From the Mail:
John Wotherspoon was promised that his new energy-efficient solar panels and boiler would not cost him a penny.
The £3,000 combi boiler and £5,000 panels would 'pay for themselves' through the savings he'd make on his energy bills, he was told.
But over the past five years, the retired builder's bills have soared and he is now burdened with a debt that he will not pay off until he is well into his 90s.
John is just one of thousands of homeowners who say they were sold a lie when they signed up to the Government's flagship energy-saving scheme.
The Green Deal was hailed as the 'biggest home improvement programme since the Second World War' when it was launched by the Government in 2013.
It promised homeowners solar panels, insulation and new boilers, with no up-front cost. Customers would need to take out a loan, but they were assured that the repayments would be no more than the savings they'd make on their energy bills.
So if a customer's bill was £1,200 a year, they would pay no more than that, and any savings generated would be used to cover the Green Deal repayments.
The problem was that this was based on a typical household's energy usage, and many homeowners who used less than average have ended up with higher bills.
On top of this, the loans were tied to the property, rather than the individual, which means homeowners could struggle to sell their house in the future.
The multi-million pound scheme was dropped by the Government after just two years following low uptake and was described by MPs as a 'complete fiasco'.
But the flopped scheme has left a legacy of thousands of households lumbered with high-interest loans that they will be paying for decades to come….
Many homeowners also complained that they did not know exactly what they were signing up to, had been oversold the benefits and had no idea they would be locked into repaying debt — with interest rates between 7.9 per cent and 10 per cent APR — over 25 years.
Others complained that they were not profiting from the excess energy generated by their panels, while others said their panels did not work at all.
While the focus of the article is on a few cowboy firms, the real guilt lies with government, which continually peddled the lie that the cost of Green Deal loans would be no more than savings on energy bills.
Below is an extract taken from Govt's Green Deal website:
https://www.gov.uk/green-deal-energy-saving-measures/how-to-pay
As has already been noted, this promise is only based on estimated savings, which may bear no resemblance to reality.
Furthermore, the loan debt may be spread over 25 years, long after a new boiler or solar panels have been scrapped, and subject to high rates of interest.
It has been obvious from the start that the economics of energy saving schemes simply do not stack up. That is why the Green Deal has been such a flop from the beginning. Most people did the number crunching themselves and and quickly realised that it made no sense to commit to thousands of pounds of debt, when the potential savings were so tiny.
The example in the Mail of John Wotherspoon is a classic example. He was paying £100/month for gas and electricity, a typical bill and similar to mine in fact.
I would guess that maybe a third of his bill is for heating, as opposed to cooking, hot water and power for appliances. In other words around £400 a year. How much of this could be saved by a new boiler, insulation and so on? £100 maybe?
So on what planet would it be worthwhile paying out £3000 for a new boiler, which he presumably did not need. Interest at 10% would be triple any likely savings. And given that the boiler might only last ten years, you would need to save £300 a year to break even, even with zero interest.
Mr Wotherspoon's Green Deal loan is costing him £2.63 a day, or £960 a year, and appears to be spread over 25 years. This makes a total of £24000.
Even allowing for the solar panels reducing electricity bills by £100 or so a year, the scheme would clearly be a non starter.
As I say, most people can see this for themselves immediately. Unfortunately others took the government's word at face value, and assumed they would not be worse off.
While the Coalition Government was responsible for the introduction of the scheme in 2013, special mention needs to be about Ed Davey, who pushed it through while in charge of DECC.
Not for the first time, government's obsession with climate change has cost ordinary people large amounts of money.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2M3nBxh
No comments:
Post a Comment