What Was The Green Deal?

The Government stopped funding the Green Deal in 2015. It was a government initiative which was designed to allow home owners like you and I to add eco technology to our homes in order to make them more energy efficient without having to spend large amounts of money up front.

The types of technologies which were installed under the Green Deal included solar panels for hot water (solar thermal panels), solar panels to generate electricity (photovoltaic panels), heat pumps, biomass, insulation and many more (see below).

The basic premise was quite simple: you had the technologies installed in your home at no up-front cost to you (unless you pay for the assessment yourself) and then you would pay back the cost of the equipment, installation and interest charges via your energy bills.

The loan was attached to your home rather than you, so if you sold your home the repayments passed to the purchasers as, after the sale of the house, it would have been them who benefitted from the savings.

What Did You Get?

Insulation – this included the provision of cavity, internal or external all insulation and/or loft insulation.
Draught proofing – after all if your home is draughty then the heat in your home escaped quicker than if it was draught proofed. A leaky home meant your boiler would have to fire more often to replace the lost heat.
Heating – Older boilers are quite inefficient so replacing them with modern heating systems such as condensing boilers, heat pumps, wood pellet boilers, CHP systems etc. should reduce your running costs.
Double glazing or triple glazing– old single glazing units tend to be draughty and are poor insulators meaning you’ll get lots of condensation forming and your rooms will cool down quickly. So installing modern double or triple glazing will mean you lose less heat through your windows meaning your home stays warmer for longer.
Renewable technologies – such as solar thermal panels, photovoltaic panels, wind turbines etc. These will allow you to produce your own hot water or electricity on site and maybe even sell some back to the grid.

What you needed to know?:

The Green Deal Providers - what firms were involved in the scheme and what each of them did in relation to your application.
How you would have applied for the scheme - This section showed you how you would have gone applying and what was involved.

Essentials:

The entire principle of the scheme hinged on the fact that the energy savings following installation of the technology had to outweigh the cost of the technology, installation and interest payments.

If this were the case with your property the approved company would then have signed you up with an agreement before installing the appropriate technologies in your home.

You should then have started to see a reduction in your bills.

The Green Deal- a very simple illustration:

If your energy bills were £100 per month and the suggested eco-technologies could have reduced those bills to say £50 per month and the cost of the loan was £40 per month then you’d still have been £10 per month better off.

This principle was crucial to the scheme’s success. So if the total of your energy bills plus the cost of your loan was greater than your old energy bill then it wouldn’t have worked for your property.

The theory was great but the figures used were estimates and the biggest problem that I saw with the whole scheme is that in reality the assumed savings and the assumed costs of the technologies can be inaccurate.

Ultimately that may have been one of the reasons why the green deal died in 2015.

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