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.
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.
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.
New! Comments
Have your say about what you just read! Leave me a comment in the box below.