There’s nothing ‘smart’ about my meter

 

The Government's programme for installing smart meters in every home by 2020 has been put back by a year and now will not start until 2015.

This is not yet another U turn on energy priority, but a sudden attack of pragmatism as several practical problems have been raised and more time is needed to iron out the technical issues. However, this remains a government policy and there is a juicy £12bn contract on offer – no wonder BAE Systems; BT; Vodaphone and several other giant infrastructure providers are interested.

I recently moved into a new build apartment block designed to Level 3 of the Code for Sustainable Homes. Needless to say, the flats came with lots of bells and whistles to achieve the requisite approvals. Tragically, very few are fit for purpose and their shortcomings become increasingly apparent the longer I live there. They were enough to convince the local authority inspector, though.

The metering is one of the biggest disappointments. I do have an electricity meter, but I can’t read it because it is inside a locked cupboard and I don’t have the key. There is also a water meter – similarly hidden from view and inaccessible. As with many multi-occupancy developments, access to crucial information is put in communal areas and then hidden from the person who pays the bill.

I can see the timeclock that controls my heating and hot water. However, it was installed ‘discreetly’ behind the storage vessel , facing into the cupboard and the physical contortions I have to perform to read it put me at risk of serious injury – it is even harder to actually programme it.

The thing is…I am one of the few people in this country actually interested in reading my meters. How many people in this country actually care enough to look at the data when it is right under their nose? OPower reckon we spend less than 9 minutes a year checking our energy consumption. And if you make it difficult for them; forget it.

Winners
There is logic behind the smart meter roll out, but who are going to be the big winners? The Government suggests it will be us – the consumers – as we will have lots of fascinating information about our energy consumption available so we can make better choices about turning appliances down and off. Mmmm, not sure about that at all.

The truth is that the big winners will be energy suppliers as they will have lots of fascinating information about our energy consumption allowing them to accurately measure our consumption and charge us for it without having to send a man round to read the meter. They are really interested in this information for obvious reasons – the Man in the Street is not, although he might start to be as energy costs rise.

Tariff
In theory, it should make it easier for consumers to switch to a more suitable tariff and we should be able to say goodbye to the dreaded estimated bill, but it will do precious little about energy efficiency unless the information is made accessible probably on your smartphone and tablet in a format you can understand.

So the Government will spend £12bn on installing 53 million ‘smart’ meters in about 30 million domestic and small commercial properties…but what will it gain?

Well, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) says there will be a £18.6bn energy saving across the country as a result of everyone having a smart meter – so the net gain will be £6.6bn. It thinks every homeowner with a smart meter will save £24 a year by cutting energy use.

If everyone is expected to perform some sort of physical contortion to be able to read this information; or break down a locked door – that simply isn’t going to happen. And, by the way, the Government isn’t actually paying the £12bn…you are. The estimated £350 cost of having a new meter installed will be added to your energy bill.

Interested now?

Ignoring building regulations can kill

The inquest into the fire at Lakanal House in South London that killed six people in July 2009 has exposed a shocking disregard for the Building Regulations.

Firefighters have told the ongoing inquest that partitions in the flats where the victims died had just four and a half minutes of fire resistance instead of the one hour minimum required.  Ironically, the partitions were installed as part of a refurbishment that had been prompted by a need to replace asbestos.

The nine-week inquest, which is due to conclude later this month, heard that the surveyor hired by the refurbishment contractor was “not familiar with building regulations which relate to fire spreading”. What! So why was he employed… and by whom?

The surveyor has actually admitted that the contractor installed “materials that were less fire resistant than what was there before”. He added that the tower block’s landlord Southwark Council did not instruct him to make sure the refit met building regulations and had told him the responsibility lay with the contractor.

John Hendy QC, the lawyer for the bereaved families, described it as "a fundamental breach of building regulations… a lamentable failure of the contractor…".

It seems that the compartmentalisation that usually contains a fire for 60 minutes failed hideously in this incident – the victims were not in the flat where the fire was started by a faulty TV. It also appears that the fire walls collapsed and the ventilation system also did a great job of spreading the fire and smoke.

That old cliché about accidents waiting to happen applies here. Building Regulations are treated with utter contempt by far too many clients, contractors and landlords – it is a miracle there haven’t been far more incidents like this one. The landlord is ultimately responsible for ensuring work complies with the regulations, but that does not make it right for the contractor to simply install the cheapest material he can find.

It is easy to draw a parallel with the horsemeat saga. There is a control system in place and certificates are produced, but is anyone looking at the detail?  The label on a piece of meat is just a piece of paper in the end; and so is a certificate if the person who produces it doesn’t know what they are doing and, even worse, doesn’t care. 

2013 - the year of gas

 

The Energy Bill was the clearest signal yet that this Government has given up on energy efficiency, says B&ES head of sustainability David Frise.

The Government has shown its hand and it is purely focused on increasing power generating capacity. The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement has reinforced this by supporting a new ‘dash for gas’ through the construction of 30 new gas-fired power stations and tax breaks for firms seeking to exploit our substantial reserves of shale gas this year.

Display Energy Certificates (DECs) for the private sector were already off the menu despite the industry’s deafening calls for their adoption. Private buildings will only ever have to display an Energy Performance Certificate and, to add insult to injury, DECs will only reviewed every 10 years, which makes them almost entirely meaningless.

George Osborne has pinned his flag firmly to the ‘business’ mast, and his commitment to gas is completely understandable. Thanks to years of prevarication over renewables and the sluggish development of nuclear capacity, we have little choice if we want to keep our lights on. Gas will have to generate most of our power and it will also have to keep our buildings warm.

However, the Chancellor seems to have completely missed the potential business benefits of energy efficiency. DECC’s own figures show that energy reduction could reduce the country’s electricity costs by £10bn a year between now and 2030. Simple energy efficiency measures, like upgrading heating or increasing insulation, could almost wipe out the expected annual rise in average consumer energy bills of £175. Lots of good political capital in that…but clearly this is not eye catching enough for Mr Osborne.

Do the opposite
The decision to drop plans to roll out DECs to the private sector almost precisely coincided with the publication of an authoritative report advising the Government to do the exact opposite.Produced by Jones Lang LaSalle and the Better Buildings Partnership, the report concluded that “only by monitoring the measured carbon emissions of buildings could the government and industry succeed in cutting emissions from commercial buildings”.

“We have shown that there is little or no correlation between a building’s design (as measured by EPCs) and its actual consumption,” it added.

Researchers compared the actual energy consumption of two offices, one with a good EPC rating – its theoretical energy efficiency - and one with a poor rating. Bizarrely, it was the lower rated building that actually performed better – it was 66% more efficient! This confirms what most industry observers already knew – EPCs are hardly worth the paper they are printed on.

They also analysed the performance of 200 office buildings in London and compared the actual figures with what was shown on their EPCs. The result prompted Nick Hogg, senior consultant in Jones Lang LaSalle’s sustainability team, to state: “EPCs are not sufficient to deliver the government’s targets to ‘de-carbonise’ the UK’s built environment.

“Our findings emphasise the importance of measuring and achieving reductions in actual energy consumption in buildings. In doing so, we present the case for the introduction of mandatory Display Energy Certificates (DECs) for commercial property,” added Hogg.

The report also said BBP’s members have cut their CO₂ emissions by 8% in the last two years and saved themselves £4 million in energy costs in the process.

The WWF has also weighed into the debate. Policy officer Zoe Leader blogged that energy efficiency was the ‘timeless classic’ of energy policy making – because it is easy to ignore. “Control over energy bills…is even more important for the more vulnerable members of our society,” she said.

On top of this, important changes to Part L of the Building Regulations are delayed. A further 20% reduction in emissions from commercial buildings was proposed by DCLG, but this seems to have hit the same brick wall at the Treasury that also torpedoed ‘consequential improvements’ under an onslaught of negative publicity headed by the Daily Mail.

The Government has been accused of sending out mixed messages about energy. I would argue their message isn’t mixed at all…their foot is on the gas.

There goes our energy

Britain is in very serious trouble. We have a clear long-term energy strategy, but that will be no consolation if our lights go out before we get there, says B&ES head of sustainability David Frise*.

Over the next four months 8% of our total national capacity is to be shut down as several coal and oil-fired power stations are taken off line. Over the next three years we will lose 25% of our power generation as ageing and polluting generators are switched off.

That would be fine if we had something to step into the breach, but the Government is fiddling while the last of the fossil fuel is burned.  It has a clear vision of where it wants to be in 2020 and 2030 in terms of new types of low carbon generation – but what do we do in the meantime? Renewables currently account for less than 10% of our needs and even the head of our energy regulator Ofgem doesn’t have any real answers.

Alistair Buchanan gave this year’s CIBSE Annual Lecture at the Wellcome Foundation. The audience filtering out afterwards looked visibly shocked. Not surprising as Ofgem’s chief executive had just told them the UK could have no spare capacity at all in three years time – at best it will have 4%. The regulator’s already gloomy predictions about an energy gap have just been pulled forward by two years.

The answer to the question posed by his lecture title: “How secure is Great Britain's electricity and gas supply over the next decade?” was “not very”.

We have already had one very close call. During the very cold winter of 2010/11, Centrica said it would run out of gas on February 19. By sheer chance, we then had the warmest January and February on record and got out of jail.

“The Government’s visionary energy policies have been sucked into the financial crash,” said Mr Buchanan, who has been in charge of Ofgem since 2003. “Just at the time we were expecting to lead the world in energy renewal, we had the carpet pulled from under our feet.”

Expensive
He added that the country’s renewables development programme was moving “profoundly slowly” with offshore wind proving very expensive. Currently our electricity costs around £50 per MW to produce, but if we switch over to wind the cost rises to between £160 and £180. The country’s one major biomass development (Siemens/Drax) is on hold. He also pointed out that, although we are a gas import/export hub for Western Europe, we do not have anything like enough gas storage capacity for our own needs when traditional generators are gone.

“The UK’s power demand is falling, but our capacity is falling faster,” he said.

One consolation is that we are not alone. Germany might be relatively successful economically, but they are deeply in the energy mire. Mr Buchanan revealed that Bavaria was just one day from a total energy meltdown last winter following Chancellor Merkel’s decision to shut down the country’s nuclear capacity. France stands ready to divert some of its nuclear power to Germany if it gets into trouble again, but that might mean there is none left for us if we hit trouble too.

The start of the carbon floor tax next April will finish off the remaining coal-fired energy plants because they will be uneconomic to run at £16 per tonne of carbon emissions.  Last year, according to Ofgem, coal provided 45% of the UK’s entire electricity capacity. The tax will also hasten the closure of many ageing gas-fired stations that have not been upgraded.

Four major UK power stations are closing next March. One new gas-fired power station is under construction, but will not be running until 2017 – at the earliest.

Meanwhile, how is our nuclear programme going? Hinkley B, which will be our first new nuclear power plant is at least two years behind schedule, according to Mr Buchanan.  It is now expected to come onstream in 2021. Following recent loss of confidence from our overseas investors, the next tranch of nuclear power is a further five years behind that.

Unclean
So, could we go back and reverse our decision to close down coal and gas by tackling their emissions problem? Apparently not. Mr Buchanan told his audience that there was “nothing happening” with clean coal technology and the Government would be in a tricky legal position with the European Union if it turned its back on the agreement to reduce pollution by reopening ‘unclean’ coal stations.

However, there is plenty of gas around, particularly with the emergence of the massive global reserves of shale gas. Again Ofgem has revised its predictions: Gas was expected to fall back from providing around 40% of our power needs to between 20 and 30% by 2020. In fact, according to Mr Buchanan it will need to be providing as much as 70% by the end of the decade – to keep our lights on.

However, even here there are some big clouds on our horizon. The EU is very nervous about relying on Russia and ‘The Stans’, particularly as the former has a track record in shutting the pipelines. In February this year, it arbitrarily reduced supplies to the West by 10%.

Competition
There is also huge competition for gas from all of our European partners and also from the Far East, where prices are much higher which makes it a much more attractive market for the leading exporter of shale gas – the US.  Shale gas is $2.50 per therm (mmBTU) in the US; $9 in Europe; and $18 in Asia. The Americans are also determined to become energy independent so are retaining a lot of supplies for their own use. This is a policy supported by re-elected President Obama.

Shale gas is more expensive anyway so, if we go down that route, European bills will rise by between 20% and 50% assuming shale gas extractors get over their legislative hurdles because of the links between fracking and earthquakes.

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from Australia was the great hope before shale, but transportation costs have rocketed recently and the industry has been hit by delays. Also, the main route for bringing it to Europe is via the Straits of Hormuz – right through the middle of the politically unstable Middle East. Japan and China are also lining up to take a huge slice out of LNG supplies.

Despite these problems, gas is the best we can do. It clearly represents our best hope of keeping the lights on while we count down to the age of renewables. It is going to be very expensive, but we it looks like we will just have to swallow the cost – or get really serious about the demand side.

Buildings are responsible for over 40% of total energy demand. There surely can be no more persuasive argument for a comprehensive programme of energy efficiency than this bleak energy supply picture.

Mr Buchanan’s lecture can be viewed as a webcast at: www.cibse.org/annuallecture

Making policy at the despatch box – a recipe for disaster

You have to wonder what was going through David Cameron’s mind when he decided to announce a radical reshaping of the energy supply market in the Commons.

Apparently he jumped the gun by announcing the policy early.  Yet, he still decided to grab some populist headlines by appearing to make up the country’s energy policy on the hoof.

And what an idea…all energy suppliers will be forced to give everyone – everyone! – their lowest available tariff. This turned out not to be quite the case but for a day the government were unable to give a proper response to the understandable questions this change in policy raised. The consequence?

A further undermining of in confidence in this government’s ability to make meaningful long-term decisions about our energy market, which means we are even less attractive to private sector investors than before. Foreign firms had already been running for the hills rather than invest in our new nuclear capacity, so goodness knows what they made of this new idea.

You have to have a free market – people should be able to choose the product they want at the price they want – you can’t nanny them.

If you force one tariff on everyone, then that tariff will have to be a higher one for the suppliers to make a profit. Surely consumers can be expected to make some decisions for themselves. 

I do understand that tariffs are overly complex, but the same is true of rail fares (another source of shaky investor confidence).

The Green Deal is also in danger of collapsing under the weight of this nannying culture.  Whatever happened to let the buyer beware? Even for a Green Deal project the consumer should get three quotes and evaluate that there might be a risk if they choose the lowest one.

The focus on the Green Deal is at the wrong end. We should be fixed on the end of the process and whether the work you have paid for delivers.  And we need to educate customers and empower them to understand whether or not the savings they have been promised have materialised –tie it in with smart grid roll out.  Instead the government is trying to put in so much consumer protection at the start that legitimate contractors will be put off because it is yet another accreditation scheme that pushes up their costs.

Who would have thought a Tory-led government would be guilty of bolstering the Nanny State? But they have; and the impact on our ‘Energy Policy’ could be catastrophic.

The great heat pump rip off

It is ironic that heat pumps have just had a truly awful piece of publicity just when it seems the industry has finally won its battle with the Government to have air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) included in the commercial Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).

The technology has been battling for credibility since the Energy Saving Trust’s less than flattering field trials in 2010 and the latest bad news – courtesy of last week’s ‘Rip Off Britain’ programme on the BBC – could not have come at a worse time.

Sadly, the wider public will not see the subtlety of this. They will simply hear about families in social housing ending up with electricity bills four times higher than anticipated. They will see the headlines about mothers having to choose between paying for food or their energy bill and assume this ‘new fangled’ green technology is a failure.

Yet the manufacturer – in this case NIBE, which strongly rejects the implication on the show that their products are at fault (read the company's statement here) – has successfully supplied 15,000 ASHPs to UK projects, so they must be doing something right!

The truth is that, yet again, it is not the technology, but how it has been deployed that has caused the problem. Rip Off Britain highlighted the poor performance of the NIBE units on a number of housing estates across England. The Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) for the properties in question stated that annual electricity costs for heating and hot water should be between £400 to £500. However, the programme reported that ‘hundreds of families’ were paying three or four times that amount.

Demanding
One family interviewed for the programme said their electricity bill for the first two months alone was £252. One housing association was reported to have paid more than £45,000 to support residents under siege from electricity suppliers demanding payment.

A heating engineer, who surveyed the systems for the BBC, told the programme that the particular heat pumps used in these homes were undersized – possibly because they are designed for the Scandinavian market, which has much higher insulation standards. It appears that the heat pumps were running almost continually in back-up electric immersion mode due the higher heat losses in our social housing – hence the horrifying bills.

The response from the local authorities concerned was, not surprisingly, to rip out the heat pumps and replace them with gas boilers. It’s a tragedy. Air source heat pumps could do a perfectly good job in this country, but it is going to get harder and harder as all this adverse publicity piles up.

It seems obvious, even from a distance, that the undersizing of the systems was probably done to save money and the EPC rating was based on a best possible scenario.  You will only achieve that if the heat pump system is properly sized, rated, installed and commissioned – and, vitally, the end user is shown exactly how to operate it.

A number of social housing groups now have renewable liaison officers to help residents understand the systems installed in their homes and, equally importantly, manage their expectations – shouldn’t every social landlord be doing this?

Gas fractures coalition

 

Looks like gas-fired boilers will be with us for a while longer…

Gas is back. OK, it never really went away, but global demand is on the up again, partly due to nuclear shut downs in Japan and Germany and it seems to be in plentiful supply. The state of the economy is turning the “greenest government ever” back into energy pragmatists.

Wholesale gas prices are at a 17-month low, and will go considerably lower. Decision making on renewables and nuclear has been slow and muddled so, as a result, gas is powering back in the frame.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes a new ‘golden age of gas’ is dawning. It sees global gas trade expanding by 35% after 2015 and accounting for 25% of primary energy demand – it was only 21% in 2010. Annual gas demand is predicted to rise by 2.7% over the next five years and suppliers are confident of meeting that demand with liquefied natural gas, international pipelines and shale gas.

Government ministers are at loggerheads over renewable subsidies. The Chancellor George Osborne has fallen out publicly with energy secretary Ed Davey as the Treasury tried to water down generous grants to wind farms to maintain investment in gas-fired power generation. ‘Business before carbon’ is the mantra and Osborne is exclusively focused on business competitiveness at the expense of true energy innovation – and he seems to be winning.

In the end they settled on a 10% cut to the subsidies rather than the 25% Tory backbenchers were calling for. This should still free up some public funds for gas development.

The US is enjoying a shale gas boom that has reversed its moves towards becoming a gas importer that could be mirrored here.

The ‘fracking’ (hydraulic fracturing) controversy that saw the nascent UK shale gas industry start and then stall over earthquake fears seems to be close to a technical resolution. A report from the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, commissioned by the government’s chief scientist Sir John Beddington, has given fracking an apparent clean bill of health just at the right time for Osborne and his Treasury officials.

The controversy will continue over fracking, but whether or not UK fields are developed, there is enough capacity worldwide for the UK to make a low cost gas choice, which probably means we will because it is easy and ministers fear the lights going out more than missing carbon targets.

We might have been a bit premature when we suggested the next generation of heating engineers would not be fitting gas boilers. It might take another generation.

Energy might be the issue that ‘fractures’ the coalition government, but whatever the political fallout, it looks like we aren’t leaving gas behind anytime soon.

BIM – what’s that all about?

 

If the number of conferences is the measure of the importance of a topic, then BIM (Building Information Modelling) must be very, very important indeed.  

Recent research carried out on behalf of the Government’s BIM Working Group suggests that almost everyone in the building engineering sector will be using it, to some extent, in five years’ time.

A survey of 1,000 professionals, carried out by the software consultancy NBS, found that three quarters of people, who were aware of it, expected to be using BIM by the end of 2012.

Almost one third of construction professionals (31%) said they were using BIM at the end of last year. Only a fifth (21%) said they were unaware of the technology, but lots of people are confused about what it actually is. Many still refer to it simply as ‘3D CAD’.

You often hear people saying:  “Well, of course, BIM will have an impact”; and we all nod sagely and wonder what that impact might be. 

Well, I'll be honest and say that I don't know.  What I do know is that it will bring about profound change in the industry or rather the wider digitisation of the construction sector will.

Why?

Digitisation of industries turns business models on their heads - think Kodak. Yes, whatever happened to film?

Their will be new entrants that we have yet to hear about.  Facebook is now worth billions, but was just a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye eight years ago.

Incumbents do of course have market advantage and there will be many success stories from companies, who are already at the forefront, but incumbents often tell you why things cannot be done.  New entrants by and large will just do it because they have no history or culture to deal with.

What will we do about turning all the data we collect in the building models into information of strategic (monetary) value?  New companies will spring up to take advantage of this opportunity.

I think it was the Vulcan bomber that was described as 20,000 spare parts flying in close formation. This perfectly describes our buildings - a number of the cheapest installed systems we can find operating in an uncoordinated envelope.  BIM offers the opportunity to right that wrong …possibly.

If you can predict exactly how that comes about, bet your house on it.  

Me I'm still thinking about it and am reading Ray Crotty's excellent book 

The Impact of Building Information Modelling: Transforming Construction

Who ate all the pasties?

 

At almost exactly the same time as George Osborne was doing another U turn over his deeply flawed ‘pasty’ and ‘caravan’ taxes, Germany was generating almost 50 per cent of its entire electricity needs from solar power. The juxtaposition of these two events is illuminating.

Germany was widely accused of a very un-Germanic kneejerk reaction to the Japanese tsunami and subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear reactor last year by announcing it would close all of its 17 nuclear power stations. It closed eight immediately and will close the remaining nine by 2022.

It seemed a hugely risky and out of proportion move – what would they do about the looming ‘energy gap’ if they had no nuclear? As it has now transpired, it was clear that

Angela Merkel’s government already knew the answer; they were making a dramatic political gesture – as politicians like to do – but they were making it from a position of strength.

Germany has almost as much installed solar capacity as the rest of the world put together.

It produced 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour at midday on Friday and Saturday, May 25 and 26 – enough for half its needs at a weekend and a third of demand required on working days. This power output is equivalent to 20 nuclear power stations working flat out.

Germany, at this rate of development, is well on track to plug its energy gap and can comfortably afford to shut down its nuclear capacity.

What has all this got to do with pasties?

It is a question of political will and priorities. If you can’t trust them over the price of a pasty what can you really trust them to deliver a controversial integrated energy policy?

Establishing energy infrastructure is a very long-term task – Germany has been building up itsrenewable generating capacity for decades. - although not without flaws – a dependence on gas imports for example. It also backs low carbon solutions like combined heat and power, for example, and was moved to pass a CHP Act that led to a huge increase in local, microgeneration capacity alongside large scale renewables.

Here we are told that “political risk” is the biggest problem. 

So let’s have a bit of stability and certainty and look over the political horizon.

Who is going to deliver the Green Deal?

There is not a single building engineer working today who meets the Green Deal competence criteria...

There are also no courses available to train them; and the way the projects are structured means that householders could be left with no water or heating for weeks. Other than that – it is all looking great!

With just five months to go until the launch of the Government’s ‘flagship’ environmental policy, there are big question marks over how the scheme can be delivered.

The difficulty is that the competence criteria have been set in line with new national qualifications that are not yet in place. As a result, nobody can be measured against the requirements of PAS 2030 – the ‘publicly available specification’ for existing buildings, which provides the quality standards to which all energy efficient measures funded by the Green Deal must be installed.

The PAS covers boilers, controls, insulation, warm air heating systems, flue gas recovery systems, lighting, heat pumps, solar thermal and PV, biomass boilers, CHP and wind. It sets out the installation processes, the management of those processes and the quality of the service provided to the customer before, during and after the installation. This is to ensure that installations meet customer expectations and achieve theGolden Rule that states the energy savings must cover the cost of repaying the money, provided by the scheme for the improvements.

Benchmark
The Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) depends on the PAS to guarantee the standards required by the Green Deal Code of Practice and as a good practice benchmark for installations. Yet, it could be as much as four years before the first candidates come through the qualification process. We are facing a huge hole in DECC’s strategy for delivering its ‘flagship’ environmental policy.

The irony is that there will be plenty of money available because large private organisations are lining up to provide Green Deal funding – Marks & Spencer; B&Q and the like – but what will they be funding? There is no point having lots of money, but a very narrow supply chain – if any supply chain at all – capable of delivering the projects.

The Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is facing a similar problem with £600m of public money available, but only a handful of applications. Only 20 projects – out of a total of 376 applications – have so far been approved for RHI payments and almost all of these are for biomass installations, according to Ofgem who are administering the scheme.

So, plenty of money, but precious little output.

Damaging
Contractors are sensitive to this sort of thing and their scepticism could be really damaging because of the Government’s patchy record on subsidised schemes.  It is hard to persuade employers to pay for yet more training if they get even a whiff that there is doubt over the long-term viability of the scheme – and that’s when the training courses actually exist!

The Government’s intentions are good, but this betrays their lack of understanding about how the industry works.

This is also evident in how the project process has been set up. If a contractor working on a Green Deal funded project comes across a problem during the project – say, for example, he finds asbestos or the boiler needs to be re-sited because of a previously hidden problem with a wall – he will have to go back to the Green Deal provider for approval.

This means a delay and could result in the householder being without heating or water until the person or organisation providing the funds has re-assessed the application and approved the changes. This has come about because the system has been set up to protect the funding providers – not the consumer.

Mandatory
Another opportunity has also been missed over the long-awaited ‘consequential improvements’. The industry has lobbied for these to become a mandatory requirement under Part L of the Building Regulations. The principle is that the building owner is compelled to spend a further 10% of the value of any refurbishment project on improving the energy efficiency of the whole building.  With Green Deal funding now available, here was an opportunity to impose the rule, but without any cost to homeowners.

By making it a legislative requirement, the government could have created a measure of compulsion, but Green Deal funding would have been used to pay for the improvements and consumers would have enjoyed the benefits of reduced fuel bills as well.  However, the Daily Mail dubbed it a ‘conservatory tax’ and so, despite widespread support during the Part L consultation process – including from several government departments, the Chancellor intervened and had the proposal dropped.

Solutions
So we have a whole list of concerns – but what about solutions? The flaws in the scheme will become increasingly apparent once it gets up and running because the uptake will be sluggish. There will, surely, have to be some sort of ‘staging’ process to allow already competent engineers to carry out the work before they complete further training.

B&ES will continue to raise these concerns and lobby for changes during the early stages. However, in the meantime, we recognise that you have to be on board the train as it is the government’s flagship measure and a large amount of work is linked to it. There is no point standing on the platform shouting.

With this in mind, our accreditation service BESCA is about to receive UKAS approval as a Green Deal accreditor to add to its approvals for the Microgeneration Certification Scheme(MCS) and mandatory air conditioning inspections.

We will not snipe from the sidelines. We recognise that the Government’s intentions are good, but that it needs more expert guidance from within the industry. We can provide that while also setting up the accreditation processes that will, in time, be better suited to the way projects can and should be delivered leading to a long-term work stream for building engineering services contractors.