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Initial consultation on the Renewable Heat Incentive
The consultation has now been published and a copy is available here.
It proposes paying a 'tariff' to producers of renewable heat at the levels shown in the table below.
The consultation was accompanied by further documents on:
The design of the RHI (here)
Costs of biomass (here), and
Combined heat and power (here)
The design broadly follows that of the Feed-in Tariffs for electricity (FITs), but there are some particular variations for RHI, as summarised below.
We will provide more detailed guidelines when this website is fully overhauled later in February.
Tariff levels:
The proposed tariff levels are shown in the table below. The government says these have been calculated to give a return on investment of 12% (except solar thermal, which is lower), so are generally more generous than the Feed-in Tariffs.
Eligible technologies:
Most renewable heat sources are eligible, but not open fireplaces or biomass stoves. The use of liquid biofuels is quite restricted (see the section on 'bioliquids' on page 31 of the consultation).
Tariff duration:
There is more variation by technology (see table below) than in the FITs.
Where the money comes from:
The government now believes that levying the money on resellers of heating fuels may not be the most appropriate approach and will introduce measures in this year's budget to adjust the approach originally incorporated in the Energy Act 2008.
Metering and 'deeming' - the energy outputs on which tariffs are calculated:
Put simply, they propose to meter the heat output of large systems. For household-scale and small systems the proposal is to calculate (deem) what that installation should produce to heat a well insulated building and to pay the tariff on that basis. That should encourage beneficiaries to adopt good energy efficiency standards too.
The government consultation
... will close on 26th April 2010. We will be submitting our response about the end of March, so please if you have any issues you think we should raise.
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