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| Running out of gas |
As we all know, Ireland is currently paying the price for the inability of its political and corporate leaders to take seriously the warning signs of an economy where property investment and borrowing generally got out of control. Looking at policy and commercial investment plans for energy supply and distribution, Richard Douthwaite asks, are the decision makers showing an alarmingly similar attitude to evident gas supply threats?
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Page 5 of 7
Stephen Harte checking the meter box to try to see what sort of insulation is in the cavity
“Ultimately we want to see what householders want to do in their houses; what they’re willing to pay for and what kind of grant is needed to do it, so the test is: what measures will people go for in the context of a grant, what mixture of measures might they install? Two things are likely to produce value for money. One is prioritising the most sensible actions and the second is going for a package rather than doing one thing in isolation, so the grant is set to encourage people towards a package of measures…We want to know how much will stimulate people into action because we don’t want to give away any more than is necessary from a value for money point of view. We want to make sure we’re stimulating actions, and so we expect a very healthy mix. Some people just want to do the very basic and get a small grant, and some people will want to go for bells and whistles…We want to see how people behave when you make this offer to them.”
It’s also worth noting that a number of financial products have come onto the market which offer homeowners preferential loans for investment in energy upgrades and renewables. Permanent TSB and First Active are both promoting ‘green loan’ products structured along these lines. In addition, the Green Loan home energy saver scheme, currently being piloted in Mayo, offers customised energy makeovers to qualifying householders. Approved as a cluster under SEI’s Home Energy Saving Scheme, the Mayo venture offers a range of technologies, including insulation upgrades, wood pellet stoves and solar panels at a competitive all-in-one price. In addition, as a participant in the cluster, Ulster Bank is offering finance at a variable APR of 7.7 per cent compared to their standard variable rate of 10.5 per cent.
Looking across the Home Energy Saving Scheme’s three regional pilots, Motherway says that things are going very well. “The minister only launched it in late April, but we built all the systems, we’ve recruited fifty assessors and trained them. They’re out there doing assessments on the ground and lodging assessments and advisory reports. We’ve about 1,100 individuals in the various areas that are fully live as participants and about 150 of those have had their assessments done to date. All the rules about how the assessments are done, how we lodge the systems, how we make the grant offers, they’ve all been developed and are in place, so we’ll start seeing the first grant offers going out in the next few days.”
On the ground, though the cut off point is houses constructed post-2002, Paul Kenny has seen few houses from this century. “Predominantly the people who have applied are those who think their houses are not energy efficient, so people who’ve built their houses from early 90s backwards…They’re anywhere between 1940s and 1990s. We’re seeing mainly F and G rated houses with poor heating systems, no heating controls, 100mm to 150mm of attic insulation, usually pulled back in some places and not very well laid out. Quite a few people have had their walls pumped. We are getting some people who’ve already taken action and who are now just checking how well they’ve done. Walls are either solid and can’t be upgraded, and there are some cavities that need a top up. We’re seeing a lot of double glazed windows; often houses with no cavity insulation have really nice windows…And there’s no floor insulation anywhere.”
Besides the occasional castle, stately home and 400m2 farmhouse with
neither insulation nor heating, a large proportion of houses are
tailor-made for the scheme. “If you take a 1997 house with 100mm cavity
that usually has 40mm of insulation, you can fill the remaining 60mm
using blown cavity wall insulation. The attic is always pitched, so you
can get good insulation in there. You can upgrade the heating controls
of the boiler relatively easily, and you can get a huge saving, you can
go from an E2 or an F right down to a C2 on a house built from ‘97
onwards, or even from ‘91 onwards.”
So who decides how the work is actually done? In preparing for SERVE,
Tipperary Energy Agency had decided to go further than SEI had gone
with the Greener Homes scheme. SEI has drawn fire from a number of
quarters because of the ease with which installers could get on the
registered list. In addition to seeking tax clearance, evidence of
insurance and product certification the energy agency also sought a
case study, references and a safety statement from the installer. “It
costs a bit of money to put a safety statement together,” says Paul
Kenny, “so you’re going to weed out the fly-by-nights. And with the
case study, we were really just looking for people who understood what
we were trying to do and could demonstrate knowledge of their product
and its quality.”
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