Response to the Call for Evidence : Cost and Benefits of Energy Efficiency Measures
Gordon Taylor
2011-04-04
The Government issued a Call for Evidence on the Cost and Benefits of Energy Efficiency Measures in the domestic sector – known as the 'Green Deal'. I replied on 2011-04-04 with my Response.
I believe that both the framework and the measures are wrong. For the former, the Government proposal is that individual home owners would borrow the capital cost of the measures, to be repaid via their energy bills. The Green Deal Summary of Proposals , Page 11 puts the interest rate for such people at about 11% p.a and 'considerably more for some consumers'. However, local authorities and other corporates, acting as Energy Service Companies, could borrow money at 6 to 7% p.a.
For the energy efficiency measures, there is much emphasis on microgeneration, even though the very expensive Energy Saving Trust field trials have shown that none of them work. Yet they have done no field trials on insulation and air-tightness measures, which do work - all the way to Passive Houses. However, affordable retrofits are likely to achieve energy savings of only about 30%, whereas supplying the homes with district heating from Combined Heat and Power would save about 80%.
Page 2 mentions the measuring of the house heat loss and the solar gains. While preparing a paper on my method for a forthcoming solar conference, I found two other methods – actually two variants of a single method. Both require additional equipment and instruments, but take less time. However my method also measures the annual average boiler efficiency.