Wednesday 6 May 2009

Baxi micro CHP leads the way?

At last some recognition of the benefits of micro CHP! At the Micropower Awards last week, Baxi won the award for innovation for their Ecogen micro CHP unit against all other Microgeneration technologies. So I should be deliriously happy that the industry has actually recognised that a fossil fuelled technology can make a significant contribution to the low carbon future...or should I? At the Micropower conference preceding the awards ceremony, there was a wonderful presentation from NERA, consultants to the UK Government (DECC) on the economics of the forthcoming FIT. An excellent, well argued case for prioritising support for technology measures based on either carbon mitigation cost and/or cost per kWh of renewable energy produced; somewhat tarnished by the following pronouncement from DECC that they would probably cave in to the persistent lobbying of the eco-bling PV industry regardless and give them disproportionately large subsidies anyway because, well...they need the money! Quite why the fuel poor of the UK should be forced to subsidise the vast corporate PV industry beats me. However, this is what happens when you get government by sound bite and technology adoption by target. When asked why the FIT for electricity generation was being fast-tracked to the detriment of the far more significant RHI for heat-based measures, and why there was no planned government support at all (not even proposed, not even under consideration) for technologies which might tackle serious problems such as cooling in buildings ( a major energy consumer in most of Western Europe), the DECC spokesman admitted that they were not looking at cooling "because there is no EU target for cooling". Well that's a relief! The EU has decided to bury their head in the sand over cooling to focus their attention on really useful electrical technologies like PV (the most carbon inefficient measure of all) and climate change will just go away. Maybe we should just pass a law banning climate change and, by the same process, it will just cease to be a problem. I dread to imagine what nonsense the UK government will come up with for the FIT if they are so short sighted that their policy is to be based on "targets" rather than the reality of climate change or any semblance of economics or common sense.