Microgeneration has a FIT

Am I hallucinating …or did I have a fit?

A famous Japanese Buddhist monk once wrote, “If I cannot be sure that what I perceive when I am awake is real, then how can I be sure that my dreams are not?”

Perhaps it is an indication of the onset of old age, or too much after dinner cheese or possibly excessive late night drinking, but I appear to be fast losing my grip on reality. Was it just a dream, or a nightmare perhaps, that the UK government, not content with mortgaging our grandchildren’s future to bail out their fat acolytes in the City, is now determined to spend as much of our remaining money as possible to achieve as little as possible in the questionable quest for climate change nirvana?

Are they really intent upon their insane plan to introduce a FIT predicated on investing as much money as possible in the most worthless measures? And did I dream that the PV industry is whinging about only getting 35p/kWh and is lobbying against the inclusion of more worthwhile Microgeneration technologies such as micro CHP on the basis that, unlike PV, they might actually deliver significant carbon savings? Even with a proposed tariff of 15p/kWh, they fear that everybody will rush out and invest in micro CHP, and that would mean there would be less left in the trough for them.

Now, let me get this right. The government is planning not to support micro CHP because it appears to be the most cost-effective Microgeneration technology and might actually succeed in delivering significant carbon savings and would rather spend the money on PV because they know it won’t!

I dreamt the FIT would stimulate Microgeneration and deliver as much as 2% of our 2020 electricity targets and cost a mere £50 per household. It must have been a dream, because at that rate, 100% would cost us each £2,500 per year!

Never mind, all the governments of Europe are introducing the FiT on the same idiotic basis. So we shall end up with more PV in Germany than the whole of Southern Europe and will build our wind farms in the shelter of some forest or other. Now that must be dreaming!

Surely that is an isolated aberration, but no, I dreamt that the UK government had come up with the Baldrick of all cunning plans to make all our homes energy efficient and zero carbon by 2050. For over half a century successive governments have attempted with varying degrees of success to improve the UK housing stock. Maggie came up with a cunning wheeze to cut the cost of social housing provision and maintenance by selling it to someone else, so it became “someone else’s problem” and instantly ceased to exist. Gormless Gordon has devised an infinitely more brilliant scheme; he is passing responsibility to the energy suppliers not just for social housing, but for every home in the land! Now when it comes to building a power station, I would concede that the energy companies are bordering on competent, but even in my wildest dreams I cannot imagine they are much good at building houses. The Community Energy Saving Programme is just so incredible I must have dreamt it. First they work out a projected carbon saving for a range of energy efficiency measures, then they multiply each by some random number to give a “weighted” carbon saving. External Wall Insulation, for example, gets a multiplier of 3. Why? Because it is so expensive and no-one would do it based on the actual saving. The CESP then compounds this by giving an additional weighting to multiple measures applied to the same property. So, if you insulate a house and install a new condensing boiler, you will be deemed to save more carbon than if you installed the measures in different homes, when, according to the laws of nature, the opposite is true.

Again we incentivise the least cost-effective measures so the carbon savings are achieved at as high a cost as possible. Did I dream that?

Of course it also means that we will be deluding ourselves that for every tonne of carbon we are actually saving we think we are saving 6!

That’s probably why they say we are going to over-achieve our 2020 targets. Yes and whilst we are in this fantasy world we no longer need to be concerned about Climate Change. You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time…but you cannot fool nature. You cannot legislate the Laws of Physics; a former King of England tried that once before and look what it got him…wet feet. So whilst the dimwits who determine our benighted energy policy, or lack thereof, send King Canute to reverse the inexorable tide of climate change on the shores of Tuvalu, we sleep content, dreaming that it is all going to be alright.

But never fear, we will awaken from this nightmare to the fresh dawn of Dozy Dave and his opportunistic sound bite energy policy. I dreamt that he was going to bribe us with our own money (like that has never happened before!). I think it was something along the lines of giving each one of us £6500 of our own money to spend on energy efficiency measures for our homes. This is how it will work. Every home in the country will be entitled to this windfall, the cost of which will therefore be £6,500 multiplied by the number of households. So, first he collects the money (and if I dream correctly there will be no costs for administration, spillage or diversion of funds to other “worthwhile” causes), from “the taxpayer”, also known as the UK householder at an average cost of…um…let me see…oh, yes…£6,500. So, right hand, left hand…

But here is the clever bit! He won’t actually give it to you, it will be a loan, repayable from the income you will receive from the FIT on the electricity you generate. And that is good because the FIT is not a tax and is not taxpayers money, honestly, that’s what the PV industry tells us. It comes from…er…um…oh, yes…the electricity companies. Excellent, brilliant, just what we need; a windfall tax on those nasty electricity companies. Except that it is a pass-through cost which will be recovered from everybody’s electricity bills. No, I’m having a problem here; I need more cheese. I can’t dream that obtusely. I think that means the taxpayer!

Oh, and by the way, who do you think will provide the loans? Yes, you guessed, those philanthropic institutions who screwed the entire global economy. Anyway, not to worry, there is plenty of money around these days. In fact we have got so much that we invented a new game to amuse the finance industry. It is called “cap and trade” and is a brilliant way of saving the planet. Rather than actually doing stuff and building low carbon generating plant, we just gamble on red; we pay the Chinese not to build power stations they were not going to build anyway, so that we can carry on burning coal until the skies are black. Tuvalu goes under six feet of ocean, but what the heck, the government will all be retired and living off consultancy fees from the banks.

No, it must be a dream. Nobody could possibly devise a reality as perverse as this!