ED MILIBAND has launched his Warm Homes Plan to the adulation of the BBC and renewable lobby.
The BBC reported: ‘Households will be eligible for thousands of pounds’ worth of solar panels and other green tech to lower their energy bills, the government has announced.
‘The long-awaited Warm Homes Plan promises to provide £15billion to households across the UK over the next five years.
‘The Government has said it wants to create a “rooftop revolution”, tripling the number of homes with solar, and lifting one million people out of fuel poverty.’
What the BBC forgot to tell its readers was that it will be taxpayers who end up paying the bill for this latest nonsense. Households will be over £500 worse off on average as a result.
About a third of the funding will be handed over to low-income households, but most will be in the form of low-interest loans, which will have to be repaid.
There have been several similar schemes in the last couple of decades. They all have one thing in common – very few people took them up.
It is difficult to see why this latest wheeze will be any different. People are naturally reluctant to borrow large sums of money, even if they offer potential savings. Nor do they want the hassle of installing heat pumps and solar panels.
If solar panels were so cheap, people would be queueing to buy them, without the need for subsidies.
Fitting solar panels and a battery to a typical home would cost around £10,000, but would still provide only a fraction of the electricity needed in winter months, when sunshine is in short supply.
And when they pack up after ten or 15 years, where will you get the money to replace them? They will most likely end up being left on rooftops to rot, reducing the value of your home.
Given that annual electricity bills are about £800 and the solar panels would last at best 15 years, it does not take a genius to work out that you won’t save much money, if any. The interest on a loan would immediately cancel any savings on electricity bills.
Worse still, heat pumps are not only unaffordable for most people, they actually cost much more than a gas boiler to run.
Encouraging people to take out loans, which they cannot afford to repay, on the promise that they will save money on energy bills, is fraudulent. If a double-glazing company did it, they would probably end up in court.
It is even worse for low-income households, which will be encouraged to chuck out gas boilers and then find they are stuck with heat pumps which not only cost more to run but don’t even heat their homes properly.
There is no financial justification whatsoever for this splurging of £15billion. Taxpayers are on the hook once again for Ed Miliband’s mad obsession with climate change.
Government gaslighting about heat pumps
If Net Zero targets are to be met, a million gas boilers a year will soon have to be replaced by heat pumps. A fifth of UK energy is used for heating our homes with gas and that means an estimated 20million boilers must go in the next two decades.
Replacing them all with conventional electrical heaters is not possible because the power grid would be quickly overwhelmed, hence the need for heat pumps, which use about a third as much electricity.
But as we have seen, virtually nobody wants to buy them and for good reason. In spite of obscene subsidies of £7,500, sales of heat pumps under government schemes totalled just 35,000 in the first nine months of last year.
To persuade the public to switch, the Government is running a campaign falsely claiming that heat pumps are cheaper to run. They claim that you can save around £100 a year.
According to Ofgem, a three-bedroom house typically uses 11,500kWh of gas a year, which costs £677, not ‘£2,000’.
By its own admission, heat pumps cost much more to run. This is not surprising, given that the energy price cap is set at 28.45p per kWh for electricity and 5.89p for gas. Even though heat pumps use a third of the energy, they still work out almost twice as expensive to run.
The campaign inadvertently sums up why few people want heat pumps. For a three-bedroom home, a heat pump would cost between £13,000 and £15,000.
That does not include the cost of new radiators, insulation and a hot water tank, all of which would be required in the vast majority of houses. You would be lucky to get change out of £20,000 for that lot. Where on earth do they think people can find that sort of money?
You will also need indoor space for a hot-water tank. Good luck with that – we knocked our old immersion tank out years ago, to create more storage space.
Meanwhile, back in La La Land, Miliband has set a target of 450,000 heat pump installations by 2030.
