General Election 2020 manifestos - home heating and Solar PV

KCross

I've been trawling the manifesto's.

Carbon tax
All (not Sinn Fein) seem to support the carbon tax being increased year on year so that means home heating bills will rise if its fossil fuel based.

Solar
My summary is that there seems to be a committment to implement a Feed-in-tariff for SolarPV by 2021 and most parties supporting SolarPV installs and removing planning limitations etc.

Installing a battery on a new SolarPV system didnt make sense to me before but with the already reduced battery grant this month and a FiT almost certain to be here in the next 12 months I cant see any justification for a battery system now. Let the grid be your battery and it will make you money with no upfront capital outlay like there is for batteries. The FiT might be only €50/yr but its €50 coming in, not €1500 going out on Day 1.


Heat Pump
Fine Gael also listed this interesting one around heat pumps

As well as making homes warmer, we will move away from heating homes with fossil fuels. We will establish a pay-as-you-save scheme for heat pumps, to allow homeowners to spread the cost of installing the technology by repaying over time through their electricity bills.

That seems like a better idea than direct grants which just drive the upfront costs higher and line the installers pockets. It needs more detail, of course.


Fianna Fail seem to have a similar idea (feeding the narrative that FF/FG are really just two cheeks of the one arse!)

Task the SEAI Green Homes Agency to provide low cost loans to private homeowners and landlords to incentivise investment in green initiatives on their homes. The primary funding behind the scheme is a pay as you save mechanism where reduced energy bills will be used to repay the original loan taken out.

The Green party talk about very low interest loans to deep retrofit your house with heat pumps etc.

Ultimately it still requires you to pay for it yourself so that might not work if you simply cant afford it. More detail required.



So, heat pumps seem to feature heavily in the future plans of the main parties as do FiT and SolarPV.

I do realise these are just manifestos and they might do none of it!

antoinolachtnai

At the end of the day all of this is a financing challenge.

‘Pay as you save’ is basically just a loan for a heat pump.

You can say it’s no good if you can’t afford it but that is a general problem; as carbon measures of various sorts ‘bite’, the cost of energy for your home will inevitably increase if you haven’t taken measures of some sort to reduce your consumption.

The biggest issue I see here is rental. In rental the problem isn’t just availability of the money; it’s also the lack of incentive for both tenant and landlord.

Personally the measure I would like to see and would make the most difference is to reduce the off peak (7pm-5pm distribution and transmission cost of electricity from the current 5 cents per kWh to zero, and increase the peak distribution cost from 4 cents to, say 25 cents.

This would give people a big incentive to move their electricity consumption away from the peak time.

(This model would not work well for industrial/commercial consumption necessarily.)

antoinolachtnai

antoinolachtnai wrote: »

At the end of the day all of this is a financing challenge.


Personally the measure I would like to see and would make the most difference is to reduce the off peak (7pm-5pm distribution and transmission cost of electricity from the current 5 cents per kWh to zero, and increase the peak distribution cost from 4 cents to, say 25 cents.

This would give people a big incentive to move their electricity consumption away from the peak time.

Sounds great, offset a larger financial share with Solar.
Low hanging fruit.


Power fridges with the sun and insulate them and night...nobody in particular other than every supermarket in the country for instance.

antoinolachtnai

Sir Liamalot wrote: »

Sounds great, offset a larger financial share with Solar.
Low hanging fruit.


Power fridges with the sun and insulate them and night...nobody in particular other than every supermarket in the country for instance.

It would be good for commercial solar certainly. Home PV as a replacement for buying from grid, maybe not so much (since the value of the daytime PV would now be 4c less).

If peak demand is at higher cost when solar panels work hardest then I save more (get paid better for) units I generate myself (offset import) when they are most efficient to use. The saving manifests as a reduction to night-time upkeep I'm not currently set up to generate my own power for.


Increase the cost of day time rates when electric could be abundant and more difficult to manage. Reduce night-time costs to even out demand and not be furling wind turbines.

Huzzah for heat pumps too!!