SAEI Grants have run out...Government don't seem to care...

raspberrypi67 wrote: »

Well here we go again, another reason why I'm so cynical on the governments approach towards renewable energies and grants.
SAEI grant money has apparently now run dry and guess what...the Government has no plan to continue....
What the hell is Richard Bruton ,or whoever is responsible for this area, actually doing....??
They certainly do seem to be leaving it up to the public to foot the bill for all these hair brained ideas about CO2 emissions.....
They are completely and utterly a shower of useless contemptuous idiots that only care about their expenses and pensions at the end of the day.

This is only for one particular scheme is it not? And a pilot project at that.

Similar discussion in the Construction Forum near the end of this thread
https://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2057887947

Macha wrote: »

Efficiency absolutely has to be the first consideration.

Low hanging fruit, sure. But not efficiency at all costs. If it costs €100,000 on a deep fit to reduce the energy consumption of one house by 5MWh per year and it costs €50,000 to increase wind production by 5MWh per year, we should forget about the deep fit and concentrate on wind. Agreed?

screamer wrote: »

Indeed deep retrofit is only farting against the wind......

In a nutshell, this expression sums up the whole scheme with a pun too. Bravo.

I agree they shouldn't have been taken more applications if they were going to shut it down.
But why were some people going ahead with the work before there applications were approved? It's really on them to be honest.
e.g. below
https://twitter.com/ConnorPM/status/1161298309908180993

Its also SEAI not SAEI.

It was a pilot scheme and demand seemed to have exceeded the funding. Pilots tend to be quite short-lived but ultimately lead to some form of actual schemes. It is also a grant, not something you are automatically entitled to.

is_that_so wrote: »

It was a pilot scheme and demand seemed to have exceeded the funding. Pilots tend to be quite short-lived but ultimately lead to some form of actual schemes. It is also a grant, not something you are automatically entitled to.

Exactly, if your application hasnt been approved dont do the work, then cry about it when its not approved!

is_that_so wrote: »

It was a pilot scheme and demand seemed to have exceeded the funding. Pilots tend to be quite short-lived but ultimately lead to some form of actual schemes. It is also a grant, not something you are automatically entitled to.

Have to agree and highlight this. It was a pilot. Lots of other individual grants like heating control upgrades, attic insulation, solar panels and batteries, external insulation, cavity pumping, internal insulation, BER grant, heat pump grant, etc are all preforming well or at least appear to be. The only system of combining the other grants is you get 100 extra if you do more than three which isn't a massive incentive. This overall deep retrofit grant was a trial run as an alternative.

I looked into the deep retrofit but it didn't suit me and I've saved a lot of money instead using the external insulation grant and intend in the future to use the heat pump grant.

You have to follow the rules if you want the money. You can't forge ahead until you're approved with any of the grants.

gmisk wrote: »

Well then its a case of lesson learned hopefully.
This scheme was also a pilot so could really be wound up at any time.

The only money back I got when doing up my house was under that home renovation incentive scheme, I made sure each person doing the work was part of it and had it done well before the scheme was due to come to a close.

Yeah he was nervous from the start but was also nervous of the deadline. He was going through the agent who assured him it wasn’t a problem but as time went on and nothing was coming back he contacted the seai a few weeks back and they actually told him that the deadline would be extended anyway which sounds now like it was a fib. Obviously I don’t have all the details just what he was saying during tea breaks etc but it sounded real shoddy to me from the start. Applications had to go in in batches of 7 and if one pulled out everyone would be affected.

gmisk wrote: »

It sounds like a disaster no doubt, the 7 at a time thing sounds utterly bizarre!

Again not positive but I think the 7 brought it up to a certain amount of money that the seai would deal with. So for example 7 looking for 35,000 to 40,000 brings it to somewhere in the region of 250,000 which is where they wanted to deal with. Honestly though I’m not sure as he wasn’t too clear but that’s what I took from it.

Dudda wrote: »

https://www.seai.ie/grants/home-energy-grants/insulation-grants/

For any grant you have to get it done by a contractor who's on an approved list.
What I find is as you can only chose from certain contractors they increase their quote.

I'd expect the people who were getting the deep retrofit grant and were quoted say €100,000 from someone on the list would probably have got a quote for €70-80k from another builder not going the grant process. With me able to do a lot of work myself I could add further savings bringing it back to close to the final cost after the grant. This is why I didn't go the deep retrofit route and instead chose individual grants where I had more control of the overall project.
I don't think it's a bad thing this trial has ended as serious premiums are added by the approved contractors. It was a trial grant which lessons can be learnt from which was exactly what was intended from a trial grant.

Don’t think the deep retrofit grant needed to be by an approved contractor, I think there were just certain things that needed to be fulfilled and obviously could be proven after. Air tightness etc

Dudda wrote: »

https://www.seai.ie/grants/home-energy-grants/insulation-grants/

For any grant you have to get it done by a contractor who's on an approved list.
What I find is as you can only chose from certain contractors they increase their quote.

I'd expect the people who were getting the deep retrofit grant and were quoted say €100,000 from someone on the list would probably have got a quote for €70-80k from another builder not going the grant process. With me able to do a lot of work myself I could add further savings bringing it back to close to the final cost after the grant. This is why I didn't go the deep retrofit route and instead chose individual grants where I had more control of the overall project.
I don't think it's a bad thing this trial has ended as serious premiums are added by the approved contractors. It was a trial grant which lessons can be learnt from which was exactly what was intended from a trial grant.

Thanks for that will give a shout to the companies on below list and see what they say
https://www.seai.ie/grants/home-energy-grants/how-to-apply/energy-partners/

unkel wrote: »

That's just a mantra. Insulating your attic costs a few hundred and will pay for itself within a few years. A 100k retrofit will never pay for itself. .

The average grant in 2018 was under 35k. The total cost is closer to 70k. Much of the cost is returned to the exchequer in income tax, VAT and a reduction on purchasing carbon credits over the lifetime of a building.

The deep retrofit included upgrading windows, doors, insulation and minimising draught on homes that have very poor energy ratings. It's a fair point that you can avail of grants for solar but that's not going to keep your home warm.

What you've been saying on this thread is insulate your attic and invest in offshore wind and solar. Let's keep generating heat that goes out the windows, doors, roof and out through the walls.

The options are not mutually exclusive. The government can support offshore wind and help home owners reduce the energy waste heating homes.

Bang for buck varies across different measures. Even the BER report ranks cost and effectiveness of different measures. At the very least, every attic should be insulated and every hot water cylinder too. Take the most efficient steps for everyone before doing fancy things for a few.

Macha wrote: »

I don't think you're understanding the scale if the challenge. We have to be net zero, probably even before 2050. Global emissions have to halve by 2030, which means ours have to come down faster.

The risks of climate damage so far outweigh mitigation costs, this can ONLY be seen as an investment challenge. There is plenty of private money out there in pension funds etc. Plenty. The IIGCC represents European institutional investors and they have €23 TRILLION in assets and are begging governments to put in place the policies that allow them to shift capital to climate solutions.

The government have done a pretty great job destroying the credibility of our deep retrofit scheme over the past week.

On the investment front - if I was a large pension fund, I'd much rather invest in a fund like this:
http://www.valu-trac.com/administration-services/clients/gravis/clean-energy/
Than extend some bond to (a group of) private homeowners to loan to them to upgrade their houses. Easier to control...

Macha wrote: »

I don't think you're understanding the scale if the challenge. We have to be net zero, probably even before 2050. Global emissions have to halve by 2030, which means ours have to come down faster.

Oh I do. All I'm saying is that it's a terrible idea to spend 100k per house on a million houses to retrofit them. That would cost 100 billion. Be it paid from tax money or from private money matters not. And then we will still use most of the fossil fuel that we use today (but a lot less on heating houses)

For far less money we could produce more electricity than the whole country needs from large off shore wind farms

A single 10MW off shore wind turbine costs about 20 million installed and connected. It serves 6000 households. Ireland has about 1.2 million households, so we would need 200 of these turbines, which would only cost about 4 billion. So lets say we will want to generate 250% of our household electricity needs to start with installed within the next 10 years, so we allow for more use of eletricity as we start to de-carbonise and it will give us plenty of interconnector trade for solar / nuclear / hydro. 250% of our needs costs just 10 billion


Of course it's not only about households, as we need electricity for industry, public buildings etc as well, but above is just to compare the results of spending money on retrofitting or installing wind farms

Another way to present the figures for wind. Very large off shore wind turbines have a capacity factor of about 50% (they produce about half of their rating on average over their life span). That means a single 10MW turbine produces 5MW * 24 * 365 = 44GWh per year

Irelands total electricity use at the moment is 26TWh

In order words the above 500 wind turbines costing about 10 billion that I mention in my previous post generate 500 * 44GWh = 22TWh, would almost cover Irelands total electricity use.

Ireland also uses 5 billion m3 of natural gas. One m3 is about 9kWh of energy, so there's an additional 45TWh needed to cover

Another 1000 wind turbines

And Ireland of course uses oil for heating too and petrol and diesel. And then there is aviation...

So yes we are talking several thousand wind generators before Ireland is 100% renewable energy (not electricity). So this will cost in the order of 50-100 billion in total. A lot of money, but for sure doable over the next few decades. Apple's 13 billion will help.

Unkel aren't you double counting here? How much of that natural gas is for electricity generation? I would say a bit more than half. 51% of electricity generation and 55% efficiency.

garo wrote: »

Unkel aren't you double counting here? How much of that natural gas is for electricity generation?

Yes indeed I am. And also I did not take into account current renewable electricity which stands at just under 30% already. And I did not even begin to calculate how much it would cost to electrify all current use of oil, petrol, diesel and aviation fuel. My sums were more for:

1. showing that it is far more efficient to spend money on investing in new off shore wind turbines than in deep retrofitting older houses

2. getting some sort of handle on the total cost of installing wind turbines to cover all our energy needs. Show that this is going to be very expensive, but doable over a decade or two

EVs will sort themselves out very quickly. They will be cheaper to own than ICE cars even without grants in a few years time and it will only be possibly for car makers to sell full EVs from 2030. Agreed with public transport though.

Not sure if it should be priority to convert boilers to heatpumps. You can't just do that if the house is not well insulated as the heatpump won't be powerful enough. Let's concentrate on building the wind turbines and then keep steadily increasing duty on carbon fuels, so it will make more economic sense to heat your house electrically. Even if that meant using a few €10 2kW fan heaters

I contacted one of the suppliers on the SEAI site about zoned heating - heating control, it seems to be a subscription service....are they all like that?