Month: November 2020

What’s in store for the future Energy Company Obligation?

What’s in store for the future Energy Company Obligation?

The Sustainable Energy Association (SEA) has published it’s report: Recommendations for a future Energy Company Obligation.

We wish to applaud the SEA on addressing key issues and engaging with industry wide stakeholders in producing a report aimed at improving ECO and tackling fuel poverty in the next decade.

We are particularly keen to raise the profile of the point addressed on page 13 of the SEA report:

“The current pressure on delivery through HHCRO has increased the costs in finding eligible households and exposed flaws in the obligation itself. For example, the current legislation only refers to ‘space’ heating, excluding any measures that reduce carbon in other ways, such as heating of water”

This is an important point, as the drive to decarbonise our homes both new build and existing, hard to heat and treat homes will increasingly necessitate the use of grid electricity.  This will inevitably lead to an increase in the cost, to the resident, for showering. Our space heating will require less energy, this will not however, result in a reduced usage of hot water for showering, in fact the converse could be true.

Therefore, there is a need to address this as we are quite literally now throwing energy down the drain.  If we do not address energy use for domestic hot water in ECO4, it could be conceivable that the fuel poor will reduce their use of hot water and this will have unforeseen consequences in terms of health and wellbeing. Showersave is an off-the shelf tried and tested, system installed in over 70,000 European homes which can reduce energy thrown away while showering by >50%.

Read the full report here >>