Renewables grants "now too difficult"

I reported some time ago that the UK's "Low Carbon Buildings Programme" grant programme for domestic renewables was to be relaunched with tighter restrictions to stop the flood of applications on the first of each month. Well, guess what, according to the Guardian, the flood of applications has dwindled to a trickle as home owners have found the conditions too onerous.

There are now mounting calls to introduce a so called 'feed in' tariff for local generation - this would give householders a big incentive to export electricity to the grid. This has been very popular in Germany, but of course it only applies to electricity - users of solar hot water generators and biomass heating would not benefit.

Whatever is done, the LCBP programme has not done itself any favours and may well have put genuinely concerned citizens off the whole idea of generating their own energy.