With energy secretary Amber Rudd signalling her intention to slash solar subsidies, perhaps this isn’t the best time to fit panels to my roof. But I’ve just signed up, keen to generate clean power as well as attracted by the solar PV installation offered through Solar Together, a collective purchasing scheme run by local councils in Norfolk.
Generous government subsidies have sparked a huge uptake in domestic solar: Britain has added more solar capacity than any other European country since the turn of the century. For the government to halt this success story looks silly, but the biggest problem with all renewable subsidies is that they tend to feather wealthy nests.
Last year I remortgaged to spend £25,000 on a biomass heating system. This sounds like middle-class self-indulgence, but ruthless profit-seekers would do it too. I can’t access mains gas, and heating my house with a wood pellet-burning boiler is cheaper than oil. Plus, under the government’s – presumably soon-to-be-scrapped – Renewable Heat Incentive, I will be paid an astonishing £28,000 over seven years for using biomass.
When government money is handed to the relatively affluent like me (several biomass installers told me their typical clients were stately home owners whose new boilers will earn them £100,000 or more from the taxpayer), then a scaling back of domestic renewable subsidies may not be a bad thing – if it makes renewable energy available to the less affluent.
Why not link council tax to a home’s energy consumption, just as vehicle excise duty makes owners of gas-guzzling cars pay more? Then wealthy home owners still have an incentive (a stick, rather than a carrot) for installing renewables. Even better, these tax receipts could fund “Passivhaus” design standards (an internationally recognised model which should reduce heating bills to less than £100 a year) for social housing.
Sadly, George Osborne this month abandoned the requirement of new homes to be carbon neutral by 2016, which would have bequeathed radically lower bills to first-time buyers and social housing renters rather than just those rich enough to buy renewable technologies. The Green party has called on local councils to ignore him and make Passivhaus standards a condition when selling council land to developers, thus connecting renewable energy and social justice. They’re right.
The air ambulance chasers
Rural Norfolk, some joke, is where people still point and holler “metal bird” when a helicopter flies over. The joke is on me (Norfolk born and bred) for assuming this was why my fellow villagers started taking photos of a visiting air ambulance the other day. What sort of sicko brandishes their camera phones when someone is being rushed to hospital?
It turns out that the cameras were actually aimed at the pilot, a nice young man called William Mountbatten-Windsor who recently moved to our county. So East Anglians have become (air) ambulance-chasers. But the Mail on Sunday was not happy. It fretted that a £2.99 app could track the air ambulance’s progress. That would be “intelligence gold” for terrorists – when it should be an indispensable tool for the paparazzi.
Time for some drone logic
They will do anything for a good picture, but so will we, for aerial camera enthusiasts flying drones have come within 20ft of aircraft over British airports six times in a year. One buzzed over the naturist beach of Studland. Rather than David Cameron’s promised “big conversation” on seagulls, shouldn’t we discuss how better to regulate these bothersome flying machines?