The clean green gas of home – UK government consults on (initial) successors to RHI
3rd June 2020 | Commercial Energy
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has unveiled a consulting proposal for a Green Gas Support Scheme, providing support for injecting biomethane into the grid, and a Clean Heat Grant Scheme, offering grants of up to £4,000 to encourage uptake of heat pumps, and in some cases biomass heating. Entitled “Future support for low carbon heat”, the consultation is one of three linked documents published together on 28 April 2020 which between them set out how BEIS proposes to replace the Renewable Heat Incentive (theRHI) in the short term. The consultation is scheduled to close on 7 July.
RHI
The UK is the first major economy in the world to set a legally binding target to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Currently, heating the UK’s homes, businesses and industry, dominated by the burning of fossil fuel, is responsible for approximately one third of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In its report to government that led to the adoption of the net zero target in 2019, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) highlighted the scale of the challenge that the UK faces in decarbonising heat: currently, the share of heat demand met by low carbon heating needs to increase from around 4.5% today to around 90% in 2050.
Successive UK governments have adopted a number of measures designed to enhance the energy efficiency of buildings (thereby reducing heat demand) and to encourage the installation of more efficient and lower carbon heating equipment. Heat policy is necessarily a complex jigsaw, with important aspects ranging from planning, agricultural and waste policy to industrial strategy, but the RHI has been at the forefront of government heat policy now for some 10 years. It aims to encourage the production of biomethane (enabling the supply of gas through the gas grid to become “greener”) and the installation of low carbon heating equipment such as heat pumps and biomass boilers.
More information available on the website below
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=fa830db9-3580-4ca6-8dca-0837388d82dd