Heating and cooling

Sunday 14 December 2008

At a European level, heat has been included as an issue worthy of attention within proposed new renewable energy targets.

In the UK, heat has already been discussed in the government's strategies on combined heat and power, microgeneration and biomass. Policies like the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the Climate Change Levy also act to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from heating activities.

Other initiatives like the Energy Efficiency Commitment and its successor programme the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) as well as grant schemes like the Low Carbon Building Programme, Warm Front and Decent Homes - and institutions like the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust - have also touched on heat in their general promotion of energy efficiency.

Heat will also be an important factor in forthcoming targets for new homes to be zero carbon from 2016 and commercial buildings from 2019.

On present course, the government's Office of Climate Change predicts that renewable heat will account for 40TWh of energy by 2020 - 6% of the projected heat demand.

Thanks in part to Europe's inclusion of heat within its proposed Renewable Energy Directive, we are now seeing the first concerted efforts in the UK to single out heat for more specific action.

In particular, this is expected to include the introduction of a Renewable Heat Incentive in April 2011, which looks set to take the form of a new levy on fossil fuels being used for heating purposes, to fund a feed-in tariff subsidy for renewable fuels used for heating.