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Opinion: Insulation not fossil fuel subsidies

by Ian Shires on 30 January, 2015

Earlier this week parliament overwhelmingly rejected an amendment to the Infrastructure Bill calling for a moratorium on fracking.

The challenge that the UK faces is that we are particularly dependent on natural gas. The vast majority of us have gas boilers and heating makes up much of the gas used in the UK. Weaning ourselves off gas boilers isn’t easy. There are renewable alternatives such as heat pumps but these only work in very well insulated homes. And there’s the rub. Around 70% of homes in the UK are still not well insulated, and a good portion of those have solid walls which are difficult and expensive to insulate.

Even assuming a really ambitious programme of bringing 1 to 2 million homes a year to a high standard of insulation, and fitting them with heat pumps, we will still be dependent on gas until around 2030. On that basis, I suspect it does make sense to investigate fracking, with a robust regulatory framework, as the alternative is importing large quantities of gas.

But the problem is we are nowhere near retrofitting 1 to 2 million homes a year. The government have tried to address this by introducing a number of schemes including the Green Deal, the Green Deal Home Improvement Fund and the Energy Company Obligation (ECO). But in 2014 less than 100,000 homes had solid wall insulation fitted through these schemes – around 1% of the total number of homes with solid walls. And just 20,000 heat pumps were installed last year.

At the current rates of insulation and installation of renewable heating technologies, we will be using gas long beyond 2030 and blowing our carbon budget in the process.

The government has allocated £540 million to home energy efficiency schemes for 2014-17. This is welcome funding, and is in large part due to Lib Dem influence. But this compares to £3 billion in tax breaks given to companies for fossil fuel exploration in the North Sea over the last five years (according to a recent report from independent think tank Overseas Development Institute). If we are serious about hitting our climate change targets, we should stop the fossil fuel subsidies and plough this into energy efficiency and renewable heating technologies.

* Cara Jenkinson is Chair of Haringey Liberal Democrats, editor of the Liberal Democrat Education Association website and PPC for Enfield North

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