Here at Woodfuel Pathfinder Towers we have been trying to decipher the recent slew of information on the Renewable Heat Incentive and related matters.

Just as we got our collective heads around the review of the Clean Air Act, new Ofgem guidance on heat metering and scheme administration and announcement of DECC’s budget management mechanism yet another consultation on the RHI has been issued.

The “Renewable Heat Incentive: Providing certainty,improving performance” sets out a series of proposals for the non-domestic RHI (Phase I) relating to longer-term budget management and scheme improvements, including biomass sustainability, air quality and changes to the metering requirements.

Needless to say the document is long and technical so we have attempted to extract the salient points from the executive summary.

The proposals are important and anyone considering investing should set aside a some to read the document and familiarise themselves with the proposed changes, particularly as we may have missed something.

Before we get going we thought we would highlight the following tables that show the latest position on RHI uptake and payments (England only, see Ofgem web site for full report). Executive summary – key points: Other improvements:

With regard to boiler sizing Biomass DECC has anecdotal evidence that there may be installations of biomass boilers which are inappropriate for the heat demand they are intended to serve but have been sized in order to claim the tier 1 tariff only. DECC considers this to be poor practice and is likely to have a detrimental long-term financial impact on the owner of the installation. DECC intends to introduce an eligibility requirement to prevent such installations from benefitting from the RHI.

For all the proposed changes, apart from those on sustainability, within this consultation grandfathering will apply; only applications which are accredited after these changes come into force will be affected. All those installations accredited currently or before these changes, will have to meet current eligibility requirements.
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