Low Carbon Building Programme

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Low Carbon Building Programme (LCBP) is a Government programme in the United Kingdom. It offers grants towards the cost of installing domestic microgeneration technologies and larger scale distributed generation installations for public buildings and businesses, provided energy conservation standards are also met. The programme commenced on April 1, 2006, is expected to last for 6 years, and is managed by the Energy Saving Trust.

Grants are normally in to 10 to 50% range, according to the applicant and the technology. Funding for domestic schemes, restricted to £500,000 per month and allocated on a first-come-first served basis, is well below demand. In January 2007 funds were exhausted within 12 days [1], and in March 2007 within 75 minutes [2].

There are to be no domestic grant allocations in April 2007 as the scheme is being restructured [3]. Funding in the new financial year is also to be increased, as detailed below.

1 Government funding
2 Previous schemes
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Government funding

Funding for the LCBP was originally set at £30 million for the first three years [4]. £6.5m of this is allocated for domestic installations, £4m for community installations and £18m for others [5], while £1.5m was reallocated to plug the financial gap that appeared between the earlier programmes ending and the start of the Low Carbon Building Programme.

A further £50 million was announced in the April 2006 budget, although as of September 2006 details of this are unclear. It may have been made in response to criticism of the initial funding levels which, at £9.5m per year, was less than the £11.25m per year allocated to the earlier schemes (taking into account the 1.5m used to plug the gap) [6] [7].

The schemes replace by the Low Carbon Building Programme were also seen as being under funded, with only £45m having been invested in them. The Solar PV programme was originally intended to ‘establish the UK as a credible player.... alongside Germany and Japan’, however in 2004 the UK installed 2.5MW of photovoltaic electricity capacity, compared to over 300MW in Germany [8].

On March 21, 2007, it was announced in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's Budget Statement that the funding of grants for homes would be increased again to £18 million pounds in the new financial year [9] for a new, restructured, scheme [10].

[edit] Previous schemes

The Low Carbon Building Programme replaced two earlier schemes, the 'Major Photovoltaics Demonstration programme', which assisted with photovoltaic installations, and the 'Clear Skies' programme, which aided other microgeneration installations.

The Government were criticised by the photovoltaic industry for ending the PV programme 6 years early [11], and also for allowing a funding gap to develop between the old and new programmes, which caused significant disruption to the renewables industry [12] [13].