Housing groups 'being blinded by the science of green energy'

Councils and landlords are being put under pressure to spend large sums of money on technology to cut energy bills, despite having little understanding of what they are buying, a study has found.

The housing authorities are increasingly investing in equipment such as solar panels and ground source heat pumps, without knowing which are the most efficient.

The two-year study by academics at Sheffield Hallam University found councils were treating green energy as a cure for fuel poverty.

The report called on authorities to monitor the performance and maintenance costs of the equipment to determine how effectively it can reduce bills, rather than simply installing it and forgetting about it.

The most recent available government figures suggest that the number of households living in fuel poverty - where at least 10 per cent of the collective income is spent heating the home - had risen to 5.5million, or about one in five, in 2009.

Fin O'Flaherty, one of the authors of the research, said: "Many local authorities and housing associations have begun installing renewable energy technologies on their properties in a bid to address this problem [fuel poverty].

"While we applaud them for this and appreciate their motivations, our report has found that there is often a limited understanding of how the technologies perform in use or what level of savings are being delivered to residents. Under-performing and malfunctioning renewable energy technologies will result in a reduction in income for social housing providers and undermine the economics of schemes."

The report, funded by the Eaga Charitable Trust, found that solar heated water systems mean boilers do less work.

However, they make only minimal savings and vary greatly in efficiency. It estimated that recouping the cost of the technology - by which the sun's heat is used to warm the water supply - would take the average household 60 years.

This could be reduced to 16 under the Government's proposed renewable heat incentive scheme.

Solar panels can save households £340 to £420 a year through free energy and payments for feeding extra units into the national grid.

However, it would take 15 to 17 years to pay back the cost of installation even when the feed-in tariff scheme is taken into account, the report said.

The technology can be made more effective by using high-power appliances at certain times of the day, but the performance of each system differs widely, researchers said.

Ground source heat pumps, which use pipes buried in the garden to take heat from the ground could save a property with a coal-fired central heating system about £800 per year. But in some cases residents reported they did not keep the house sufficiently warm.

However, the report said they could become a "viable alternative to gas-fired central heating systems".

From The Daily Telegraph