Last month, the Labour Government announced its Warm Homes Plan, a set of policies that aims to improve the quality of five million homes, impacting millions of families by improving comfort and reducing costs, with grants and loans to install low carbon technology being at the forefront of the plan. What’s in it and what opportunities does that give you?
The Warm Homes Plan outlines £15 billion of investment to combat fuel poverty, to help reduce costs for millions of homes, to invest in heat networks, and to train and upskill the workforce. Maybe most relevant to me and you are the announcements of grants and low cost loans to help support the installation of low carbon technology at home. This includes continuation of the boiler upgrade scheme that gives £7,500 towards the installation of an air source heat pump, but also new low or zero interest loans to upgrade homes by installing solar panels, batteries and insulation.
The government’s ambition is that three million homes have solar panels by 2030. But solar panels generate electricity, they don’t heat homes. Why is this target a key part of a warm homes plan?
Well it seems that government are hoping to start the ball rolling on a transformation of how we use energy in our homes.
First, more homes adopting solar panels means that the costs we have to power our lives drops substantially, an average system could save £600-£800 per year on electricity costs, if installed with batteries, this figure could increase further. During day light, particularly when the sun is shining, households would have free electricity to use for whatever they want.
On sunny days, a normal solar installation would generate more than a normal home could use, which comes to the second step of the government’s hopes, that rather that selling electricity back to the grid, households look to other ways to use that electricity. This could mean buying an EV and charging at home (for those that have space to park) or it could mean electrifying heating, installing a hot water tank that can capture some energy generated on the roof with an immersion heater, or installing a heat pump that could use some generated electricity to heat a home.
The warm homes plan could be renamed the electrification plan, hoping to encourage households and communities to move away from fossil fuels for heating homes, by making electricity cheaper, by generating electricity where it is needed, by storing electricity with batteries, and using electricity to power heat pumps.
Electricity today is the clean way of heating and powering our lives, and, as more wind turbines and solar panels are installed, will get cleaner and cleaner.
For those of us who want to see action on climate change, who campaign for a transition away from fossil fuels, who want to build a low carbon future of warm homes powered and heated by low cost, low emissions energy, the warm homes plan could be a moment to celebrate.
It is a moment where Net Zero moves away from something intangible, or something that is happening somewhere else, or something that risks change to our status quo, to something that could make our lives better. It is a moment when Net Zero becomes reality for millions of people. When Net Zero comes home in each of our communities.
So what do you think? Would you consider installing solar panels when a cheap loan becomes available?
If you think I might be able to help you think though any of this… please do say hello through my website – sb-energy.co.uk or if you wanted to dig into how solar panels could help you in 2026… have a look over on Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRsnMAdYrf4.
Tom Bray
South West Durham News covering news across County Durham.
why would people go to heat pumps thats costs 3 x the cost of a combi boiler or even more.. even the government are using tax payers money to entice people with a £7500 grant towards buying one surely that alone tells you no one wants them because electric is too high to run them.. al the billions we have wasted in this net zero rubbish and yet we still havent seen any improvement in the infrastucture in the uk and still rely on buying from norway at high prices,,, those billions would have been cheaper to just give every household free solar panels and a free heat pump if there as good as they want us to believe and it still would have worked out cheaper than what this country has spent so far on nothing