One of the most popular home improvements in recent years has been to install solar panels onto your home. This gives a number of huge advantages, not least the ability to reduce your electricity bills. Energy prices have been soaring over the course of a decade, and are becoming unaffordable for many households. The same families have also been forced to accept pay freezes due to recessions in the same period, magnifying the effect of rising bills.
So, while reducing bills tends to be attractive to home owners, the multi-thousand pound price tag associated with the solar panel installations have been prohibitive and so for many homes, buying them hasn’t been a realistic prospect.
Nearly five years ago the rumblings of a new opportunity began, and feed in tariffs were born. This allowed people to fit solar panels and get paid for the energy they create as a green incentive. Resourceful investors quickly recognised that they could tap into these attractive returns, by paying for solar panels and giving home owners free installations in return for the energy payments. Unfortunately, the government reduced the level of payments from creating this green, renewable energy back in 2011, and with that the free solar panel deals became much harder to find as the return on investment had been greatly diminished.
Now, there is a new scheme to subsidise the cost of going solar. The Green Deal is a government initiative to reduce carbon emissions and make homes more energy efficient. For example, in Yorkshire you can arrange for a company like Green Deal Sheffield to visit your home and carry out an assessment, and they’ll identify all manner of work that can be completed which results in energy savings that more than pay for the cost of completing the work. It may not necessarily mean that you can have solar panels for free, but you might find you can get a loan towards them which effectively pays for itself. What’s more likely is that you’ll get the up front costs of work like insulation or the supply and fitting of a new boiler, and the cost of it paid out of the reduction in your energy bills.
The great thing about the Green Deal is it’s handled (on the whole) for you by tradesmen who are already experts in the field. For example, you might find that the Sheffield Green Deal experts we referred to earlier work with installers of solar panels in Wakefield, so they already of a network of specialists ready to complete the job to the same high standard and with the same expertise that you would get if you paid for the improvements yourself out of your own pocket.
UPDATE: 2015 has seen the death of many incentives relating to reducing energy use and creating green power in the home. The Green Deal has been scrapped and in early 2016, the feed in tariffs paid to solar panel owners are going to be drastically reduced for new installations. Undoubtedly something will have to come along to replace them in time, but for now there are less opportunities available in the market than there have been for many years.