Although the costs of renewable technologies are coming down as they become more widespread, most of the technologies mentioned in this section are still fairly expensive. There are some avenues of funding that might make the installation of any of the renewable technologies less of a burden.
Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) is a UK Government scheme to encourage uptake of renewable heat technologies amongst householders, communities and businesses through the provision of financial incentives.
The domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) will pay people for the green heat they generate for their homes, offering homeowners payments to offset the cost of installing low carbon systems in their properties. The scheme is open to home owners, social and private landlords, and people who build their own homes. The guaranteed payments are made quarterly over seven years and the scheme is designed to bridge the gap between the cost of fossil fuel heat sources and renewable heat alternatives.Technologies in the scheme include biomass heating systems, ground or water source heat pumps, air to water heat pumps, and solar thermal panels.
The Non-Domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) provides financial incentives to increase the uptake of renewable heat. For the non-domestic sector broadly speaking it provides a subsidy, payable for 20 years.
The scheme is open to the non-domestic sector including industrial, commercial, public sector and not-for-profit organisations with eligible installations, and to producers of biomethane. In the context of the scheme, a non-domestic installation is a renewable heat unit that supplies large-scale industrial heating to small community heating projects. This includes for example small businesses, hospitals and schools as well as district heating schemes such as where one boiler serves multiple homes.
Feed In Tariffs (FIT) scheme was introduced on 1 April 2010. It is intended to encourage deployment of additional small-scale (less than 5MW) low-carbon electricity generation, particularly by organisations, businesses, communities and individuals that have not traditionally engaged in the electricity market. This will allow many people to invest in small-scale low-carbon electricity, in return for a guaranteed payment from an electricity supplier of their choice for the electricity they generate and use as well as a guaranteed payment for unused surplus electricity they export back to the grid.