The Low Carbon Buildings Programme – Phase 2, which is aimed at getting low carbon technologies integrated into public sector owned buildings such as local authorities, schools and housing associations, has just been revamped with an extra £35 million available for the next two years.

The grants will still be available for solar PV, solar thermal, heat pumps, wind, biomass and micro-hydro technologies.

Key improvements include a proliferation of intstallers and products that qualify for the grant. This is a welcome addition as the previous scheme (before July 1st 2009) severly restricted the options for installation to, in some cases, one product from only one supplier. This increase should hopefully result in more healthy competition between suppliers.

The upper limit for heat technologies has now been increased from 45kW to 300kW meaning that larger buildings can now benefit. This is a sensible move as many of the public bodies looking for the funding, such as hospitals, tend to occupy buildings with heat demands that are greatly in excess of the previous 45kW peak demand limit.

Once again, solar PV has received a cap on its grant allocation which seems odd after the debacle experienced earlier this year when the funding stream dried up. Admittedly, this is now £14m out of the £35m available, however, £5m of the £14m has already been allocated to existing applications that were made pre-July 2009. If the demand was exceeding the supply of grant money before then it seems strange to place a cap on the grants again. Indeed, the increase to 300kW seems to be a heavy promotion of biomass heating, which has several issues, including local air pollution concerns, fuel deliver problems and the unknown true CO2 emissions associated with transporting of the fuel supply (typically from Scandinavian sources).

It remains to be seen if the grant allocation will be sufficient for the next two years, particularly at a time when building integrated renewables are expected to be growing exponentially. The fear is that, once again, the government is promoting one agenda and not delivering the necessary tools to implement it.

Roll on the feed-in tariffs!