Cheap Boilers

The Magic Boiler Scheme run by PTS Plumbing was a very successfull promotion and was discontinued over a year ago now.The good news is that it has been replaced and is called Energy Smart and can be found at www.energy-smart.org.uk.

Mackie's challenge on renewable fund

Farmer, ice cream maker and potato crisp manufacturer Maitland Mackie yesterday challenged to the Scottish Government to come up with the cash to enable rural communities to benefit from the current surge of interest in renewable energy.
A year ago, Mackie suggested a rolling fund so that communities rather than multinational energy companies could become involved in bringing forward their own projects and benefiting from the income generated.
His advice on how the whole rural community could benefit came from his own experience where renewable energy in the form of three wind turbines has transformed the family business.

These are not only fuelling the business but also feeding large quantities of electricity into the National Grid. He reckons the family firm will get a double digit return on their investment. Having seen what can be achieved, he is keen to promote the idea of local communities "getting in on the action", describing the current subsidy system, the Feed In Tariff, as promoting the wrong scale of power generation.

"Feed In Tariffs, where electricity suppliers get paid for putting power into the grid, incentivise the innocent to invest in very inefficient small-scale power generation. As a vehicle to deliver renewable energy, they encourage dreadfully inefficient investment and they deliver an insignificant amount of energy."

For farmers and landowners approached by major energy companies, he said, it was too easy for them to "sell the pass" to the big operators leaving them to develop big projects in return for a rent.

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Renewable energy seminar held for Cornish landowners

“We have seen a number of farmers and other landowners come to us to appraise offers made to them by developers. So the time was right to organise an event that would not only advise on what terms the landowners maybe should and should not be signing up to, based on what we and other professionals had collectively experienced, but also to give a heads up on other related issues, such as tax planning.

“We were delighted that other professionals involved in the sector were likeminded about the need for such an event and the high attendance is testament to the demand for impartial advice in this area.”

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Spain To Cut Wind, Solar Power Subsidies In December

Spain's government is seeking to press ahead with planned cuts in costly renewable energy subsidies in early December, as part of ongoing austerity moves, a spokesman for the country's Industry Ministry said Wednesday.

The plan, which is designed to make annual savings of around EUR100 million, should be fairly similar to draft cuts discussed with sector representatives in July, spokespeople for the ministry and the wind and solar power sectors said. The cuts are more drastic for solar power generation, they said.

However, the cuts may also effectively shelve projects to build solar power that would have received around EUR1 billion in subsidies in coming years.

Solar power, the most expensive contributor to Spain's electricity generation, currently accounts for around 3% of Spain's power generation and around half of renewable energy subsidies. Wind power accounts for around 13% of generation.

Spain is among the countries most reliant on renewable energy--a policy that has made it less dependent on fossil fuel producers but has resulted in higher energy prices, stoking up inflation and hitting the economy's international competitiveness at a time when domestic demand has weakened.

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