Energy Company Obligation

The ECO (Energy Company Obligation)

The ECO for the big six energy suppliers is also being launched in early 2013. It is in three parts:

Affordable Warmth Obligation

To provide heating and insulation improvements for low-income and vulnerable households (but social housing tenants are not eligible for affordable warmth).

There are complex eligibility criteria for this means-tested scheme. Call the Energy Saving Advice Service on 0300 123 1234 to check whether you might be eligible, and to apply if you are.

Carbon Saving Obligation

To provide funding to insulate solid-walled properties (internal and external wall insulation) and those with ‘hard-to-treat’ cavity walls.

This is not means-tested but can be used in conjunction with the Green Deal. The aim is to provide enough support to make these relatively expensive measures cost-effective.

Carbon Saving Communities Obligation

To provide insulation measures to people living in the bottom 15% of the UK's most deprived areas. It is expected that this element of ECO will particularly benefit the social housing sector.

Through ECO, the government aims to help 230,000 low-income households or those in low-income areas. Of the expected investment by suppliers of £1.3bn per year, there will be a 75:25 split between the carbon and affordable warmth obligations.

Free New Energy Efficient Boilers

The ECO fund,uses subsidies to encourage homeowners and tenants alike to install energy efficient measures.

Available to ALL low income and vulnerable homeowners and tenants.
If your boiler is more than 8 years old
Own your own home and earn less than 16k pa
Tenant earning less than 16k pa
Pension tax credit
Child tax credit
Working tax credit


If the answer is yes to any of the above, then you are eligible to the government grant.


Find out more at www.ofgem.gov.uk

ECO Energy Companies Obligation

The Energy Companies Obligation (ECO) is a government energy efficiency scheme for Great Britain which has replaced the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) and the Community Energy Saving Programme (CESP) programmes, both of which came to a close at the end of 2012. It operates alongside the Green Deal and places obligations on larger domestic energy suppliers to domestic householders, with a focus on vulnerable consumer groups and hard-to-treat homes.

MPs want to turn your lights off. A shame no one told you

Within six years you could be expected to reduce your electricity consumption by a quarter

What MPs were being asked to endorse was that, within just six years, we should all be forced by law to make a mind-boggling cut in how much electricity we are allowed to use.

The reason why no one seemed to grasp this was that the amendment was so opaquely dressed up that only an MP with some knowledge of the basics of electricity might have twigged the enormity of what was being proposed. By 2020, it said, Britain must reduce its electricity use by “103 terawatt hours”, rising by 2030 to “154 terawatt hours”. This could have been understood only by someone aware that we currently use each year some 378 “terawatt hours”. So what was being proposed was that this must be cut down in six years by 27 per cent – more than a quarter – rising 10 years later to a cut of more than 40 per cent, or two fifths.

In the course of his mind-numbing speech, Greg Barker, the minister proposing this, carefully avoided any explanation of what it was all about. Not one MP picked him up on it. At the end of a vacuous debate, during much of which the House was virtually empty, MPs dutifully poured in from all over Westminster to nod the Bill through by 396 votes to eight.

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