Why it doesn’t “pay” to go green.

When should the average 21st Century Wife invest in energy-saving technology?

It’s a timely question, what with last month’s Energy Saving Week (did anyone notice that?) and the enormous THUD made by the Stern Report as it hit the news (700 pages! I hope that gets distributed on CD-ROM) . . . . Still, it was nice to have a world-renowned economist calculating the financial cost of global warming. Seeing pound signs attached to the implications of rising temperatures and sea levels was welcome (it put things in a language most of us understand) but also depressing (we really do need to do something about climate change).

By coincidence, the cost of energy efficiency is also a timely question for the Darnbrough family. Having just moved house, we had thought that now would be good time to invest in green energy.

We have the added incentive of having inherited an LPG-based central heating system. If there is a more expensive way of heating your home, I’d be interested to hear of it. It might be schadenfreude, but it would be nice to know that there are people out there whose heating bills will be higher than ours.

We’ve done – or are in the process of doing – most of the obvious things with regard to being eco-friendly:

• we don’t fill our kettle right up every time we boil it
• we try to remember to turn lights off when we leave a room
• we don’t run the tap while we are cleaning our teeth
• we try not to leave any electrical products on standby
• I rush round the house closing curtains at dusk
• we have started buying energy-saving light bulbs.

More importantly, we have had someone round to survey the house with regard to getting cavity wall insulation sorted and improving our loft insulation . . .

With all those bases covered, the next obvious step for the eco-friendly 21st Century Wife has to be renewable energy. “We could get our hot water for free,” I told Mr Darnbrough; who is sympathetic to the idea but sceptical about the economics. He did, however, agree to talk to a representative of an “approved” solar thermal energy company. I sent off the coupon which had appeared with the post soon after we’d moved in and settled back to wait for a few months. In a disconcertingly short space of time, they contacted us and the visit was arranged.

Our salesman arrived just before 8pm. By the time he left at 10.30pm, we knew a lot more about solar thermal energy and what it could and could not do for us. Sadly for him, we were also convinced that however attractive and eco-friendly solar thermal energy undoubtedly is, we couldn’t justify spending eight thousand pounds – including a special offer 20% discount for becoming a customer reference installation – on something that won’t pay for itself for at least eight years.

It’s a tricky problem. Mr Darnbrough and I would like to be more environmentally friendly but we don’t have that kind of money to throw around. You’d have to be pretty certain that you were going to live in a house for a good 10 years to justify that kind of investment: especially when there are carpets and floors to be replaced, artex to be removed, en suite bathrooms to be installed and double glazing to upgrade (eventually).

And then of course, there’s the worry that with all the interest in alternative energy, the technology is bound to improve and the costs are only going to come down. You have to ask yourself, why invest thousands now in a solution that will probably be outdated in a year or two? It’s all very well being a pioneer, but they do tend to be the people who get the arrows in their backs.

Cavity wall insulation on the other hand, will cost us around £300. It may not be pretty, and it’s probably made from some non-environmentally friendly oil-based product, but it will cut our energy bills now and leave us with the cash to do some of the other things that we have planned.

Unlike Mr Stern’s report, which made what was generally agreed to be a convincing case for spending now to save billions later, Mr Darnbrough was even sceptical about the figures provided by our salesman for average annual heating costs. Obviously, we don’t yet know how much it will cost to heat this house, but compared with our heating bills for the last one, the average national cost for heating and hot water which he quoted to us, seemed rather high. I choose to interpret this as implying that we must already be fairly economical in our energy usage.

Mr Darnbrough’s back of envelope calculations also indicated that the payback period for us to invest in solar thermal would be around ten years – we don’t even know if we will still be in the house in ten years time! Businesses expect to write down the costs of capital investment in three or four years – unless they are in the atomic energy sector or heavy industry, why should a householder be any different?

It’s a sobering thought that even though we would like to “go green”, we can’t make the numbers stack up. It’s all very well for the green web sites to tell you that replacing your old refrigerator with an energy efficient one will save you £45 a year off your annual energy bill, but you’ll have to pay out several hundred pounds upfront first. Unless you are about to change your ‘fridge anyway, most people simply can’t justify that.

It is true that once you come up to that point where you need to replace your fridge (or your central heating boiler), you might be prepared to pay a small premium for the warm, fuzzy feeling that being “eco-friendly” will undoubtedly give you. But how many people will part with eight grand to get that glow? The reference customer we spoke to from our solar thermal company, said that he thought his system might pay for itself in 14 years. That’s a long time to wait before you can boast about your minimal hot water bills at dinner parties . . .

Its true that I lie awake at night sometimes and worry about the future of the planet and the kind of world we are making for our children but when it comes to balancing the medium term benefits of spending eight thousand pounds on solar thermal hot water heating versus the immediate benefits of widening the driveway and getting rid of the textured wallpaper, I’m afraid I know where our money will go.

So, unless the Government starts making it a lot more attractive to invest in environmentally friendly devices – either with better incentives or with financial penalties – it is going to be hard to make significant progress on reducing the Darnbrough’s carbon footprint.

Getting back to solar thermal energy: I did briefly try the “security of supply” argument on Mr Darnbrough to see if that had any impact. He gave me one of those incredulous looks that men reserve for women who’ve just announced that they don’t have enough pairs of shoes, or anything to wear . . . (which I don’t) and said that if terrorists started disrupting the UK’s energy supplies to that extent, he thought that we’d have more pressing things to worry about.

So I’ve started reading up about biofuels (the Chilterns is one of the most densely wooded areas in the country) and making yet more plans for the veg patch. At least we’ll have something to eat, even if we won’t have any hot water . . .

Relevant websites:
http://www.est.org.uk/
http://www.tvec.org.uk/