OZEV Grant ..stupid or not!?

[Mr Gus]

"Important: As of the 1st April 2022, the OZEV Government Grant will only be available to homeowners who live in flats and people in rental accommodation (flats and single use properties)"

https://www.gov.uk/government/collectio ... oint-grant


Upon reading the above, bearing in mind the oft messed up leasing & landlords giving notice early to maximise increased rent, how does a rental property make sense for a n English govt grant for either a flat or a rental property, ...you may have noticed to vacate sooner than you think, the landlord can advertise a charger, maybe earn more rent for that "property extra" to the public, the majority of which are not likely for some years yet to have an ev.

Is it govt ollocks to not pay out whilst appearing benevolent!?

Renting in built up areas & the likes is more musical chairs than ever with short term leases being very normal.

..on a separate note workplace charger grants remain active, I don't know of any firm myself that has chargers (local nhs dngaf) for staff / a charge n pay scheme in place to assist employees with no home charging access.

[Stinsy]

All these grants have gone to the installers and bypassed the person paying for the work!

When FiTs ended the cost of getting a 4kWp PV system installed dropped from £10k to £4k overnight. Most EV charging point installers charged the same price with and without the grant. They saw it as free money for themselves for filling out the form.

[Mr Gus]

Then we may as well simply have a cash bonus & seek our own tradesmen & have a discounted product.

Doesn't resolve the current state of affairs as per original post though.

[Oldgreybeard]

All these grants have gone to the installers and bypassed the person paying for the work!

When FiTs ended the cost of getting a 4kWp PV system installed dropped from £10k to £4k overnight. Most EV charging point installers charged the same price with and without the grant. They saw it as free money for themselves for filling out the form.

Years ago I had a long conversation with a civil servant that worked in the department responsible for insulation grant funding. He was very clear that the government knew that grant money was just pocketed by installers, but that was OK as the government's intention was just to inject money into the economy. The government view was that grants were a way of avoiding criticism when injecting cash into businesses.

He was pretty cynical about the whole thing, having seen it from the inside, but what he said made sense from the perspective of a government trying to help businesses out. The fact that millions of consumers saw no benefit at all didn't matter to the government, as they were never the reason for coming up with the grants in the first place.

I have no doubt at all other grant schemes are the same, be they for heat pumps, solar systems, car chargers or whatever. They are seen by government as ways to fund businesses, not as a way to reduce prices for consumers.

[Mart]

All these grants have gone to the installers and bypassed the person paying for the work!

When FiTs ended the cost of getting a 4kWp PV system installed dropped from £10k to £4k overnight. Most EV charging point installers charged the same price with and without the grant. They saw it as free money for themselves for filling out the form.

Sorry but I have to disagree with that, the FiT scheme reductions were led by falling install costs, not the other way around. In the case of FiT's (like CfD's) payments are based on output/generation, and paid to the owner, so to be economically viable, you need the cost to be lower.

For FiT's, I got a 3.58kWp system installed in the summer of 2011 for £11.5k.
By Nov/Dec costs had fallen to about £9k, making the FiT scheme too good, so the Gov cut the subsidy in half, from the then 42p, to 21p, in Mch 2012. Before Mch costs were down to £8k.
My second system 2kWp was installed in the summer of 2012 for £4k, as costs by then were about £7k for 4kWp.
Due to the subsidy again being too good (due to falling costs), it was cut in August 2012 to 16p, and the term cut from 25yrs to 20yrs.

From then on the subsidy reductions were linked to the install rate. The more MWp installed each quarter, the more the subsidy was reduced two quarters later. Minimum reduction 3.5%, but quickly scaled through 7%, 14% and 28%.

By 2015 prices were around £4k-£5k for 4kWp, and less than £1k/kWp for installs of 5kWp+, and the subsidy was down to 3p or 4p. This is before the subsidy was ended in 2017.

[Prices I'm giving are after haggling, and represent what folk were reporting on the MSE site (moneySavingExpert) after asking for advice, then reporting back what they'd achieved, and then often, feeding back to the next people asking for info/advice.]

So, the subsidy fell behind falling costs, not the other way around.

Worth looking at the original FiT scheme payment schedule, which planned to reduce the FiT from 43p to 39.6p in 2012/13, but actually 21p, then 16p.

That 16p (and for only 20yrs) is particularly interesting, when you see that the original scheme expected costs to fall far slower, and planned reductions out to 2021, when it would fall to 18.8p, but falling PV costs meant it hit 16p a decade earlier.

Feed-in Tariff Table 1 August 2011

I'm often critical of Gov subsidy schemes, but I'd suggest that this one was a massive success, achieving the goal of reducing PV costs, but in a fraction of the time expected.

Note - FiTs, in various forms, were rolled out in many countries. The UK's contribution helped, but Germany (and Italy) did most of the heavy lifting, with more capacity rolled out, and earlier, at higher prices. FiT's created an artificially higher demand, allowing for greater supply, and the virtuous circle that this led to with rising demand, and falling costs.

[Mr Gus]

But getting back to the opener...