Improving domestic energy efficiency is a key tool for reducing energy bills, ensuring a warm home, and lowering carbon emissions.
The UK government incentivises progress in domestic energy efficiency through the Energy Company Obligation (ECO) scheme, which is administered by Ofgem E-Serve.
The current obligation period is known as ECO2 and requires the 12 obligated suppliers to achieve delivery targets in the period from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2017. You may also have heard that the government plans to extend the ECO scheme from March 2017 onwards.
One of our key roles on the ECO programme is to monitor obligated suppliers’ progress of installed measures against their obligations. Every month we report to the Secretary of State for the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy on the progress of the obligated suppliers, including the number of energy efficiency measures we have approved.
And now we have reached a significant milestone in the delivery of ECO2.
From April 2015 to October 2016, we have approved over half a million measures for ECO2 (521,827). When you account for the overdelivery against ECO1 targets (April 2013-March 2015) this equates to estimated lifetime savings of 17.95 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and £3.34 billion in energy bill savings between the three ECO2 obligations.
The table above shows cumulative measures approved by Ofgem under ECO2 to October 2016. It does not include surplus actions which may be carried over from ECO1 to ECO2.
If you take a look at our monthly public reports, you will see there is some variation in suppliers’ progress towards meeting their obligations. Overall, suppliers still need to deliver 0.45 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and £360,000,000 in cost savings by the end of March 2017.
The first stage of ECO (ECO1) ran from 2013-15 and the second stage (ECO2) runs from 2015-2017. Last year the government announced an extension of energy efficiency programmes for at least another 5 years.
If you would like to stay up to date with the latest developments on the ECO scheme, you can sign up to our ECO newsletter.
Ingrid Bennett, Energy Efficiency and Social Programmes Assistant Manager