June 2014: An independent evaluation of the first year (2013) of the operation of the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), undertaken by the Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) for industry trade association Energy UK, has recently been published and highlights the low levels of funding directed to the capital.
The study ‘The ECO: An Evaluation of Year 1‘ includes a comparison of regional distribution of ECO spend and previous energy supplier obligations and reports – that across these major energy efficiency programmes:
“London has fared the worst, because although it has the second highest population, it obtained the second lowest number of EEC-2 cavity wall insulation installations (after Scotland), the third lowest number of CERT measures (after Scotland and the North East, which have lower populations), and the third lowest number of HHCRO households (after the East of England and the South West). London has a higher number of CERO households, but relative to its population this is still low.”
The following graph from the CSE report provides an illustration of this:
A summary of the report’s findings are available here. The full report is available here.
Government has previously stated that the ECO would support the uptake of ‘hard to treat’ measures, which would work better for London, and hence a regional target would not be needed (see para 53 onwards from November 2011 DECC ‘Green Deal & ECO consultation document‘). It may be that DECC now needs to look at this issue again under the current ECO consultation.