By Juliet Davenport

This week, the much anticipated announcement from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) came out on Feed-in Tariffs, a new mechanism for rewarding renewable energy generators. This is something Good Energy has been working towards for a long time, and we welcome the announcement.

Good Energy pioneered offerings to small generators in the UK with our award-winning HomeGen scheme and still offers the highest paying financial reward to microgenerators.

It’s great this has now arrived! Good Energy has shown for many years that financial incentives work on a commercial scale, benefiting generators at minimal cost to the energy consumer when delivered effectively. The rates that will be paid to renewable generators should provide the incentive that a lot of homeowners, landowners and businesses have been waiting for to generate their own energy, allowing them to follow the pioneering individuals that have put their own generation in already.

Good Energy will be the place for microgenerators to come - people know that when they are dealing with us, they are working with a company committed to making sure the UK delivers for microgenerators. We have been running incentivised microgeneration schemes for more than five years so we are the obvious trusted partner for any microgenerator.

We support over 1000 ‘energy entrepreneurs’ and have more generators per customer than any other energy company in the UK. Because of this, we have systems in place to be able to deal with large numbers of generators and we believe that this will give us the edge over our competitors.

However, it’s not quite a perfect Feed-in Tariff. It’s outrageous that the scheme only pays the highest reward to new generators – we feel that the early adopters of microgen technology should also be recognised for their pioneering attitude and taking a lead. Good Energy will continue to campaign for these pioneers and intends where possible to support them.

Furthermore, barriers caused by under-resourced and under-trained planning services still need to be addressed - expecting the current planning regime to deliver on the future energy policy of the UK is a tall order and more needs to be done to support planners in their work.

I’m also delighted that the government is following our lead and has announced plans for a Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) in 2011. Since 2008, we’ve been paying solar thermal generators a reward for the heat energy they generate with our own RHI, called HotROCs.

We were the first - and are still the only - supplier to introduce our own version of a renewable heat incentive. Our award-winning scheme has shown that financial incentives work on a commercial scale. Just as we’ve been encouraging people to generate their own electricity, we’re aiming to encourage renewable heat generation at home and reduce the UK’s dependence on gas.

Just as HomeGen showed that Feed-in Tariffs could work, HotRocs is forging the path for a RHI.

This is the way we like to work at Good Energy.