By Sophy

One of the many contentious aspects of the Feed-in Tariff review consultation is the idea that in order to get a higher rate of FIT from April 1st 2012, properties must have an Energy Performance Certificate rating of C or above.

Unless you’ve bought or sold your house since the EPC was first introduced a few years ago, you’ve probably no idea what an EPC rating of C or above entails. I certainly didn’t, and as we had to abandon our original plans to install solar PV – victims of the early deadline -- I decided to find out.

We live in an old stone farmhouse, off the gas grid, so we rely on oil-fired space and water heating. Although we also have a very efficient wood-burning stove too which means the central heating only goes on in the coldest weather.

Getting an EPC rating is easy, a quick visit and £50 later a nice man had fed all our data into his computer to generate the necessary figures.

Despite scoring highly for having new double-glazing on most windows, low-energy lights and thermostatic radiator controls throughout, and getting a medium rating on roof insulation (difficult access, so hard to prove) our energy efficiency rating came out at 46. A miserable E. We were let down by our 400-year-old solid granite walls, which scored only one star out of five.

The EPC rating also includes recommendations for improvements. But the real disappointment is there’s almost nothing we can do to improve it – our home’s potential rating is only 48. Still an E. And to get that we’d need to spend up to £3,500 replacing our perfectly functional boiler with a new condensing model.

Here’s the really ironic thing though – to increase our EPC rating to C the report recommends that … … we install solar PV!

So – if I want to get an EPC rating of C I need to install Solar PV – but I won’t qualify for the higher FIT rate for Solar PV because I haven’t got an EPC of C.

How can that be an incentive to sustainability? As my colleague Chris wrote recently there is a huge disconnect between the EPC rating which focuses mainly on thermal efficiency, and the way renewable electricity is used in the home. It looks as if rather than encouraging greater energy efficiency, the EPC standard is just another way of discouraging FIT takeup.