Exclusive | Once-lucrative RHI boiler can’t even be sold for £1 as hundreds drop out of bungled scheme

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/northern-ireland/once-lucrative-rhi-boiler-cant-even-be-sold-for-1-as-hundreds-drop-out-of-bungled-scheme/a1941027913.html

Sam McBride
Today at 06:10

RHI boilers were once licences to print money – but now people are selling them at knock-down prices and one man is struggling to give his away for free.

Many biomass boilers have been disconnected from the scheme and are being sold, while hundreds of boilers have simply been turned off and are gathering dust as their owners return to using fossil fuel.

That fact dramatically undermines Stormont civil servants’ claims to have rectified the problems in the scheme.

When Stormont opened its non-domestic Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme in 2012, it was a bonanza for some. There was no upper limit on how much claimants could earn, no tiering of payments to reduce subsidies if boilers ran for long periods, and the level of subsidy was set above the cost of fuel.

That meant that it was burn to earn; once a boiler had been installed, claimants on a supposedly environmental scheme were being financially incentivised with public money to pollute the environment.

However, that ‘cash for ash’ phase ended abruptly in 2017 when a vast projected overspend on the scheme collapsed Stormont, with MLAs rushing through dramatic cuts to subsidies just before devolution fell.

Further dramatic cuts were then made by Westminster back in 2019, leaving payments in Northern Ireland vastly behind anywhere else in the UK or Ireland.

Now the impact of that is becoming clear.

One RHI boiler in good condition is currently listed for sale for a nominal £1. The Co Antrim boiler is available on Facebook Marketplace, with the advertiser describing it as “free to a new home for someone to come and take away”.

The Pelletburn 28kW wood pellet boiler is “no longer in use as RHI scheme has now ended”, the advert says. The advertisement has been active for two and a half months, indicating that biomass boilers now can hardly even be given away.

Another individual is offering four RHI boilers for sale in Castlederg for just £380 each. Depending on the specification, biomass boilers can cost many tens of thousands new. The description says that they have been “removed for gas conversions” but remain in “good working order”.

At a media briefing after they slashed rates, senior officials in Stormont’s Department for the Economy (DfE) pooh-poohed the idea that anyone would pull out a working biomass boiler to revert to gas.

The fact that this is now happening suggests that — yet again — DfE’s figures have been disastrously out of touch with reality.

Figures from Ofgem, which runs the scheme for Stormont, show that what had been more than 2,000 boilers on the scheme has dropped to 1,885. But even this inflates the true situation.

Ofgem said just 1,298 RHI “stations” in Northern Ireland were paid more than £30 in 2022-23, meaning that hundreds of people still technically in the scheme are not using their boilers.

Even a layperson looking at the Stormont subsidies could see that just as they were disastrously too generous initially, now they are astronomically behind other regions.

When the last cut to subsidies came in 2019, it was rushed through Parliament on the basis it would be temporary until a long-term fair way was found to deal with the issue. However, consistent with the shambolic way in which Stormont has dealt with RHI from the outset, some four years later it still hasn’t agreed on that plan.

As a consequence, Northern Ireland is increasingly at an economic and environmental disadvantage.

As other regions increase support for businesses wanting to move from fossil fuels to renewable heat, Northern Ireland is unique in not only having no subsidy to encourage that transition but instead having been using public funds to subsidise fossil fuel boilers.

Stormont is on course to waste at least £420m — and perhaps as much as £660m — over the next 20 years due to its failure to find a way to spend Treasury funding made available for subsidising renewable heat. Already, £130m of that money has been wasted because Stormont can’t work out how to spend it.

This is vastly more than the actual overspend on RHI which was £33.8m after the retroactive cuts to subsidies.

Arlene Foster, the minister who set up the scheme and was happy to take credit for it when it was popular, had given a personal cast-iron guarantee to banks that RHI payments could only rise for 20 years.

But she abandoned that promise and the courts have upheld the legality of Stormont’s dramatic cuts to subsidies, while also saying that the courts are not best placed to adjudicate on whether the department’s figures or those put forward by claimants are accurate.

Boiler owners, who organised as the Renewable Heat Association of Northern Ireland (RHANI), took two cases challenging cuts to the scheme but have lost both. RHANI executive chairman Andrew Trimble said that government’s rhetoric on decarbonisation was not matched by reality.

“More than six years after the crisis, the beleaguered department, the NIO and the Secretary of State remain in denial,” he said, adding that he had drawn the NIO’s attention to multiple reports — some of them commissioned by government — which show that subsidies are now too low in Northern Ireland and leading to hardship.

He said that many boiler owners in England are now being paid more than 12p per kWh for the first 1,314 hours each year (15% of a year) which a boiler runs — and then 3p per kWh beyond that.

By contrast, many boiler owners in Northern Ireland are getting 2p per kWh for the first 1,314 hours each year — and then nothing after that.

“Practically everything the department has ever done has been a can of worms,” he said.

One major RHI claimant told the Belfast Telegraph: “My boilers haven’t operated in years; they’re just lying there gathering dust.”

The man, who asked not to be named, said: “It would suit me if they just shut it. I’m sick to death of it. I would just like to see it over and done with. But it seems bonkers for us all to take the boilers out and just throw them in the bin.”

The man said he doesn’t think Stormont will actually do that because it would require significant compensation for people who were promised that their payments were locked in for 20 years and could only ever go up with inflation.

by columboscoat