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The Department of Energy and Climate Change is to further delay the launch of Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) for households and has set out interim plans to control the costs of the existing non-domestic RHI.
DECC said the domestic Renewable Heat Initiativeis now likely to launch in summer 2013. In the meantime, DECC said it will extend its existing voucher scheme for the renewable heat installations from April.
It said that the RHI tariffs set out by the previous Government in the consultation document in February 2010 would no longer apply.
The delay is to avoid the sort of mistakes made with the Feed-In-Tariff scheme where the Government announced that the costs would be cut, but implemented it before the consultation was finished.
On Friday, the Government lost its bid to appeal to the Supreme Court against a High Court ruling that its plans to slash the FiT tariffs were unlawful. This means DECC must now find extra money from the FiT budget, which is constrained under the Levy Control Framework.
The domestic RHI was expected to launch in October 2012 alongside the Green Deal, although it is still not certain just how this will be implemented.
