What data tells us about new energy technology
In the past year, 4,500 people contacted our Consumer Service over issues with insulation and solar panels.
Energy improvements, like insulation and solar panels, can make homes cheaper to run, more comfortable and environmentally-friendly.
UK governments encourage households to install these products, with schemes like the Feed-in Tariff, which has offered generous subsidies for solar panels and the Energy Company Obligation, which has funded insulation.
In the past five years, around 2 million households got free insulation and half a million have received solar panel subsidies. At Citizens Advice, we’re in a unique position to understand people’s experience of these technologies. In the past year, almost 4,500 people contacted our Consumer Service about these products. These numbers give us an idea of the main issues consumers are facing.
We’ve seen new types of problem emerge as these technologies have developed. These sit alongside long-standing issues in these sectors. We need to learn from these experiences to improve consumer protection, particularly as new technologies are rolled-out more widely in future.
Key trends
The contacts are spread across different types of product:
And occur at 3 key stages of the customer journey:
- The sales process, including cold-calling and pressure-selling
- During the installation process or immediately after
- When something goes wrong after the installation.
Some issues are well-known, like damp from faulty cavity wall insulation. The recent Each Home Counts review into consumer protection also identified problem issues at each of these stages.
But there’s a new trend of products and services targeted at households with existing insulation or renewable energy.
Initial customers, new products
As technology moves forward, new products have become available to supplement those already in homes.
Homes with solar panels can now add a battery, to store the energy produced and use it when most needed. However, we found that the quality of some of these products can fall short. With batteries the most common complaints we get are installation or performance issues.
The same householders are being targeted by firms selling voltage optimisers or ‘boosters’. Salespeople say these products will significantly increase the output from a solar panel, but there is often little evidence to support their claims. Some consumers who’ve bought one tell us they’ve seen no improvement. Others realise afterwards they’ve paid an excessive amount. Many only contact us when they have already signed a contract.
Exploiting consumer worries
Households are also being targeted by firms offering insulation removal. They trade off well-publicised and serious problems some households have had with shoddy cavity wall insulation. But many appear to be scams. They offer to remove insulation for spurious reasons, and often target vulnerable people.
Home energy scams often play off legitimate concerns in this way. Some invent or exaggerate energy efficiency regulations to persuade householders to buy their product. After the Grenfell Tower tragedy, we saw cold-callers use scare tactics to push unnecessary insulation removal and solar optimisers, at extortionate cost.
Getting ready for the energy-efficient future
At the moment these cases are relatively small in number and there’s also a lot of good practice in these sectors. The number of consumers installing home energy improvements has dropped in recent years because of government cutbacks. But with falling prices of new technologies and renewed government emphasis on climate change, the number is likely rise again in the future.
Households will get new, complex home energy systems. A home could have a solar panels, with a battery and other add-ons, linked to a charging point for their electric car. If something goes wrong it may be hard to work out who’s at fault and get things put right. New heating technologies, like heat pumps, bring other potential pitfalls.
As technologies are taken up, we’ll continue to track consumer experience and share key issues with policy makers and industry. We’re already passing information to Trading Standards and some industry bodies. This helps industry and their associated consumer codes to see where improvements are needed. We are looking at other ways to use this analysis.
The data can also be used by Citizens Advice to improve the advice we give to people. Consumers now seem more cautious as a result of past publicity on dodgy doorstep insulation offers. But there’s currently little clear guidance on newer issues, like insulation removal. These issues need to be covered by the government’s revamped energy saving advice service.
Better consumer protection
The Each Home Counts review promises to create a single industry quality mark for energy efficiency and renewables. This should help people spot dodgy firms and improve standards among registered ones. In future, we’ll use our data to help monitor the quality mark’s impact.
It should also give people a clear route to get things sorted where something does go wrong. They should be easily to claim on their guarantee, even when firms go bust. If someone cannot get their problem resolved, they should have access to effective Alternative Dispute Resolution.
When the government designs its schemes to promote new technologies, it should make sure consumer protection is built-in.
To tackle climate change and fuel poverty, the government needs more people to install energy saving technologies in their home. Nipping problems in the bud is not only good for the people they affect, but a prerequisite of delivering these policies.
