Sara Vaughan, the strategy and regulation director at E.on, has said that both the government and energy suppliers share the problem of cutting consumer energy use through energy efficient methods.
Ofgem have announced that the first target for the present ECO (Energy Company Obligation) period has been met over a year before expected. Ms Vaughan has said that the government needs to be clearer on how it intends to proceed into the next ECO period, which will commence in March 2017.
She said:
“We don’t want customers to use more energy than they need, and we actually care about people who can’t afford to pay for their energy.
“It’s a problem for government for exactly the same reasons so it’s an opportunity for us to work together to try and solve it.
“What we have seen is government and energy companies can work really well together and when they do the customer is nearly always the winner”.
The energy secretary, Amber Rudd, is not expected to make an announcement on the future of the ECO until the end of 2015 at the earliest. It is believed that her announcement next week will focus on an initiative to replace the Green Deal, which was binned earlier this year.
The call from Ms Vaughan has arrived in the same week as the release of figures detailing the success of energy companies in meeting the ECO target. The CSCO-rural target has already reached 101.55% of the full ECO2 target for this period.
E.on itself has also delivered more than 373% of its aims for the first phase of the ECO2.
Ms Vaughan went on to say:
“If you look at ECO we have already funded and delivered nearly a quarter of a million measures across 181,000 homes.
“What we want from government is clarity of policy. We want to know that if we invest to do deliver these things that they are not going to change the policy the next day, and that is not going to cause a knock on damage down the supply chain who can’t invest to plan for what the future looks like.
“If government will give us what we need then we will government what it needs.”
