Renewable Heat Incentive

Renewable Heat Incentive or RHI is the incentive given by the UK government to anyone who uses renewable energy (including solar thermal) for heating purposes. It works on the same lines as the Feed-in-Tariff. The three main differences being:

Feed-in-Tariffs are incentives applicable to electricity while RHI is applicable to heat energy. There is no thermal grid to which you can feed the energy you harness so the incentive is based on the heat energy produced by your renewable energy systems.
RHI is a recent thing while Feed-in-Tariffs have been there since a long period of time and have done a whole lot of good to increase the production of renewable energy across Europe.
Important Date: The RHI comes into force from October 2012

What is the eligibility for RHI tariffs?

Here is the list of main eligibility criteria:

Renewable energy systems installed after 15th Jul 2009 are eligible.
The installation should have been done by a MCS certified solar systems installer
The solar thermal system should use MCS certified equipments

How RHI works?

Once you install a solar thermal energy system, an estimate is made to determine the amount of heat energy you will produce and on the basis of this estimate, the tariff chart is used to pay you a fixed amount of money as incentive over a long period of time (20 years). The rate remains fixed for the entire period of time and there are plans to account for inflation too.

RHI tariffs:

For solar thermal energy systems that generate up to 45KW, the tariff is 18 pence/KWh.
For solar thermal energy systems that generate 45-500KW, the tariff is 17 pence/KWh.
As mentioned earlier, this tariff is fixed and the tariff lifetime in both cases is 20 years.