Thanks to funding from Community Energy Scotland and our consultants, On-Site Generation Ltd, we now have a toolkit for any size of community to use for an initial assessment of whether the retrofitting of biomass fired district heating is likely to be feasible in your particular situation. The toolkit is in three parts, an initial Introduction to Biomass Heating , a Community Checklist and an ‘Economic Viability Assessment Spreadsheet’ to use in assessing the likely financial viability of your scheme. We are very keen to trial this toolkit with local communities who are looking at how to best to decarbonise their future heat supply. Please do
try out this toolkit, give us your feedback as to how it could be improved and get in touch to ask for any assistance. It isn’t possible to upload the spreadsheet to this web platform, so you will need to email me and I will send it to you.
Currently there is uncertainty regarding the level of the proposed Renewable Heat Incentive but thankfully it has been clarified that it will be permissible to receive a certain level of grant funding in addition to the Renewable Heat Incentive (as long as the total of both doesn’t exceed Euro 200,000 over three years) . This means that the economic assessment of schemes is still difficult. Hopefully this will be resolved soon but even then, please bear in mind that this toolkit is very much to provide an initial assessment of whether it would be worthwhile to commission a full feasibility study for installing a biomass fired district heating scheme in your particular situation.
