Solar water heating systems = Solar panels + solar energy. Solar thermal: solar power & solar hot water.

How to sort out the UK’s Microgeneration Certfication Scheme.

The Government’s Microgeneration Certification Scheme (MCS) is underfunded, secretive, unable to anticipate innovation and riven by cronyism and abysmal governance such as lifetime appointments for technical committee chairman. Paralysed by vested interests, it wastes time duplicating existing European standards such as Solar Keymark, is very slow to decide anything new, is of dubious legal status abroad and is not currently “fit for purpose”.

Here are some comments on today’s shambles.

Chronic under-delivery.

The numbers accredited under MCS to date are woefully inadequate. The installer accreditation process is like glue. Costs are ten times too high while the numbers accredited are ten times too low.

Look at the numbers – take the govts aim to have 7M microgeneration-fitted homes by 2020 (and ignore any non-domestic installations). I think that we have about 1200 MCS installers in place today. If they all work (full time) for 240 days a year, spending 4 man days per job they will manage only 72,000 installations a year.

So it will take them 97 years to complete what is supposed to be done in ten years!

Time to learn to delagate.

One way to speed things up would be to allow MCS installers to validate or attest other people’s work. This happens to some degree in trade work but the wording of the MIS installation standards appears not to allow this to happen in retail work, even though retail work often seems to be simpler.

Offer it all to the British Standards Insttution

If a workable alternative to MCS is going to exist at all, is a more suitable home more likely to be BSI. Why suggest BSI? Because:

Focus. Their core business is British standards and technical standards (one step below full standards in status).
Setup. They have all the procedures and governance in place already – so why reinvent the wheel?
Self-funding. They operate based on business plans “you plan to sell XX standards at £YY each and BSI provides marketing & secretariat”.
Influence and status. BSI delivers European input to standards at CEN (or we could adopt / vary other CEN members standards). So a UK lead could be taken.

We could then deliver with a professional system with the potential for international recognition. Wasteful 99% duplication work like Solar Keymark and MCS Solar Thermal could be eliminated. The whole gummy process could be streamlined and run transparently – with proper reference to BS0 (the “standard for standards”).

The too-easy solution.

Of course the whole installer quality challenge could just be settled using a “competent persons scheme”, as is common in the building trades. Is this approach too easy?