Consumers could be encouraged to take up low carbon technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs) and heat pumps through a student-loan type scheme, an industry expert has suggested.
Jo Jo Hubbard, chief executive of Electron, was speaking during a panel debate at Utility Week’s Future Networks, Heat and Transport Conference in Birmingham.
During the session on financing the energy transition, panellists were asked how to encourage consumer investment in low-carbon technologies.
In response Hubbard said there was a real “hand in glove piece” around the fact that such assets are needed for net zero and also for flexibility markets to work.
“But we are still financing EV charging stations that aren’t capable of responding to grid signals… so it’s about financing the right kind of behaviour and incentivising the right kind of behaviour,” she added.
Continuing, she said: “What I would say is I think there needs to be some kind of student loan-type scheme to help you fund electrifying (sic) and then you can earn money back from that electric asset and start maybe paying some of that support mechanism back.
“But we can’t just finance it, we’ve got to finance it to be a flexible part of our energy system and so there’s got to be consumer propositions for actually wanting to adopt those energy assets in that way. This is the commercial infrastructure having to go alongside the financial infrastructure.”
Also speaking on the panel was Mike Wilks, energy networks partner at Baringa, who made the case for the physical infrastructure to be part of the mix as well otherwise, he added, “you don’t realise the value”. 
He said: “So you’ve sold the consumer a proposition that they can’t realise because the infrastructure’s not there to enable it, whether it be smart behaviour or whatever.
“That’s why it’s difficult, because you’ve got to solve all of it. You can’t charge your car if you haven’t got enough capacity on the local grid to be able to do that at the time that you want to do it. You can’t operate it in a smart way if you haven’t got the digital infrastructure to be able to connect it in the right way and do it in a way that is convenient to you and your lifestyle on a basis that you’ve set.
“There’s some pretty nutty problems here and that’s why I think the search for perfection is going to take too long, and we’re going to have to make some hard choices.”
