OFGEM’s ECO scheme is the route through which energy companies have to meet statutory obligations to meet overall carbon reduction and affordable warmth targets. The energy company needs to report to OFGEM an ECO score for each individual qualifying measure installed in a property in each month. In the vast majority of cases, this will be produced using RDSAP.
NES (Andrew R Williams & Associates are Registered with NES –SAVA-NHER) have started to launch a new service for our DEAs to help them tap into the emerging ECO market.
Here now: Manual Calculation of ECO scores
The first step, taken today, is to make a small change to our NHER EPC Online software (NES one) to output Running Costs and CO2 values to the required number of decimal places for our DEAs to be able to do manual calculations of ECO scores, from either a draft or a lodged RDSAP dataset.
To accompany this release we have made available a new document ‘NES Guidance for DEAs on calculating ECO scores’ and a spreadsheet to help you calculate ECO Scores.
Coming Soon: Automatic Calculation of ECO scores
NES are currently developing a new service whereby our DEAs can quickly and easily generate ECO scores for installed measures in a way that conforms with OFGEM requirements. This service will be released in late February, and updated as OFGEM clarifies the rules for how calculations are to be done.
The new service will provide DEAs with a new report option ‘ECO Report’ on NES one. This will allow scores to be calculated instantaneously from either a draft or lodged EPC, simply by answering a few questions about the improvement measures. OFGEM require that various rules be applied when assessing the impact of improvement measures; this makes manual calculations time consuming and error prone. The new OFGEM approved service will enable our DEAs to produce ECO Scores extremely quickly and in a way energy companies will be confident that they can use in reporting to OFGEM. You can also be confident that, if OFGEM want to spot check any of the energy company’s ECO scores that you can respond quickly, easily and with more peace of mind.
This new NHER ECO Report service will be released at around the end of February. In the meantime the manual service is available for use now.