Much of the two-week marathon of talks at the United Nations conference on climate change, which gets underway in Copenhagen today, will deal not with the fact of climate change, but how to finance the technologies that are needed to deal with it.

It’s now more obvious than ever that one of the key roles of governments in all of this is to give business the confidence it needs to invest in the development of clean tech fixes.
Enter the UK government’s Home Energy Pay-as-You-Save pilots, which aim to develop markets for clean tech products by giving households the opportunity to invest in energy efficiency and microgeneration technologies with no upfront cost.

Many householders want to reduce their emissions, but are put off by the initial cost of installing insulation, solar panels, ground source heat pumps, or other technologies. The pilots will trial different ways of paying for this work to make it affordable.

Householders will make repayments spread out so that what they pay each month is less than the savings they make on their energy bills.

One quarter of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from houses. Increasing the energy efficiency of homes will not only reduce emissions and fuel bills, it will drive the market for energy-efficient clean tech products.