There was an article in last Saturday's Guardian about a family who'd installed the latest generation of solar panels - still horrendously expensive (something like £17,000 before various grants I think) but this family were effectively running their electricity meter backwards. The energy supplier the family was with didn't like that so they charged them some sort of cover charge :-( Moral of the story? The energy suppliers don't want us to go energy efficient - why would they when they want to make money from us, not pay us for producing not only our own energy needs but actually feeding what we don't need into the national grid.

If this 'government' really was a government it would insist that every new house had solar panels fitted as a matter of course. Why doesn't it?