FAQs
Why can’t payments be assigned to others?
Beats us! The government seemed to find it too difficult (though they did it easily enough for the FITs).
Chapter 2 of the government's RHI announcement says under:
Who can claim the RHI?
A number of stakeholders have argued that participants should be allowed to assign and transfer payments to another person, as allowed under the Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) scheme, in order to help reduce the credit risk to lenders. The current legislation only allows payments to be made to the owner of the equipment. Therefore, in order to allow this form of assignment, the primary legislation (Section 100 of the Energy Act 2008) would need to be amended. While we appreciate these concerns, we are not convinced that the legislation should be changed, given the delays to implementation that this would cause.
We are also not convinced that assigning payments would fully reduce the risk to lenders, as ultimately they would still be reliant on the ‘owner’ of the equipment meeting their obligations under the scheme (e.g. maintenance, allowing inspections). In addition, the RHI payments cover the on-going costs of running the equipment (maintenance, fuel etc), which would still have to be met by the person operating the system.
