The company that fitted Ashley Seager's solar panels has gone bust.
The company enabling the RSPB to give access to grants helping householders pay for solar panels is still in business. But government cuts mean it can't guarantee funds for all applicants so this scheme, to harness clean energy from the sun, no longer exists.
Ashley Seager is the Guardian's Economics Correspondent and says government support for offers such as the RSPB's now defunct Going Solar scheme is pathetic. He's right, especially when it's compared with the money being ploughed wastefully into biofuels and the funds that would be needed to build a barrage across the River Severn.
Seager received 50 per cent of the £17,000 cost of his solar panels but the maximum grant available now is a relatively paltry £2,500, and that's if you manage to wade through the application red tape.
On top of that, funds are rationed monthly so, if you do make it into the application home straight, your finishing sprint could be effort wasted if others have beaten you to it. You must then try again at the beginning of the following month, and again and again and so on.
Too few clean energy technologies are ready to roll yet the potential, and enthusiasm, for one of them is being squandered by the government whose provision of resources to fight climate change is still not matching its rhetoric.
Ashley Seager and his family have reduced their electricy use by 92 per cent in a year – a saving of about £500 on top of their carbon cuts. Just imagine the extent of Britain's carbon savings if more of us were able to follow Seager's example.
Read Ashley Seager's account in full