Increased Government support for clean air

An extra 1250 households each year will be able to access Government funding to replace their old solid fuel heaters, Environment Minister Nick Smith and Acting Energy and Resources Minister Hekia Parata announced today.

“For the last three years, Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart and Clean Heat have fitted around 7500 homes each year with clean heating devises such as heat pumps. Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart has also been highly successful in insulating more than 100,000 homes which makes it practical for the Clean Heat scheme, which replaces inefficient open fires, to become part of it,” Dr Smith said.

Ms Parata said: “By combining these two programmes we expect to make it easier for people who want to shift to clean heating by stopping any confusion about which of these programmes they should be applying to. Savings from merging the two schemes means an extra 1250 homes can receive the benefits of clean heating.

“Warm Up New Zealand: Heat Smart has been a huge success for clean heating with 20,000 new devices in two years under the National Government. This compares to only 800 being installed during Labour’s nine years.”

Dr Smith said as well as providing warm, healthy and energy efficient homes, moving more houses away from solid fuel heaters will avoid an extra 35 tonnes of PM10, or soot, being emitted into the atmosphere each year.

“The number of regions exceeding the environmental standards for air quality over the last year has dropped. With Auckland and Hamilton now achieving the target, a large proportion of our population is breathing cleaner air.

“By supporting more people to move from using solid wood to heat their home, we should see an even bigger improvement in regions meeting the air quality standards,” Dr Smith said.