Ed Miliband has given up trying to promise £300 a year off our energy bills. He is now dangling the prospect of something even better: ‘zero bill’ homes. He is expected to announce a new £13 billion ‘Warm Homes Fund’ to subsidise solar panels and heat pumps which could mean some householders paying nothing for their energy whatsoever.

That £13 billion Miliband is going to be shelling out to homeowners has to be paid for somehow. It will either come out of our bills or our taxes

Is that possible? Yes it is – if you get someone else to pay your energy bills for you. As it happens I already live in a zero bill home, in that the money that I earn from the solar panels on my roof exceeds the sums I pay for electricity and heating oil. In fact, my net energy bills are less than zero – I end up with an annual profit of several hundred pounds.

Unfortunately, however, this is not because my solar panels are super-efficient – rather it is because I was able to take advantage of the Feed-in........

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