Steven Harris of the Energy Saving Trust

Gordon Brown is doing it, the Tories are tweeting about it and, if the hype is to be believed, over the next few years we will all be investing massive amounts of money to lavish our homes with it.

Microgeneration, once a dream of hippy communities, is to become the latest trend in cutting carbon emissions. On 1 April, the government will launch its much-anticipated feed-in tariff, which will provide households with cash in return for generating energy from low-carbon domestic systems.

With the UK facing soaring energy bills, the Energy Saving Trust (EST) believes the tariff will be enough to convince most of the population to install what were once seen as exotic technologies, such as fuel cells, solar photovoltaics (PV) and ground-source heat pumps, in and around their homes.

Steven Harris, who recently joined the EST as head of low-carbon technologies, predicts that this could happen within the next few years. ’The poor old cottage industry of renewable energy will not know what’s hit it,’ he said. ’People could be forgiven for waiting to install these technologies up until this point, but once the tariff comes in, things could change rapidly.’