Crown Office's £3.5m taxpayer 'decarbonisation' refurb will take 1000 years to recoup costs

dailyrecord.co.uk:

The Crown Office has admitted it will take 1000 years to recoup the £3.5million cost of a “decarbonisation” refurbishment at one of its bases.Elgin’s small Procurator Fiscal office is being given the taxpayer funded upgrade which involves improving insulation in order to rip out a gas boiler and replacing it with a heat pump.But the scheme has been branded “utterly ludicrous” after it emerged the estimated annual energy cost saving is just £3885 meaning ti will take a millennium to pay for itself.SNP MSP Fergus Ewing said: “This Crown Office scheme involves utterly ludicrous expense to the taxpayer, for minute benefit.“According to these revelations these annual savings will only be £3885 and as the total costs of the work are £3,500,000 it will take nearly a thousand years to recoup the benefits.

And that may not even take account of electricity running costs.”Figures released through Freedom of Information show the Elgin project is costing a staggering £2,342 a square metre despite the building’s annual gas bill averaging around £2500 a year.The Scottish Government wants to ban gas boilers and a “backstop” date of 2045 has been set for all homes to use “zero direct emissions heating systems” such as heat pumps which run on electricity.But based on the Crown Office’s budget for Elgin in Moray, that would mean a tenement flat of 100 square metres would cost £234,000 to convert, while a 150 square metre house would be £351,000.Ewing added: “The astronomical costs of this misguided policy would be devastating for home owners. “If the costs of decarbonising older types of properties like this one are around £2342 per square metre, then people would be hit with bills running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.“Plainly such