Why residential eco-retrofits are failing in the UK

Retrofit projects to make homes more energy efficient are failing, especially when their design is dictated only by financial values, according to the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance (STBA).

It is backing a “Responsible Retrofit” program incorporating health and heritage values and not just financial ones, in order to encourage a new attitude to giving old homes makeovers.

About 25 million British homes were built before 1990 and are in need of retrofits to bring them at least up to modern standards for energy efficiency. And it is generally considered more economic to retrofit the whole house at one go, as I argue in my book the Earthscan Expert Guide to Sustainable Home Refurbishment.

Yet there are many unintended consequences of existing retrofit programs, especially piecemeal ones. They may lead to unhealthy indoor environments, condensation and mould, fabric decay and other problems that affect occupants.

Often programs fail to meet their targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, and in some cases even result in an increase in both of these.

Part of the problem is that there is often not a whole house/building approach when retrofit measures are applied. But even when there is a whole building approach similar consequences can ensue. This is because there are different ideas of what is involved in a whole building retrofit. So what are these different ideas?

Responsible retrofits

An earlier report from the STBA called Responsible Retrofit of Traditional Buildings found that most of the problems that occur with retrofits are at the interfaces between elements, technologies for building processes, or through the interactions between the measures taken, people, and the buildings they occupy, many of which are not fully understood.

This is not just a technical issue. Buildings, and people, behave differently and interact differently depending upon the social, economic and environmental context in which they find themselves.

All of these aspects need to be taken account of. The aim of retrofits should be to look for multiple wins: such as how to improve occupant health, the long-term condition of the building fabric, and make it easy to live in.

To achieve this they need to examine the way thermal energy is conducted through the building and where moisture travels and how it is managed, throughout the year-round weather conditions and patterns of occupancy. This is especially true where different materials meet each other.

When retrofits do fail, it’s not “just because we do not sufficiently understand traditional buildings, or have the wrong approach or the wrong standards or skills”, the STBA says.

“It is because we have an economic and political system which is driving misallocation of finance, land and housing, depletion of natural resources and pollution.”

This is really the reason why The Green Deal programme failed so abysmally, as I have shown before – and why the German equivalent has succeeded.

What values should be incorporated then? The STBA says we need to account for heritage, well-being, community, biodiversity and health – values which, for most people, give meaning to their world more than money does.

But the organisation is pessimistic this can happen without an ethical approach being taken to the allocation of finances for retrofitting. It believes that this demands that the economy and society should “have sustainability and culture at their heart”.

That is why it is issuing a call to rethink the whole approach. It argues:

“The process of retrofit, if carried out correctly, has great potential not only to repair the environment but also to improve people’s lives. Unless we start with the Whole House Advanced/Responsible Retrofit position our efforts will lead to unintended consequences and may be counterproductive even in the most narrowly measured terms.”

To this end the STBA has launched a Responsible Retrofit website, which is full of resources, one of the most useful of which is the Guidance Wheel.

This interactive tool represents over 50 measures that can be used in the refurbishing of the buildings and allows you to explore their interrelationships including the user’s interest, motivation and knowledge about the building:

Since its launch, it has been taken up by several other organisations, including the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and Construction Excellence Wales.

But until it is mainstreamed into the general drive to upgrade the performance of all older buildings, rather than just heritage ones, then piecemeal retrofitting, driven by economics, will prevail in the marketplace, and with it the risk of failure to deliver the desired outcomes.

David Thorpe is the author of:

• Earthscan Expert Guide to Sustainable Home Refurbishment 
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Buildings
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Industry 
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Solar Technology
• The One Planet Life
• Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement (with Oung, K. and Fawkes, S., UNEP)
• A London Conversation: Business Briefing on using Green Bonds for energy efficiency in buildings

Wanted: a serious business model for eco-retrofitting homes

[NOTE: A version of this article appeared on The Fifth Estate on 29 November.]

A new approach is needed to retrofit the UK’s housing stock to allow it to contribute to a cost-effective decarbonisation strategy, according to a report published by the Energy Technologies Institute.

But the report does not make it really clear what this approach might be.

Although deep retrofits of houses for energy efficiency are technically feasible, as detailed in my book the Earthscan Expert Guide to Sustainable Home Refurbishment, at present doing it to the proper standard might cost around the same as rebuilding the entire UK housing stock.

New homes built to modern UK Building Regulations standards will cost approximately half as much to heat as a Victorian home, according to the British NHBC Foundation. These new or refurbished homes mean reduced bills for heating, hot water and electricity bills, due to better standards of insulation, draught-proofing and improved airtightness, double glazing and efficient controls (programmer, room thermostats and thermostatic radiator valves).

The difference in heating costs between a new and Victorian home. Source: NHBC

Housing Retrofits – A New Start, written by the ETI’s chief engineer Andrew Haslett, looks at the role of housing retrofitting when seeking to tackle the 20 per cent of emissions that comes from heating the UK’s 28 million homes.

Its conclusions come from a two-stage process. The ETI first identified two particular retrofitting approaches that were the most cost-effective in terms of getting the most from time and materials by industrialising the planning and execution of projects. They followed this up by testing them out on five typical UK dwellings (terrace, semi-detached, detached) built from pre-1919 to post-1980, to work out what might be deliverable in the real world. Here are the results:

Retrofits were successfully completed on four of the houses, with gas usage reduced by 30-50 per cent. But the costs ranged from £32,000 to £77,000. The experience led the team to conclude that proper investment in supply chain and training might reduce this by about half to £17,000 to £31,000.

The incentive gap

That’s still a lot. So how do we persuade someone to spend the money? The report highlights that most consumers are not motivated to spend money on efficiency measures because efficiency savings are a very weak driver. That is the “incentive gap”.

Instead, the report recommends that improved comfort, health and amenity should be the main incentive to fill this gap, with saving money on bills as a secondary benefit.

Meanwhile, at the back end, finding savings in the supply chain by scaling up manufacture and supply, and rewards to investors or installers, and/or legally binding targets for carbon savings (carrots and sticks), would seriously help, both in the social and private sectors.

The ETI has made a video about the project:



But the route to market is still fuzzy.

The need for investment

UK Government spending on grants for home energy efficiency is currently languishing at a 20-year low.

This year has seen a massive fall in the number of households helped by government to become more efficient, with the annual number of major energy efficiency measures installed in homes declining by 80 per cent from 1.74 million to 340,000 between the height of delivery in 2012 and 2015, according to the Association for the Conservation of Energy.

The government seems to lack any sense of the value of energy efficiency compared to investing in large scale energy projects. The ETI reckons that with carbon prices at such a modest level one way to improve housing efficiency lies in more effort to tackle the approximately four million hard to treat cavity walls across the UK. But governments have been trying for years to incentivise this and not even all the “easy wins” have been fixed.

Wanted: a serious model

Although the ETI wants to make eco-retrofits “an integral part of improving the amenity and value of the dwellings”, rather than seeing them as a series of independent measures, it does not present a financial model for doing this.

The only hope it offers is a vague one for “a new kind of service provider (integrator)” to replace existing energy providers, on a franchised basis (local teams), “that aims for a much higher level of service provision, starting with existing energy supplies”.

Such companies would have “a plan for the decarbonisation of supply of each dwelling” but “only if a market environment can be created over the next five years”.

Given the current preoccupations of the UK Government – Brexit – and the lack of any mention of climate change or social care in the government’s budgetary spending plans announced last week, that’s a big ask.

It’s not as if the ETI is asking for a lot of cash compared to the scale of the task. It says: “£10 billion of private and public funds over the next 10 years would provide a platform that would enable investment of roughly £100bn out to 2050″.

Financial Disclosure

The incentive gap is to be addressed by yet another report, soon to be released, this time from the UK Financial Stability Board’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures.

It will contain their first set of recommendations about how to help close the gap between the climate/sustainability world and traditional finance thinking.

It will say that all infrastructure projects – not just housing retrofits – have a climate-related element to them, be that energy efficiency (mitigation), resilience against adverse weather events (adaptation) or others.

Therefore policy to encourage the reporting of more information on these topics will help to bring more visibility to the benefits.

And standardising how this information is reported would ensure that it can be used for investor analysis, enabling investors to set targets, and the creation of more products that are attractive to investors.

Well that’s what the Investor Confidence Project is doing. I wonder if the FSB knows about it.

The ETI is conducting important research. What they have done is expose the difficulty of the task but they have only begun to chart a path to accomplishing it.

David Thorpe is the author of:

• Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement (with Oung, K. and Fawkes, S. UNEP, 2016)
• A London Conversation: Business Briefing on Green Bonds (The Fifth Estate, 2015)
• The One Planet Life (Introduction: Jane Davidson. Routledge, 2015)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Buildings (Earthscan, 2013)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Industry (Earthscan, 2013)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Solar Technology (Earthscan, 2011)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Sustainable Home Refurbishment (Earthscan, 2010)

An off-site pre-fab approach to Passivhaus 'deep retrofit'

A new approach to retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency to a high standard has been deemed so successful that a British company is opening a new factory for offsite fabrication of a retrofit system that will be then taken on to the site for installation.

These kits involve a wrap-around solution for an existing building that also includes ventilation to ensure good air quality and, because it uses off-site construction, the upgrade process can take as little as three weeks and means that the occupants do not have to move out during the upgrade.

The company, Beattie Passive Retrofit, has secured patents in 57 countries for its innovative solution, which is called TCosy and been developed with funding from Innovate UK, that channels public financial support to private sector R&D to foster low carbon innovation.

The company’s approach, founded on the stringent and verifiable Passivhaus energy performance standard, also involves using locally-trained labour. Passivhaus standard is hard to achieve because it demands that the contractors achieve a high level of airtightness. However, due to the simple system and factory construction much of the uncertainty is taken out of achieving this. The standard can attain an 85% reduction, or £1000 per year, in heating fuel costs for the average house.

Residents of 6 flats in a 3-storey, apartment block owned by Solihull Community Council near Birmingham, England are amongst the first to benefit from the system, following a three-year collaborative R&D project between Encraft, a low-carbon buildings engineering consultancy, Coventry University and a local social enterprise called Jericho Foundation who trained people facing significant personal or occupational barriers to build the system.

Beattie's CEO Ron Beattie, who founded the company in 2008, said: "We have designed the retrofit process to be as simple and efficient for all parties involved. Having tested the processes we've proved we can deliver energy savings over the life of a building."

Ron Beattie provides an overview of the innovative Beattie Passive Build System and Retrofit System - The TCosy – filmed at the 2015 Passivhaus conference.

Gareth Cavill, Beattie Passive's lead architect, said that "the process begins by producing the architectural drawings in house. The information goes to the factory where the frames  are manufactured and then taken to the site where they are erected. We source the windows and doors from one of our supply partners in Europe due to their advanced quality and cost advantages."

He added that the insulation used within the timber frames consists of expanded polystyrene eco-beads.

Isabel Beattie, Head of Strategy and Development stated that "The estimated price for a retrofit is £550 per square meter of floor area including the frame, windows and doors," she said. "This makes a three-bedroom detached house retrofit typically cost £45,000. Our clients are expected to be social housing providers, developers and self builders."

The approach is similar to that offered by the Investor Confidence Project, in providing a guaranteed rate of return and financial package to investors, the key being the simplicity and certainty guaranteed to the investor and to the housing provider of the whole offer.

Ron Beattie believes this approach will solve a key problem facing what is called 'deep retrofit' agendas – financing their comparatively large upfront cost. "Once we can guarantee energy savings, we believe that pension funds and other long-term investors will be prepared to lend over 30 years, with a return after that. And we will have pulled people out of fuel poverty," he said.

"We showed estate agents in Birmingham what we’re doing and their studies suggest a £65,000 uplift in value on a £120,000 property, because you are putting a new building over the top of the old one. If redecorated, with a new kitchen and bathroom, you’re looking at a completely new house." This raises the possibility of generating a profit from deep retrofitting.

Isabel observed that they were already talking to some pension companies about investing in retrofits for future roll-out at scale. "We estimate that savings generated by the retrofit of on average 85% of heating requirements would help pay back the investment within 30 years. With this type of programme the tenants generally pay one fee that includes rent and energy, and it is from this income that the housing provider would pay back the investor. The fee would be reduced slightly for the tenant compared to the non-retrofitted rent, and they will also have warmer, healthier home."

Solihull homes before cladding.

"We have new sales staff and an architect. Work is coming in and growth is going to be very fast," added Ron optimistically. "We are due to start manufacturing in the factory soon and we’ve got seven or eight homes booked in, ready to go. They range from private client, multi-million pound houses to standard affordable homes for Hertfordshire Council – different ends of the market, but the same process."

To fill the demand the company will soon open a factory on the Scottow Enterprise Park, formerly RAF Coltishall. With 57 patents secured abroad, it is clearly confident that expansion on a large scale is possible one small proofs of concept are installed. With 20 million homes in the UK alone needing a low-energy retrofit, the market is clearly huge.

---

David Thorpe is the author of:

• Best Practices and Case Studies for Industrial Energy Efficiency Improvement(with Oung, K. and Fawkes, S. UNEP, 2016)
• A London Conversation: Business Briefing on Green Bonds(Fifth Estate, 2015)
• The One Planet Life(Introduction: Jane Davidson. Routledge, 2015)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Buildings(Earthscan, 2013)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Energy Management in Industry(Earthscan, 2013)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Solar Technology(Earthscan, 2011)
• Earthscan Expert Guide to Sustainable Home Refurbishment (Earthscan, 2010)

Communities key to reducing carbon emissions from buildings

If the Government is keen on reducing the carbon emissions from the domestic sector, it should ideally target efforts at the community level rather than individual households, according to a study of British Gas' Green Streets programme by the IPPR.

Not only are there efficiencies in scale at this level, there is also the knock-on benefit of households working together and inspiring each other, spreading the word to encourage their neighbours to participate, in a way that wouldn't happen otherwise.

British Gas has been running the Green Streets project for two years. It has involved 14 communities receiving grants and expertise to install micro-generation and energy efficiency measures in households and community buildings.

A competition to receive a further £100,000 to spend on additional greening measures has also been won by Llangattock, a village in the Brecon Beacons.

Based on robust meter readings and accurate modelling, the IPPR estimates that the communities involved will benefit from impressive ongoing annual savings:

• Total annual savings in energy: 726,450 kWh
• 
  Total annual energy generated: 104,804 kWh
• 
  Total annual CO2e emissions saved: 215,461 kgCO2e.

Many will also receive additional revenue from feed-in tariff payments for renewable energy installations - a total of £22,792 a year - as well as saving around £30,000 per year on their energy bills.

The report says, "The community groups were integral to the success of the technology installations, having engaged large numbers of people in their local area to take part in their projects."

IPPR Researcher Reg Platt told Energy and Environmental Management magazine that British Gas benefits from the £2 million investment that they made in the project - which is additional to their Carbon Emissions Reduction Target commitment - by "developing their knowledge of working with communities, internal capacity building in energy efficiency and micro-gen installations, and increasing their brand value."

As the Green Deal and the Renewable Heat Incentive kick in they will be better placed to take advantage of the market opportunities.

Platt added that every building was given an energy audit, with assessors regularly revisiting to check the results.

"The audits recommended measures according to the proper hierarchy - quick wins and efficiency first, then micro-generation - but in some cases communities wanted micro-generation like solar panels as a visible way of spreading awareness to involve more people in the community in their projects," he said.

IPPR surveyed approximately 1,300 people in households within 1.25 kilometres of community buildings that participated in the projects. 41% of those surveyed were aware of the Green Streets project in their neighbourhood, providing a strong testament to the outreach work by many of the groups.

Of those who were aware of Green Streets, 30% said they had changed their attitudes towards energy efficiency and renewable energy as a result and 46% had been inspired to take action on energy efficiency and renewable energy. 61% said they would be more likely to take action in the future.

The researchers were hugely surprised and encouraged by these findings.

The research has thrown up many challenges facing communities wanting to take these measures and come up with a series of recommendations.

Community groups without doubt need not only finance to get projects off the ground and buy technology and energy efficiency measures, but also the availability of expertise.

And they are not the only ones. Planners and local councillors also often suffer from a lack of knowledge and incorrect perceptions that can affect planning decisions and make it difficult to get micro-gen installed, IPPR researchers found.

The biggest challenge facing the campaign to make the nation's buildings energy efficient is the number of old, solid walled properties. There are 26.6 million homes in Great Britain, of which 18.7 million have cavity walls and 7.9 million solid walls. Only 104,000 of the latter have solid wall insulation.

The latest figures from the Department for Energy and Climate Change on energy efficiency measures show that in the last quarter, 128,000 cavity walls were insulated but only 7,000 solid walls.

This is because it is far easier to do the former, and the latter has, on average, a 30 year return on investment period.

Only one of the groups participating in the Green Streets project – terraced streets in the Meadows in Nottingham – opted to spend a proportion of their share of the British Gas capital on solid wall insulation. The IPPR report says that participants "were strongly averse" to this measure for "a range of non-financial barriers, including hassle and aesthetic considerations".

This is bad news, for it means that any group attempting to persuade households to take the measure in the future will have a seriously uphill battle.

In addition, because heat pumps are unsuitable for properties that do not have a relatively high level of thermal efficiency, it will be pointless to install them in these homes. The IPPR report therefore concludes that "the UK’s potential for domestic heat pumps is significantly compromised by the number of solid walled properties."

They therefore recommend that the Government should launch a solid wall insulation competition to challenge academic and private sector innovators to come up with 'break through' technological solutions, and fund an educational outreach programme on renewables for planning officers and local councillors.

Microgeneration may be eligible for £10,000 Green Deal support

The Green Deal, the Government's flagship scheme for giving buildings £10,000 of energy-saving improvements, will include microgeneration technologies like heat pumps and solar power.

Climate Change Minister Greg Barker has published further details of how the Green Deal scheme will work, with a draft list of measures that the scheme will permit to be financed; a Green Deal Code to protect consumers; and details of the new Energy Company Obligation (ECO) to tackle fuel poverty.

Businesses as well as householders will be able to access up to £10,000 upfront to pay for energy efficiency work, repaying the costs through savings on energy bills from next year.

Consumers will get BSI quality assurance from a Green Deal Code of Practice which will cover providers and installers, and a Green Deal advice line will be set up.

The principle of the Green Deal is being called The Golden Rule, under which expected savings from measures will repay the costs over 20-25 years. The cost-benefit levels for each measure are still being calculated.

Consumer groups are welcoming the proposals. Audrey Gallacher, head of energy at Consumer Focus, said: "Particularly welcome moves are the introduction of an independent advice line and more robust complaints handling and redress measures. This should not only help consumers make informed decisions on products and services, but mean support is there if things go wrong.

"The Green Deal will be sold through a spread of providers from energy companies to DIY chains."

Confirming what I've observed myself before, Richard Lloyd, CEO of Which?, cautioned that: "Our latest research into cavity wall insulation uncovered inadequate inspections and poor advice. For this scheme to be a success, Green Deal assessors need to be held to the highest standards. £10,000 represents a major investment for most people, so the Government must ensure that the financing of the scheme is fair and good value for customers."

The £10,000 is not to be seen as a cap, however.

"Central to the scheme is the fact the repayments have to be lower than energy savings," said a DECC spokeswoman. "As long as the likely savings from a package of measures are more than the costs, the project will be financed. There is no cap."

This is great news for the most energy-inefficient buildings, for example in the rented sector, which could benefit from a host of much-needed measures.

The eligible measures

An industry-wide Call for Evidence and Literature Review on the costs and benefits of a range of measures was issued in March 2011, and the results are not yet in, so the published list is indicative only, but it includes the following:

• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning: Condensing boilers; Heating controls; Under-floor heating; Heat recovery systems; Mechanical ventilation (non-domestic); Flue gas recovery devices


• Building fabric: Cavity wall insulation; Loft insulation; Flat roof insulation; Internal wall insulation; External wall insulation; Draught proofing; Floor insulation; Heating system insulation (cylinder, pipes); Energy efficient glazing and doors


• Lighting: Lighting fittings; Lighting controls


• Water heating: Innovative hot water systems; Water efficient taps and showers


• Microgeneration: Ground and air source heat pumps; Solar thermal; Solar PV; Biomass boilers; Micro-CHP.

When making an inspection of a building, Green Deal Assessors will draw from this list of eligible measures to make property-specific recommendations.

The assessor will then work out whether the estimated annual saving is expected to be equal to or greater than the expected annual repayment costs. If it is, then the work can go ahead.

Certain measures could have an extra upfront subsidy - via the Energy Company Obligation. Alternatively a householder could choose to pay a top-up to bring down the repayment cost.

As an example, the documents cite that external wall insulation could pay for itself in 30 years based on an installation cost of £7,600. With a subsidy, the repayment period could be significantly reduced and brought within usual finance periods of 20 to 25 years.

The list has been welcomed by the industry. "It's encouraging to have as wide a list of technologies as possible included," said John Alker of the Green Building Council.

He added that as the scheme allows people to top up the Green Deal financing with their own money, and includes microgeneration technologies, this would encourage them to invest in upgrades.

Friends of the Earth's Dave Powell commented that adding microgeneration technologies to the Deal could make it more attractive, but it might reduce the amount of money available for insulation and draughtproofing, which is always more cost-effective.

The Government has realised that often it only makes sense to install a measure while other renovations are occurring, such as under-floor heating, or to add an additional measure to a package, such as installing heating controls when fitting an upgraded boiler. Further guidance will therefore detail the effects of sequencing.

It is not yet clear how, if the Green Deal will cover microgeneration, it will fit in with the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) - kicking in at the same time for domestic properties - and Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) for renewable electricity.

The Energy Company Obligation

The ECO will make sure that cases will still receive attention where the Golden Rule will not work but where energy efficiency improvements are needed.

For these cases, it will mandate energy service companies and utilities to meet the needs of the lower income and most vulnerable first, followed in priority by those properties needing the next most cost-effective measures that do not meet the Golden Rule for example, solid wall insulation (SWI).

This is intended to boost the supply chain for SWI, which is still relatively small, and bring prices down, which will help the measure meet the Golden Rule.

The ECO's funding 'pot' is expected to provide between £1bn and £2bn a year, but will inevitably result in higher general fuel prices.

ECO support is intended to be integrated into the Green Deal framework so that where they combine to deliver improvements, the consumer will just see one seamless package on offer from a Green Deal provider.

Suppliers and Green Deal providers will therefore need to work together to provide an offer to the consumer that comprises the optimum mix of support between Green Deal finance and ECO subsidy.

Join me for a free webcast on sustainable home renovation

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More money needed for the new Green Deal

The ″greenest government ever″ must put serious money behind this scheme to let householders eco-renovate and repay their loans from their savings on fuel bills.

The UK's domestic properties need to be renovated to a high energy efficiency standard at a rate of 700,000 a year in order to have renovated them all by the year 2050. We need to do this because there are 28 million homes in the UK which are responsible for 27% of our greenhouse gas emissions, most of them will still be standing by then, and they need to be treated to make a contribution to meeting our national targets of reducing these emissions by 80% by 2050. ['The 40% House', Boardman et. al., 2005, and The Low-Carbon Strategy, 2008 (Oxford Environmental Change Institute)]

It would be alright if we knew exactly what it is that we have to do. The problem is that there are many areas of uncertainty, not least of which is the embodied energy of the materials used in construction. Unless we know this cannot estimate the carbon balance of the measures we are proposing to take and know that we are really saving carbon.

There also needs to be agreement on what measures these are to be - and they will be different for each type of property. There is an appalling lack of experience in this country of monitoring and measuring the efficacy of sustainable refurbishments that have already taken place to see how effective they have been.

One thing we do know is that they often don't live up to expectations, whether it is because of poor workmanship leaving, for example, gaps in insulation or whether it is that the occupants of the treated houses do not behave in a manner predicted by the architects and continue to turn their heating up.

Retrofit for the Future is a government-sponsored project that is hoping to find the answers to some of these questions for the social housing sector. I shared a panel with Neil Morgan, the project director, at the recent Greener Homes & Buildings show and he gave an outline of a number of research projects they are backing. One of these projects - by Anne Thorne Architects - showed that they are going for the demanding Passivhaus standard, which is more or less the standard that we are going to have to aim at in every case.

Neil gave some costs: they are allocating a budget of £120,000 per property for a sustainable renovation. Of this perhaps £60-£70,000 will actually be used for the renovation itself, the rest might go on overheads, sorting out the supply chain issues - which are right at their infancy and help to increase costs - dramatically, and post-occupancy monitoring and evaluation.

The government announced in the new energy bill that it would institute a Pay As You Save scheme to support households that wanted to carry out eco-renovation. No figure has yet been put on the loans that will be available to householders but before the election the Tories were touting the figure of £6,500.

This is about one tenth of what Retrofit for the Future is allocating. In Germany where similar pioneering work was done quite a few years ago costs in the region of £20-£40,000 per property were common, and another figure that has been offered is around at least 10% of the value of the house.


In other words, £6,500 is going to be nowhere near enough.

Everybody working in this field is advocating that whenever any work is done on a property the opportunity should be taken to renovate it to the highest possible energy efficiency standard to reduce the electricity and heating cost demands. These measures will of course pay for themselves in the future.

In other words if you are having workmen going into your house or scaffolding being put up, it makes sense to get them to do other jobs that need to be done while they are there rather than to get them back later. It would be more expensive if you were to do that and a valuable opportunity would be lost. For example if the roof is being replaced it makes a good idea to put solar water heating panels on it at the same time or at least put the pipes through the insulation and the roof so that they can be added easily later when a budget permits without having to tear apart your earlier work.

The danger is that in an era where savage public spending cuts are to be made then the amount of money that is going to be loaned to householders will be nowhere near enough, and the work will not be done to the sufficient standard. Another opportunity will have been wasted to help not only the UK reach its carbon emissions reductions targets but also for householders to reduce their ongoing energy costs.

Demand reduction is the best investment. It also means that we have to build fewer power stations and there is less likelihood of the lights going out in the future.