The challenge to reduce CO2 emissions from the UK’s homes by 80% by 2050 is a tough one. The good news is that this target is very achievable but there is a lot of work ahead of us in order to see it happen and cutting emissions this far will require us to take a different approach to improving the energy efficiency of our homes to the one taken to date.
Financial support for carbon reduction measures in the home has mostly come from the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (and before that the Energy Efficiency Commitment). Both programmes are obligations on the energy suppliers to reduce carbon emissions from UK homes by subsidising a range of energy efficiency measures.
The activity is funded by a levy on our energy bills (the energy suppliers aren’t doing this out of the kindness of their hearts), which means that they opt for the cheapest route to achieving their targets. This isn’t the most effective means of starting us on the path to an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions.
Mostly this support takes the form of piecemeal work such as discounted loft or cavity wall insulation, energy saving light bulbs (too many of them) and assorted other measures. Lots of homes have taken advantage of these offers and if you have a loft that hasn’t been topped up yet or a cavity wall that hasn’t been insulated, you should too.
But this activity only tackles one aspect of a home’s energy consumption and this tactic will not be sufficient to achieve an 80% reduction. Instead, a whole house approach is the most logical way to go about it.
A whole house approach doesn’t mean that the whole house has to be done in one go. Instead you want to consider all of the solutions that are appropriate to your home, work out the order you need to do them in to deliver the biggest carbon savings at lowest cost and then do the maximum amount possible as each opportunity to do the work arises.
These opportunities might include moving house, redecorating, roof repairs, re-pointing your walls or redoing your kitchen. It might even be something as simple as doing a spring clean and Freecycling the contents of your loft, freeing up space to add more insulation.
If you are considering doing any of this sort of general work to your home, you should be looking at improving the building’s energy performance and do as much work, to as high a possible standard (beyond building regulations) as you can afford.
While it will stretch your budget, the cost of doing that same energy efficiency work in a few years time will in many cases be considerably higher because you might have to strip back to the brickwork, put up scaffolding, do the work and then redecorate all over again. If you are going to have tradespeople on site anyway, there are savings to be had in the long run by doing that extra bit of work at the same time.
You also want to have to do each energy efficiency measure once only so you should look for the best solution for each aspect of your home. For this reason, measures that appear to be a cheap fix (insulating wallpaper springs to mind) are best avoided. While the costs are often a lot more modest than the alternatives (in this case full solid wall insulation), so are the energy savings and you might well find that in some years time you’ll need to go through the whole process again.
Financial support is moving in the direction of a whole house approach at the moment. In the next couple of years we are going to start to see the introduction of funding that pays for the more costly measures up front. You then pay this money back from the energy savings, with any outstanding balance remaining with the home, not the homeowner.
Between now and the introduction of this support, there’s lots that you can be getting on with to reduce energy consumption in the home. Work out what could be done to your home and what you can afford and then keep an eye out for those times when you’re going to be doing work anyway and take advantage of those opportunities to invest in energy efficiency.
The next post will point you to a guide that goes into more detail on this whole house approach and should stimulate some ideas.