An Ocean Housing project
We held a webinar discussing the challenges of decarbonising rural properties, and here are some of the key takeaways from the session.
The webinar was hosted by Rachel England, with expert speakers Liam Augarde, Energy Improvement Manager, Ocean Housing in Cornwall and Emma Fletcher, Low Carbon Homes Director, Octopus.
The panel discussed the route to zero carbon for rural housing associations and landlords, including the potential challenges insulating rural buildings, low-carbon heating options for off-grid properties and the need for renewable infrastructure in rural communities.
The housing stock
The speakers agreed that one of the biggest challenges in rural areas is the condition of the properties. Emma Fletcher said: “Statistically most villages, for example, have half of their housing stock at least 50 years old, if not actually a hundred years old or more.” These older homes can be hard-to-treat, Liam agreed. He said: “Generally the properties in rural areas are larger, solid wall properties and we’ve got a lot of system built properties as well, particularly Cornish unit type ones and type twos. They’re typically hard to insulate, especially when you’re going for the fabric first approach, it can be quite costly and difficult to do.”
Geography
The location of rural homes can also make low-energy retrofits more of a challenge, said Liam. “If we look to retrofit a hundred properties, it’s much easier for us to do two schemes of 50 than it is to do a hundred schemes of one or 50 schemes of two, for example. And that goes right the way through the retrofit process for us, from project inception, the retrofit assessments under the PAS 2035 scheme, the design, the surveys themselves and the works, if we look at site set up for the contractors as well, it’s much more attractive to be working in one area than spread out across the county.”
Social engagement
On the subject of the social challenges involved in retrofit projects, Emma spoke about her own experience of decarbonising her own village – Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire – and getting the community on board. She said: “The way that the villages are now, there may not be a rural pub anymore or community hub where people came together to talk about these things. So you literally need street by street champions talking about this stuff. Rural communities have to do something and collectively they can work together – and I think there’s a role for big landlords such as affordable housing associations in order to achieve that.”
Liam agreed that bringing residents on the journey is important: “I think there are different incentives in the private sector to the social sector. I think where the private sector looks to undertake retrofit, it’s a choice that they’ve made to do that, wheareas in the social sector, it’s something that our tenants have done to them. Essentially we create our programmes to meet our EPC targets, so one of the key things for us is getting the tenants on board, making them aware of these new technologies that are coming and why we’re doing it essentially.”
Supply chain
Economies of scale are harder to achieve when decarbonising rural homes that might not all be in one location, said Liam, explaining that this was a big driver in Ocean developing its own in-house team. “We only border one county, Devon, so in terms of contractor availability, we found that’s quite an issue. We got over that was by assisting our current contractors in gaining their PAS 2030 accreditations, and we also deliver that service in-house as well and we’ve got our own in-house trades team – the coordinator, assessor and designer in-house, as well.”
Renewable energy
Both Emma and Liam spoke about the important of prioritising the fabric of homes, looking at how to best insulate properties. They also spoke about renewable energy in rural areas and how social landlords can maximise the benefits. Talking about combining solar and energy storage, Emma said: “In rural properties, there’s less issue over shading on the whole and less apartment blocks. So there are more houses that you can accommodate solar onto the roof and if you can’t get it on the roof, there are options for arrays on the ground or in canopies or on garages. On the whole, you’ve got a little bit more space to play with rural properties than you have in the urban environment.”
Liam agreed that fabric first is the way to go. He said: “Reduce the heat demand first and then once you’re down to a certain level, where it’s viable you can look at low carbon technologies. The funding has also aligned towards that fabric first approach as well, particularly in the social sector, which I think is good. We do have air source heat pumps and ground source heat pumps in our properties. However, we do need to make sure that the fabric is correct first. The older properties, the rural properties generally need a significant amount of money spending on the fabric before those heat pumps are economically viable for the tenant to use.”
To watch the session on demand visit: crowdcast.io/c/decarb-rural-homes
