We spoke to Christopher Price, Technical Development Manager at Knauf Insulation, about how innovation is altering the landscape of decarbonisation within the housing industry.
Tell us about your role at Knauf Insulation?
Our technical team has dual responsibilities, both assessing standards, testing and certification, as well as providing a support service which enables anyone to make enquiries about our products and how to install them. I sit within the standards testing and certification side and oversee what happens to our insulation after it leaves the factory.
This involves consistently answering a series of questions – how is the product installed? How could it be installed better? How can we deliver the outcomes that people want? Ultimately, people are looking for a real range of improvements from our products, whether that be reduced heat loss, better acoustic performance or developed fire performance.
I’m also involved in the sustainability of our products, so I look at Environmental Product Declarations and secure them for all of our manufacturing facilities. These product declarations inform us about the sustainability of the product, and most notably at the moment, they’re used for calculating the embodied carbon of products. To put it another way, they tell us the carbon dioxide emissions or global warming potential of a certain amount of our products so that people can then use it to specify lower carbon buildings.
It’s interesting the breadth of areas I’m involved in, so that one day I could be crawling around in a loft looking at how insulation is being installed, to ensure it performs on site. Then on another day, I could be discussing government policy with civil servants and how best our solutions can align with sustainable ambitions.
What are your ambitions for the next five years?
As a family-owned company, Knauf Insulation can be very forward-thinking in its philosophy. In my position, I appreciate that my own personal values really align with the clear purpose of the business. The long-term plan set in place by Knauf involves several core pillars. One of these is to create better buildings, which is about ensuring that our products make the right contribution to the energy efficiency, acoustics, fire safety and sustainability of buildings. Hence, a significant proportion of my work is assessing the real-life performance of our insulation.
We want to make certain that when our insulation products leave the factory and are installed, they deliver the decarbonisation outcomes that people desire. Of course, the primary purpose of insulation is to reduce energy demand, but at Knauf Insulation we also consider the carbon impact of our production processes, and how we can reduce this footprint as much as feasibly possible too.
It’s essential to adopt a wider perspective of the sustainability picture, because we can’t become blind to all other aspects involved in sustainability by solely focusing on the impact our products have once installed in buildings. Prioritising this holistic approach and applying it to all Knauf Insulation projects and missions is really the current long-term ambition.
Are there any recent successes or innovations that you are particularly proud of?
I’m currently collaborating with our sister company, Knauf Energy Solutions, along with various social housing providers, to deliver some really innovative projects at the forefront of government policy.
Government bodies are looking at how we can measure the thermal performance of buildings, and how we can actually build these learnings into government funded schemes. Specifically, I’m working with the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) at the moment, and we’ve discovered a fascinating strand around the digitalisation of retrofit.
Social housing providers are really exploring what this means for them, and we’re offering some progressive solutions for them. They want to know how to recognise when a retrofit they’ve carried out on a property has been a success and what they could improve upon. By measuring the thermal performance of their housing stock, we can help them to better understand these sorts of queries and allow them to take these learnings into the future.
We’re now on wave 2.1 of delivery of the SHDF, which involves me going onto estates and talking with social housing customers. Wave 3 has just come out, which includes strands that suggest consortia should also be looking at these tools, and the larger projects will be rewarded for incorporating our innovation into their bids. It’s certainly an exciting time, where we’re really pushing the boundaries of what retrofit looks like.
More generally, what future trends or policies do you think will have the biggest effect on the energy landscape?
I see a lot of overlap between government ambitions and the sorts of projects that we’re working on. A huge area that needs tackling is the performance gap. This is where the property that has been built or retrofitted ends up performing differently from that which was specified. So, you end up with higher energy demand from a property than expected.
As a consequence of that, you have higher energy bills and less flexibility in when you can use energy. There are knock on effects from this, and we know from numerous studies that living in colder homes is very detrimental to the health and wellbeing of residents, and even the educational outcomes of children. Much of government policy to date has rightly focused on lifting people out of fuel poverty and helping them afford their energy bills to avoid some of those outcomes.
I think moving forward, though, legislation is going to focus a bit more on carbon reduction. In addition, I think we’ll emphasise outcomes over input. At the moment, the government mostly focus on ensuring buildings achieve an energy performance certificate rating of C. This is used as the measure that we are reducing fuel poverty.
However, when you combine that with the issue of the performance gap, you realise that the EPC system won’t necessarily be the right measure for understanding individual properties. I imagine policy will develop to address building energy efficiency in a more nuanced manner, and that the government will provide the framework within which industry can start to address that performance gap. It will be a case of tweaking, rather than overhauling the whole system, so that people are rewarded for outcomes rather than fitting certain criteria.
Another key area where policy is rapidly progressing is around embodied carbon and low carbon construction materials. If I look back 18 months or so ago, Environmental Product Declarations were very much something which simply ticked a box on a low carbon design; now, they are increasingly relevant within the industry as people start to scrutinise figures more closely and compare products on their embodied carbon levels. This criterion is being considered much earlier on in the design process, being seen as a core characteristic of products rather than just a nice to have.
Environmental Product Declarations have already evolved to become essential in the manufacturing sector. For example, I sit on the Whole Life Carbon Oversight Group at the Future Homes Hub, which is laying the foundations necessary for the calculation and potential regulation of embodied carbon. For example, analysing how can we calculate the whole life carbon of a property on a consistent basis, so that two people using two different tools get the same results. The ultimate aim is with these tools and methodologies, we can enable the government to direct more attention to the regulation of embodied carbon.
In terms of challenges you and Knauf Insulation will face moving forward, what would you say is the most significant roadblock to your work?
We know that within the retrofit sector, there are challenges across the board. From having a skilled workforce in place, to the technical challenges and the risk profile of retrofitting, there are lots of concerns to address and develop infrastructure around.
Another important focus is on consumer understanding and interests. If you give people the choice between putting a solar panel on their roof, or having extra insulation in their loft, most people will go for the solar panel, because it’s something tangible; it’s seen as effectively free electricity, and really appeals to the wider consumer psyche.
Then you have the ‘pitch’, as it were, for buying more insulation materials and reducing heat loss, which is far harder to quantify and make marketable. I think there needs to be a shift in how we promote insulation, so that consumers understand there are advantages beyond saving money on annual energy bills, such as living in a warmer home and having better air quality.
We don’t highlight these benefits nearly enough. Lots of people will buy a filter to improve their water quality and for the discernible health benefits, and it’s no different when it comes to improving the thermal performance of your home. If at the end of the process people feel healthier, consumers will feel the real value of the commitment.
I’d like to see the industry move beyond just speaking in monetary terms and start promoting the wider attractions of improving a home’s energy efficiency. It’s about connecting with people, rather than boiling it down just to saving pennies.
How can the industry best encourage workers to learn new green skills?
We know there’s an ageing workforce of skilled tradesmen that isn’t being replaced fast enough, which leads to a skill shortage. Really, the best way to engage with people and encourage them into the profession is to make sure that the positions are respected and desirable. The roles need to be seen as valuable and viable career paths, otherwise we won’t attract the talent needed for such a large-scale campaign.
The decarbonisation of buildings is also a complicated process, so whilst we need simple consumer messaging which has a broad appeal, we also need the complexity involved in the process of retrofitting to be reflected in the training that the workers are receiving. Industry roles are demanding and require extensive knowledge, so we need to offer support to workers to learn a multitude of skills, rather than limiting themselves to any particular niche.
We also need new tradespeople on a substantial scale. This goes beyond just getting young people to take up the profession, and requires the issue to be elevated to a national mission. We can see as consumer desire for decarbonisation is growing, so too is the ambition of policy makers on a national and local level, which is then reflected in support for accreditation schemes and apprenticeships. These all mutually support each other, and if the demand and frameworks are in place, I believe we’ll see a healthy stream of workers coming through.
All these pieces are really coming together, which makes it an exciting time to be involved in retrofit and construction.
What are some of the technologies in development at Knauf Insulation that you think will have the greatest impact in the future?
I mentioned earlier my ongoing work with Knauf Energy Solutions, which specialises in applying technology to assist and enhance building performance. As I’ve discussed, despite a lot of studies and policies targeted at reducing the performance gap, it stubbornly remains. The main reasoning behind this is that we’ve never really been able accurately to measure it. Traditionally, the method for gathering data was to enter empty homes and stick sensors to every surface, in order to measure the rate of heat flow. This is known as a co-heating test.
Knauf Energy Solutions has developed a new methodology for measuring heat loss, which combines sensor hardware with an advanced machine learning algorithm which works in the background..
By installing sensors and having the algorithm in support, people can carry on living in test buildings as normal. This means you can essentially subtract the effect of how people are using the property from the property performance, so that you just get an accurate measure of the building’s thermal efficiency. This obviously provides a far wider and more varied testing group than only using empty houses.
This tool also allows us, beyond just measuring properties, to set outcomes rather than inputs.
While an input would be a suggestion such as installing cavity insulation, an outcome would be a target, such as reducing heat demand by a certain percentage.
The success of our toolset in achieving set outcomes isn’t just theoretical, either. Knauf Energy Solutions has been running commercial projects in Belgium, where the team was tasked with reducing space heat demand by 25% across 160 homes. Within this sample size, the team actually reached an average reduction of 37%, so the target ultimately was conservative.
The UK government has seen our results and is keen to utilise these sorts of technologies and frameworks moving forward. In its ‘Energy Performance Certificate Action Plan’, published about four years ago, the government stated that EPCs should ‘provide a trusted, accurate and reliable measure of a building’s energy performance’, and we think our work will be of great aid to this resolution.
There should be a consultation coming out later in 2024 discussing the Home Energy Model, which will provide the basis for future home assessments moving forward. With the calculation methodology that Knauf Energy Solutions has pioneered, home energy reporting will be far more accurate and linked to the lived experiences of occupants. This will be a pivotal step in getting consumers engaged with decarbonisation, as they can feel secure that before committing to installing new technologies, the research behind their decision is backed up by more than just theoretical analysis.
