Delivering the extremely ambitious carbon reduction goals announced by the Prime Minister during Earth Day will require a return to some good engineering first principles and long-term financial incentives.
The government deserves praise for showing global leadership in announcing its new target to cut carbon emissions by 78% compared with 1990 levels by 2035 in line with the latest Carbon Budget. However, announcing the target is one thing – turning it into reality is quite another.
Financial incentives will have to play an even more significant part than they have in the past and will also have to be long-term and coherent. This is not an area where the government has a good track record.
The built environment is responsible for more than 40% of the UK’s total annual emissions so its transformation must form a centrepiece of the new strategy. However, the government already has some ground to make up and needs to convince the building engineering industry that it is serious.
To achieve long-term, low carbon aims the country needs to have long-term, well managed initiatives
The Green Home Grants scheme, which launched amid much fanfare last year, has just been cancelled having achieved less than 10% of its target to transform the energy performance of 600,000 homes. No sooner had business minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan told parliament that only £320m of the original £1.5bn would be made available for the voucher scheme – it was unceremoniously dropped completely.
The government says consumers were reluctant to apply for the grants because they did not want contractors coming into their homes during the pandemic. However, many householders reported waiting months for their applications to be approved and hundreds of small firms had payments due through the fund so severely delayed that some went out of business.
History
This all seemed far too much like history repeating itself. Many companies in our sector got their fingers burned with the earlier Green Deal and organisations like BESA spent considerable time and effort trying to persuade members to get behind this latest initiative.
To achieve long-term, low carbon aims the country needs to have long-term, well managed initiatives. This stop-start approach will have the opposite effect by turning off both the industry and consumers.
We were also disappointed that the Chancellor did not take the opportunity in his recent Budget to reduce VAT on energy saving measures to support building retrofits. This means he ignored a recommendation from the parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), which also urged him to reallocate the unspent GHG funding to long-term decarbonisation plans.
“Making 19 million homes ready for net zero Britain by 2050 is an enormous challenge that the government appears to have not yet grasped,” said EAC chairman Philip Dunne MP. “In the next 29 years, the Government must improve energy efficiency upgrades and roll out low carbon heating measures…starting now. A much better understanding of cost, pace, scale and feasibility of skills development is desperately needed.”
Pump priming such a huge market with public funds also makes good business sense as it creates and preserves jobs and gives companies confidence to invest in the future. This makes the new 2035 target a great opportunity to, not just help tackle the climate crisis, but also drive economic recovery.
The government has put £1bn into its decarbonisation strategy to improve the performance of industrial and commercial buildings. The industry will now be watching closely to make sure that is properly supported.
Schools, hospitals and other public buildings are at the heart of the Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy, which aims to reduce carbon emissions from buildings by two thirds in 15 years. The strategy has already allocated almost £1bn to 429 retrofit projects across England and Wales and is promoting the uptake of low carbon solutions like heat pumps, solar power, and insulation.
“The government deserves great credit for putting such an impressive programme together and giving it significant financial support,” said Emma Brooks, chair of the BESA Energy Efficiency in Buildings group, which is a joint venture with the Energy Services and Technology Association (ESTA).
“However, while there are some very exciting plans for technology developments in the plan, we strongly believe that we must go back to the basics of energy efficiency first. There is still plenty of low hanging fruit to be plucked in the industrial and commercial building sector from making relatively low-cost improvements to the ‘real life’ energy performance of installed systems.
“If we can focus on those first that will give the programme a solid basis on which to build,” she added.
Missed opportunity
Her group has highlighted a number of gaps in government policy and support adding there was a danger that the excitement around alternative sources of power like renewables and plans to use hydrogen in the gas grid was pushing energy efficiency measures to the back of queue. This, and the greater attention paid to the residential sector, was making commercial buildings a “missed opportunity”.
“Energy efficiency is just as important as low carbon sources of power in the battle to narrow the country’s looming grid capacity gap,” said Brooks. “It is understandable that renewable power and emerging technologies are seen as more ‘sexy’, but without huge improvements in the energy efficiency of commercial buildings, in particular, the country will not achieve its net zero carbon goals.”
She said the government had seemed to have a clearer route for the residential sector, but the failure of the green home scheme raised serious questions about its commitment to energy saving across the built environment as a whole.
Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said the decarbonisation programme would create and support up to 80,000 jobs over the next three decades and was a serious statement of intent ahead of this year’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow. He said the government would also introduce new rules for measuring the energy and carbon performance of the largest commercial and industrial buildings that could save businesses around £2bn per year in energy costs by 2030.
In the long-term, the government believes the plan can lead to a 90% cut in emissions by 2050 compared to 2018 levels with heavy industry expected to source 40% of its energy needs from low carbon technologies.
Gathering actual energy consumption data – rather than projected or estimated statistics – is the key to delivering meaningful energy efficiency savings. Greater take up of smart metering and open source data sharing would provide building managers with a clear picture of where they can make the biggest savings and could be linked to specific technical improvements.
Turning energy performance data into something useful around which building operators can build an energy and carbon reduction strategy could unlock millions of pounds in savings every year. It would also move us relatively quickly and cheaply towards the government’s longer-term goals and ensure it got the best value from this significant investment.
This makes a very strong case for getting back to engineering fundamentals. Poor energy performance of a building is usually an indicator of wider problems with its overall design and operation so there are comfort and safety implications as well.
It is also important to change the mind-set around design so that buildings are regarded as a complete system rather than as a series of loosely connected components. Encouraging a more joined up approach with control systems driven by real-time energy data will be key to delivering the government’s carbon reduction goals.
BESA is working on a series of initiatives aimed at encouraging better use of energy performance data to drive improvements in non-residential building design and occupant behaviour. It is responding to the current consultation on revisions to Part L of the Building Regulations and hopes to highlight the role of commercial building retrofits at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this November.
The opportunities are still there, but the failure of the green home grant scheme has once again put the industry on alert. The government has some work to do to prove that it really does mean business when it comes to improving energy efficiency in buildings, which will be critical to our 2035 – and 2050 – goals.
