On 26th October 2022, some of us went to a presentation at Nottingham University on the Nottingham Retrofit Program. Whilst it was based on Nottingham City’s experiences on retrofitting their housing stock to help them achieve Net Zero, it emphasised the scale (and cost) of reducing the carbon emissions of the UK Housing stock. The slides presented are available on the Climate Emergency Design Initiative website but it includes some pretty damning information.
Did you know:
- The UK has some of the poorest performing housing stock in Europe
- In Nottingham over 60% of the housing stock has an Energy Performance Certificate below C (in Broxtowe its over 50%)
- The Government’s definition of Fuel Poverty is when after paying energy costs the resulting household income is below the poverty line and Nottingham has 20% of Households in Fuel Poverty – the national average is 13.2%
- We don’t know the energy performance of the existing housing stock, we can only guess based upon age & size (one presenter was pretty scathing about the usefulness of the EPC as a measure)
- The cost of a complete retrofit program for Nottingham City’s Homes is estimated to be £7.2B
Whilst our Neighbourhood Area’s housing stock is probably newer than Nottingham City, the scale of the issue is huge.
On the positive side, the presentation was preceded by a visit to Nottingham University’s Sustainable Homes which showed (amongst other things) that it is possible to design and build homes using Modern Methods of Construction that require no additional power other than that which is generated by the home.
Go and look at the Climate Design Initiative’s website and realise that solving this problem is like eating an elephant, solved one house at a time.
