Tag: energy efficiency

My Carbon Footprint

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I was brought up to turn the lights off when I left a room, to save both money and energy. I remember the three day week of the 1970s and the power cuts when energy was rationed. That early training may help me now as I start the work of making my home more energy efficient.

I knew when I bought my home three years ago that I would need to do this eventually as it came with an energy performance certificate rating of E, which is pretty bad. Then recently, I checked out some of the carbon footprint calculators you can find online. This was partly for my own interest and partly because my parish council has declared a climate emergency, and as a councillor, I thought I should look at my own carbon emissions. Well, that didn’t go well!

I don’t fly much and aim to keep it that way, so I score points there, and although I drive an old diesel car, I don’t drive it very far. (The electric bike we bought this year is doing increasing mileage!) The main problem is household consumption of electricity and heating oil, which accounts for nearly 40% of my total footprint. It makes my energy bills high too.

The first step in trying to reduce that is to find out which household appliances are the greediest in energy terms. I have borrowed a couple of meters to help with this and am gradually working through the house. Most of my appliances are quite old, so it may be worth replacing some. Even though a new fridge freezer, for example, comes with embedded emissions from the manufacturing process, it’s greater energy efficiency (and lower running costs) may make it a worthwhile purchase.

Next is an assessment of where the house leaks heat, which will hopefully help me decide what I can do to improve this. More or better insulation may be called for, or perhaps I can start thinking about whether to install a heat pump and retire my oil-fired boiler. I might be able to apply for the government’s Green Homes Grant to help with costs, or the Renewable Heat Incentive. 

It’s a steep learning curve and I will need help along the way to make sensible decisions. It has opened my eyes, though, to the importance of economising on energy wherever possible. It might help my bank balance too. A win win in fact!

Are you interested in retrofit?

In 2019 nearly 70% of Teignbridge’s existing housing stock had an EPC rating D and below.  Despite the significant increase in new build, this % has changed little in the past 10 years and, in the last 2 years, has actually increased.

Green-House Gas (GHG) emissions from heating our buildings are significant with Teignbridge’s domestic emissions in 2018 accounted for approximately 25% of all its emissions, most of this from heating.

In order to to reach the UK’s Paris targets we can reduce emissions by retrofitting properties to:

  • decarbonise heating energy, by using low-carbon fuel sources (eg Biomass & Hydrogen) or switch to electric heating (eg. Heat Pumps) and using low-carbon electricity generation.
  • reduce the heating energy demanded by eliminating waste and minimising heat loss (ie with better insulation).

Homeowners invest significantly in home-improvements, especially in the able-to-pay sector, however this sector tends to have the highest GHG emissions, primarily because energy pricing is still low relative to incomes in that sector.

Whilst Climate Change is accepted as a serious threat by the majority of the population, including the able-to-pay-sector, it is still the case that, in general, they do not act to address their contribution to Climate Change.

Those who do act are faced with a plethora of solutions, deals and government incentives.  More often than not, many are either disappointed that their emissions and running costs have not reduced significantly or they do not measure the GHG emission reduction to find out.  One of the most common concerns is ‘can I trust the salesperson?’ followed by ‘will the builder do a good job?’.

To address this, ACT is considering an initiative, initially targeted at the able-to-pay, to identify local commercial organisations with the expertise and quality of work, backed by relevant industry standards, to deliver bespoke whole house retrofit solutions.

By identifying suitable customers, designers, architects, builders and material suppliers we hope to demonstrate that a sufficient market can be stimulated to become self-sustaining.  This will of course represent a small percentage of the retrofit needed, but it could be a model to deliver more ambitious initiatives such as in the Carbon Coop model. 

Teignbridge District Council does not currently have plans, or resources, to formally address this and Housing Associations will develop their own specific supply-chain solutions.

Teignbridge has a large number of older, poorly insulated, rural properties.  Increasingly these properties are owned by those wanting to undertake significant improvements and having the budgets to do so.  Normally a piecemeal approach, based on little (if any) measurements or holistic assessment, results in costly retrofits and inappropriate heating solutions.

As an impartial community-based organisation ACT is ideally placed to bring the different parties together under a replicable scheme of effective retrofits, helping to develop a template scheme for both homeowners and service providers.

The initial model proposed is that adopted by the Carbon Coop, based around an assessment/design phase and using suitably experienced local builders/crafts people.

To get the scheme started, ACT would need someone to either volunteer or be paid (grant funding may be available) to identify suitable providers and customers and liaise with similar groups to discover their approach and put a proposal together on how it could work in Teignbridge.

Ideally, we should also find a customer with a retrofit project willing to work with ACT’s Built Environment & Energy group to pilot some of the approaches already well understood.  Trialling each of the elements of the scheme to identify an appropriate supply chain should help identify problems that may occur.  Several such projects are likely to be needed before a Teignbridge-specific model is developed.

Are you interested? If so, drop us an email with your details.

Extracted from a paper written by Fuad Al-Tawil