A future free from fossil fuel

Catrin Maby

The sharp rise in energy prices this winter has added to the cost of living struggle that many households were already facing across the UK. Our housing is old and thermally inefficient, and we are heavily dependent on buying in energy to heat our homes and water, to cook our food and to run the myriad electrical appliances that we have come to rely on in modern life.

At the same time, we are painfully aware of the impact of this energy use on the environment.

Today’s announcement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is very uncomfortable to read. It confirms, yet again, the extraordinary urgency of action on climate change, the ‘threat to human well-being and planetary health’, and that the window of opportunity to take effective action is ‘brief and rapidly closing’.

But the window is still there. For now. And we do have solutions. Households can be protected from future energy price shocks as well as making a significant contribution to mitigating climate change by making homes thermally efficient, and providing residual energy needs with renewable energy.

This means that all new homes must be built to the most exacting low carbon standards, without dependence on fossil fuels — but we also need to tackle the much bigger challenges of the existing housing stock, in the owner occupied and private rented sectors as well as social housing.

This is not at all easy, but it has to be faced, and because it’s difficult, it takes time and we can’t delay. We have made a good start here in Wales, but we need to keep up momentum and accelerate action. The problem is how to make this happen in practice, and to do so in a way that avoids creating new hardship.

A particularly difficult sector to tackle is owner occupied housing. At around 70% of homes in Wales, we can’t just put it aside in the ‘too difficult’ box. This is challenging in several ways — not least that we are not talking any more just about those ‘quick payback’ measures, which are easy to install, not too disruptive, and swiftly repay the costs of the work in energy bill savings. Loft and cavity wall insulation, low energy lighting and efficient gas boilers are the norm now, and have been supported by a range of grants and incentives for many years. But we have to go much further — we need to move away from fossil fuels completely. This means doing the more expensive and disruptive stuff too. While there may well be further technological developments to help us in coming years, we can do this with what we have already tried and tested — by insulating as much of the external envelope as possible, installing solar (thermal and PV) wherever suitable, and providing residual heat and hot water needs through low carbon heat networks and electric heat pumps. The shift to electric heating goes hand in hand with continued progress on decarbonising our electricity supply.

So how can we make this happen, when these homes are owned and lived in by more than a million different households? Wales is not alone in facing this challenge of course. This is a global problem, albeit with variations in the characteristics of buildings, climate, tenure and so on. There is an ongoing debate amongst EU policy makers and interest groups about the idea of regulating for minimum energy efficiency standards in owner occupied housing, as well as in the (typically more closely regulated) social or managed housing stock.

It is interesting to note that Scotland is a pioneer in this. In 2019, the Scottish Government consulted on setting minimum energy performance standards for owner-occupied homes, and last October published their Heat in Buildings Strategy, which sets the scene for implementing it. It is not an easy thing to achieve, and the devil is in the detail, of course.

The way forward could be to set a minimum fabric energy efficiency standard, triggered by change of ownership and major works on the home — together with a parallel programme to phase out fossil fuel boilers. The latter might be achieved by a ban on new or replacement boilers after a specified date. The fabric work needs to come first as far as possible, so that the design of heating system is adapted to the new lower heat demand. This is also a safeguard against higher bills for those moving from mains gas, which has benefitted from levies being applied only to electricity.

To achieve this requires a robust enabling framework, including advice and support through the retrofit process, finance tailored to the needs of different households, and effective quality control. It also requires a reform of the current Energy Performance Certificate, to provide a rating which reflects fabric energy efficiency specifically (rather than the current running cost basis), and to reduce the assumptions and simplifications which limit accuracy. These EPCs would ideally form part of a renovation plan, showing how a home can be retrofitted to be zero carbon, and the steps towards that goal.

There are limitations to devolved powers to be worked through, particularly with respect to fossil fuel boiler phase-out. But these are challenges facing the whole of the UK, and it would be good to see a coordinated approach, taking a lead from Scotland on this. This needs to be done. Let’s bite the bullet and start now.

Dr Catrin Maby OBE is an independent researcher, based in South Wales. She stood as Labour candidate for Monmouth for the Senedd elections in May 2021.