The Warm Homes Plan is a good start – but Britain needs a plan for all its buildings

Comment by Christine St John Cox, Platform Lead for Complex Site Decarbonisation at Energy Systems Catapult

The Warm Homes Plan, released at the end of last month, offers huge potential to help homeowners benefit from cheap, clean power and make their homes more energy efficient. But are we forgetting something?

Typically, we spend an equal number of our waking hours in our places of work, learning or play. We depend on those environments to create economic growth locally and nationally, and help to make our society healthier and better educated. Despite expectations and discussions before the plan was published, there is little in the Warm Homes Plan covering non-residential buildings or the organisations that operate them, and little sign from government that any significant policy progress is on the horizon.

Whilst homes make up a much larger proportion of our built estate, about a third of energy consumed is in non-residential and industrial buildings. And this building stock is even more complex than our homes. It’s a myriad of forms, size, uses and ownership – covering everything from your local shop and school to prestige office blocks and NHS hospitals.

Improving these buildings and making sure they efficiently use home-grown energy, rather than imported gas, is hugely important. Not only for our ambitions to cut carbon, but also to reduce energy bills and boost the health and wellbeing of their occupants.

Yet with a spluttering economy, and too many businesses struggling to grow, there are opportunities the Warm Homes Plan has missed:

• We should be supporting organisations, empowering them to optimise their energy costs.
  For example, the opportunity for raising EPC ratings similar to domestic buildings was missed. Other options to encourage better performance could include buying the best energy for their needs, supporting flexibility contracts and gaining revenue, or helping them reduce their energy use. There is also a huge opportunity for innovative technology and business models to cut cost and carbon. Our guidance for public sector decarbonisation has helped build capability and capacity, and supported decision-making so we understand the positive impact tackling bills and emissions can have.
• We can stimulate growth by supporting the adoption of innovation to improve efficiency.
  Our recent Retrofit Accelerator showed that there are some fantastic products, many using AI, that offer efficiencies for the operators of non-residential buildings. Companies such as ecoDriver, Atamate and Heliotec Energy are itching to help the non-domestic sector cut its costs.

If we don’t enable businesses and others to transition to a better future, they will continue to have higher energy bills than necessary, cutting into profit margins and limiting future investment. We will struggle to wean ourselves off imported gas and leave our economy exposed to the same risks that emerged during the recent energy crisis.

At a national level, our ability to meet carbon budgets will also be stilted. Investment in better homes will only deliver part of the carbon budgets. It cannot compensate for the ongoing lack of progress in our places of work, learning and play.

There are wider ramifications. If we carry on without any significant policy changes, and a lack of funding for the public sector following the discontinuation of the Low Carbon Skills Fund and the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, we can expect poor outcomes:

• Innovation opportunities lost: innovators supporting the non-residential sector that have previously thrived under past policies and schemes will shrink and dwindle.
• National energy system resilience put at risk: at a national level we’ll be more at risk of system blackouts if we do not realise the agility to manage the large energy loads across our networks.
• The wrong, dirtier technologies become locked in: imminent investment decisions are likely to make it harder for us to achieve carbon budgets. Many combined heat and power (CHP) plants, a mainstay of campuses and complex sites, are coming to the end of their operational lives. Without a regulatory driver or support, they are likely to be replaced with the same technology, missing the opportunity to upgrade. Once seen as the solution for cheap low-carbon energy supply these need to be replaced with cleaner solutions. Progress on heat networks will also be harder, with less engagement on the larger heat loads in the commercial, public sector and industrial sectors.
• Jobs and skills lost: industry has built up capacity and capability to deliver non-residential projects supported by the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme and the Low Carbon Skills Fund creating an estimated 30,000 jobs. The withdrawal of funding and focus in this area will see the seedling industry reduce, and knowledge and skills dissipate.

This all sounds rather gloomy. Turning our back on progress in non-residential buildings risks losing the chance to really support our energy system, economy and communities.