The company says: “Our Green Print underlines the scale of the challenge ahead, acknowledging that a mosaic of low carbon heating solutions will be required to meet the needs of individual communities, and setting out 12 key steps that can be taken now in order to get us there.”
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) estimates an investment spend of £250bn to upgrade insulation and heating in homes, as well as provide the infrastructure to deliver the energy.
Approximately 80% of all homes that will exist in 2050 have already been built. The energy performance of these buildings typically remains relatively poor with 61% of the housing stock rated as EPC Band D or below.
The report summary reads: “The scale of the change needed is unprecedented, particularly regarding the changes needed inside consumers’ homes. Every single one of the 22 million homes using fossil gas today for heat and hot water will require both energy efficiency and heating retrofits – even before we consider off-grid LPG and oil properties.
“To put this in perspective, if we started today, we’d have to retrofit 67,000 homes every month from now until 2050. When compared to today’s deployment rates of heat pumps at around 30,000 per year, it’s clear that the scale of this challenge is huge. While the CCC have rightly outlined the importance of scaling supply chains and skills, scaling up consumer acceptability and demand will be equally as important.
“There is a lot of activity developing the policy framework needed tomeet this challenge, but more is needed. Some of that may be delivered by the planned Heat and Buildings Strategy and Hydrogen Strategy – neither of which had been released at the time of writing this report. Given the scale of what is needed, delivery needs to start now – on energy efficiency, heat pump deployment, heat network build-out and on ensuring hydrogen plays a central role too.”