Four years ago a UK report advocated public housing as the optimal launch pad for a campaign to meet the committments to achieve decarbonization of homes1. Progress toward this vision has been slow, and sheds some light on how the rest of the world could proceed.
First, let’s look at some of the sources of friction that make it hard to move faster.
One of the chronic challenges for Net-Zero retrofits – where building performance and occupant comfort increase a lot – is the tension between policy and practicality. Policy is often developed to be “fair.” Big change is often believed to cost a lot of money, especially when it comes to retrofitting existing buildings to perform at a Net-Zero level. And so the UK has adopted a gradual-increase strategy for building codes.
A gradual approach pulls in the opposite direction to practicality. For landlords the logical time to replace equipment and upgrade building envelopes is when they wear out. The cycle time is 30+ years and is completely out of sync with gradual increases in building code performance. It means the last retrofit is far from amortized before the next retrofit is needed. It leads to a piecemeal approach that drives up costs.
With no clear signal for Net-Zero retrofits there’s no incentive for trades to learn the skills needed. So anybody who does do a Net-Zero retrofit pays a hefty premium.
Finally, even if a landlord is willing to pay the premium it’s very difficult to get a clear picture of the costs and benefits of various retrofit scenarios. You need an energy audit from a building surveyor… a design from an architect… a construction cost estimate from a contractor… and finance from yet another source.
The process is iterative, with loops within loops. The energy audit is the longest loop, kicking off the entire process and ending it. Several turns around the loop of architect, contractor, and finance are usually required to come up with the lowest total cost of ownership and climate impact and optimal occupant comfort.
All these players are cautious about the process due to their inexperience. There just aren’t that many Net-Zero projects, yet. Inexperience makes everybody cautious. That drives the price up. And so change may even grind to a halt at times.
One organization that’s helping to address these challenges is IRT Surveys in Dundee Scotland. Stewart Little and his brother Alan co-founded the company in 2002 to address a need they saw for faster and clearer energy surveys of buildings, particularly social housing. The problems were intimately familiar to Stewart after 10-plus years of experience as an architectural technician and roofing specifier for a wide variety of building types.
The Littles’ plan was to speed up the process and provide better data for the architects, engineers and contractors. The first step was better building surveys. So IRT Surveys would use thermal imaging with an infrared (IR) camera and directly image the entire structure and all its details at high resolution.
Twenty years ago IR cameras were bulky, heavy and cost 10s of 1,000s of dollars. There was still a lot of handwork involved to correlate the IR image with actual energy loss. Landlords liked the clear pictures. Infrared imaging showed clearly where the insulation gaps were, overlaid on the actual building.
Landlords began to ask for the big picture view. How did each building in their portfolio perform relative to all the others? So IRT Surveys developed software to show that. The system is linked to GIS databases so landlords can see where the most energy inefficient properties are, as well as why these properties under perform2.
As IRT Surveys grew, it developed software to link its energy survey data with the databases and software used by architects, engineers and contractors to design and price building retrofits. Over time they would join up the data “silos” of the other professions in the building retrofit process, and then continue to improve flow throughout.
IRT Surveys has also addressed the financing disconnect by attracting a pool of patient capital, investors with payback timeframes of 15-20 years and more3. These are investors with a business model and values that align with social housing.
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place recently with a strategic partnership that adds a cloud-based turnkey planning solution for decarbonisation, energy efficiency, and energy generation retrofit projects for housing associations and local authorities.
It turns out all this clarity also helps to win the support of tenants. It quantifies how their lives will improve in terms of air quality and temperature. And most of all, a chance to exit energy poverty.
This kind of end-to-end approach seems to be essential. It gives landlords and tenants a fighting chance to embrace the solution that demands the biggest change – but delivers the biggest rewards.
You can read more IRT and its software here: Optimized Retrofits
Read more about the new strategic partnership at businesswire: Tallarna and IRT Surveys Announce a Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Building Decarbonisation
This article in The Conversation looks at some of the far reaching effects of energy poverty and the benefits for tenants who live in social housing: Energy poverty is linked to physical and mental health – our research proves it
Footnotes
- Building decarbonization is a 3-step process. 1) Reduce energy demand by increasing insulation and air tightness. 2) Switch to lowest-carbon energy sources for space heating/cooling, water heating, appliances. 3) Use on-site storage and software controls to supply electricity to the grid during times of peak demand. Read more at Rocky Mountain Institute: Decarbonizing Homes
- Since IRT Surveys opened in 2002 it has surveyed over 350,000 homes and 2,000 commercial buildings, including Buckingham Palace, The White House, Reichstag and EU Headquarters.
- A very different set of expectations compared to venture capital, where timeframes are less than 10 years.
