Decarbonising our homes - and our communities.

Twenty to forty percent of an industrialised nation’s carbon emissions come from heating and powering buildings. The technologies to reduce this (energy efficiency, electrified heat and renewable onsite micro generation) are well known.? Low carbon, energy-efficient homes are cheaper to run and healthier to live in, creating economic and social value beyond the carbon reduction. An accelerated built environment energy transition should be a no-brainer.?

Yet in the UK, like most nations, the energy transition simply isn’t happening. The status quo approach is a combination of politically difficult policies and technology-siloed subsidies aimed at encouraging individual building owners to indebt themselves. Yet retrofit levels remain anaemic; a new model is required.?

Critically, we need a model that is people-centred, rooted in enabling communities to take agency over their own neighbourhoods. Local authorities, like those in Hounslow and the West Midlands are catching on, and developing business cases for ‘Net Zero Neighbourhood’ demonstrators.??

Net Zero Neighbourhoods (NZN) can reduce the overall cost of retrofitting, minimise the need for public subsidy and maximise social, environmental, and economic impact. Hounslow, for example, is establishing NZNs to help the council meet ambitious targets, like reducing its carbon emissions by 50% by 2026.??

The model has four fundamental requirements:??

1. To drive citizen acceptance, a positive narrative must be built by delivering impact that people care about, improving lives locally rather than “just” a focus on carbon.? So, we must think regeneratively and holistically.?
2. Any approach that requires individual homeowners to borrow money to fund the work cannot hope to scale and even if people could be forced to do this, it would be deeply regressive.? So, we must design a central funding mechanism.?
3. To improve the fundability of the transition, ways must be found to both bring the costs down through economies of scale, and aggregate the investment requirement so that very long-term, patient capital can be applied which typically requires large investment. So, we must think at a neighbourhood, rather than house-by-house, scale.?
4. To support fundraising, as much of the economic value that is created for all stakeholders must be identified, quantified and leveraged. So, we must think beyond just energy saving to job creation, lower healthcare costs and increased productivity.?

To achieve this, the NZN involves planning, and co-designing with the community, a series of interventions across a mixed tenure/mixed use neighbourhood (around 1,000 properties). This work is then funded centrally through a blended mixture of public subsidy, institutional capital and outcome-buying capital.? There is no need for upfront contribution to take on debt for residents: instead they would contribute a portion of the energy saving that results through their ongoing utility bill, leaving them financially better off.?

Future NZN projects are being planned in Bristol , Manchester and Rossendale amongst others, and more on the model can be found here .?

Rufus Grantham is a co-founder of Living Places .