A new almanac for energy efficiency professionals has been published by Elmhurst Energy, the UK’s largest accreditation scheme for energy assessors.
The report captures key facts and figures about the current state of the energy performance of UK buildings and provides links to all the most important policy developments, consultations and regulatory developments affecting the sector in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.
It also spells out Elmhurst’s top 10 policy recommendations for the year ahead, including the company’s repeated call to Government to redesign energy performance certificates to allow EPCs to give equal focus to energy consumption, cost and carbon emissions.
Stuart Fairlie, managing director of Elmhurst, says: “The domestic EPC was set up in 2007 as a cost metric and hasn’t been updated since. Unfortunately, EPC ratings are now being used as a policy tool to reduce carbon emissions and therefore climate change. This just doesn’t work.
“Elmhurst has been calling for the redesign of the EPC for many years. We want to see EPCs giving equal focus to energy consumption, cost and carbon emissions.
“Fortunately, the national calculation methodologies (SAP and SBEM) can present all three metrics and we believe all three should be presented in the EPC. We have even designed a new EPC to show how it could look.
“Once we have made this change to EPCs, governments can align their regulations to the relevant metric. For example, policy initiatives to tackle fuel poverty can focus on cost, while initiatives on reducing energy use could be measured by energy consumption, and climate change regulations could be based on a measurement of carbon emissions.
“Not since the 1970s has the UK had so many concerns about the price of energy and security of supply. The issues are also complicated by the urgent need to tackle climate change and achieve Net Zero by 2050 if we are to stand any chance of keeping global warming under control.
“Thankfully, unlike the 1970s, we have many of the carbon-reducing, fuel bill busting, energy efficiency solutions at our fingertips, if only we could implement them nationally. That’s why we are renewing our call for action through our almanac – these changes feel more urgent than ever before.”
Other priorities explored in the Elmhurst Almanac include:
- Use of the ‘Golden Triangle’ to inform decision-making in low carbon retrofit programmes, bringing asset ratings, occupancy rating and energy consumption data together in a coordinated way to inform decisions on a local and national scale.
- Ensuring all energy certificates reflect the current state of the property – the 10-year validity period is too long. Elmhurst says that EPCs should never be older than 3 years and should be re-issued whenever there is a change to the building which impacts its energy performance.
- Improving Display Energy Certificates (DECs) and implementing them in the private sector – lack of investment, and a dependence on ‘free’ government software, has meant that the methodology behind DECs has not been updated in over 10 years. This needs to change.
- Expanding and updating energy assessment methodologies to address the energy used to cool buildings.
- Changing the funding mechanism in the Government’s ECO programme so that it supports the whole house retrofit approach, including upfront assessments and planning to ensure the right measures go in the right order for the good of the occupiers.
- Using energy assessors to support the introduction of more renewable technologies.
- Rebalancing the tax applied to low emission fuels and fossil fuels to make heat pumps the right option for both the environment and for financial reasons.
- Measuring energy performance to validate retrofit strategies, creating a feedback loop to test software assumptions and, where there are significant quantifiable differences, employing other building evaluation measurement techniques to establish why.
- Implementing a single national framework for lifecycle analysis and Net Zero, using accredited carbon assessors to confirm that emissions at each stage of a building’s lifecycle (from design, construction, use, through to end of life) are measured correctly and that any mitigating actions, such as carbon offsetting, are delivered.
The Elmhurst Almanac is available at https://www.elmhurstenergy.co.uk/uploads/Elmhurst_Almanac_2022.pdf and you can join the conversation on social media using the hashtag #ElmhurstAlmanac.
Established almost 30 years ago, Elmhurst is the UK’s largest EPC accreditation scheme. It supports a membership of more than 9,500 quality assured energy assessors and a growing body of retrofit assessors and coordinators. In 2021, Elmhurst members were responsible for the completion of more than 1.2 million EPCs in the UK.
