Zero Carbon Retrofit – How Big Is The Challenge?

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Local authorities and housing associations face a huge challenge to retrofit their housing stock to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The full scale of the task is yet to be fully quantified. Current estimates come up with an average projected cost of just over £20k per home. The detailed property assessment work needed to calculate accurate estimates hasn’t yet been done. And within that figure there’s huge variation depending on the age and construction of each property.

For many individual local authorities and housing associations there’s enormous uncertainty. Housing stock covers a wide variety of property types built in different decades, to varying standards and with unique repair and maintenance histories. Detailed surveys of the condition of existing properties are needed before budgeting and planning can go ahead in earnest.

Balancing Performance with Cost

Once the stock condition is fully documented there are important decisions to be made. Achieving the optimum balance between costs and guaranteed energy performance isn’t easy. For some properties, retrofitting to the required standard won’t be feasible or cost-effective. Further plans will be needed to dispose of these properties and potentially replace them with new energy-efficient ones to meet demand.

There’s little doubt that successful solutions will be collaborative – simply because of the scale and complexity of the task. Piecemeal approaches will contain too many risks and will inevitably miss opportunities to rationalize processes and organize supply chains to save time and money.

The skills and expertise needed to create the required capacity are wide ranging. They include property surveys, retrofit technologies, renewable energy installation, supply chain management and delivery of property services at scale. Some large housing associations are already collaborating to make the task of procuring the services they need more manageable.

Osborne’s approach to the zero carbon retrofit challenge is also collaborative. We are actively working with retrofit specialists and developing our supply chain to deliver a fully managed and integrated retrofit service for social housing.