Housing stock decarbonisation strategy toolkit
Energy transition Energy consultancy Customer & market insight EV charging research Residential research
Developing a tool to evaluate decarbonisation pathways for social housing providers.
The background
Social housing providers will need to make major investments in their housing stock to meet governmental and private net zero targets. The choices made by social housing providers to achieve these targets, and the timeline they are achieved within, will have a large impact on our client’s business as a gas distribution network operator.
What the client needed and their key question(s)
Our client wishes to engage with social housing providers to understand their future energy usage and path to net zero. The client wanted a calculation toolkit that aided social housing providers in understanding investment trade-offs between retrofit measures, low carbon heating technologies and renewable generation and storage. The tool was to evaluate the impact of these choices on annual gas and electricity demand.
Our solution
LCP Delta engaged with Exeter City Council (ECC) to understand their challenges in plotting a path to net zero for their social housing stock, and barriers to adopting existing housing stock decarbonisation tools. This was complemented by a broad review of published literature on guidance on decarbonising housing stock, relevant regulations, and approaches taken by existing tools.
Working with the client and ECC, we defined a specification for a housing stock decarbonisation strategy evaluation tool, and subsequently implemented it.
The tool enables users to understand at a high-level the impact on capital costs, emissions and tenant energy bills when making key strategic decisions for their housing stock, such as the level of investment in fabric efficiency measures or PV systems, choice of heating technologies and prioritisation of different properties. Strategies are also evaluated for their success in achieving a fabric efficiency target and a net zero target.
Our impact
The work showcases our broad understanding of the impact of the energy transition for different stakeholders and strong capability in developing user-friendly quantitative tools.
