Fascination

2014 – 2016: Buildings (Research)

The UK has a very heterogeneous building stock (i.e. lots of different sorts of building, designed and built in many different ways, and altered in many different ways since originally built), and it’s a very old building stock at that. Over 7 million homes without a cavity wall! We have a very high penetration of one sort of heating system (gas). This makes elimination of fossil fuels extraordinarily difficult in buildings because electric heating is expensive and impractical (we’d need about 10x more power stations to heat our buildings in the winter, but most of these power stations would only need to generate power for 5 – 10 days a year, which makes them a little … uneconomical.)

But there are solutions. Some research I kicked off (yep, I done a thing) showed that a ‘thin’ layer of insulation delivers most of the benefits of traditional solid-wall insulation (i.e. 4-5 inches of battens, insulation and plasterboard) at a fraction of the price.

So there you have it. Insulate those 7 million old buildings, plus any poorly performing more modern buildings, with a couple of centimetres of insulation, and you've already massively reduced heat-demand across the UK housing stock. The costs of installing a zero-carbon heating system (e.g. a heat-pump) are massively reduced. Result!