Greater Manchester’s Environment Plan 2019–2024
Chapter 3: Our Homes and the energy they use
An in-depth analysis of city region’s environment policy and where it falls short, presented in a series of 10 chapters related in the style of a fictional leader using language the crisis calls for #TellTheTruth
Our homes are often what is most important to most of us and our families — and is where the biggest impact will be felt both in terms of disruption and in our pockets.
Our housing sector also accounts for the second-biggest slice of our energy consumption (5) because of our reliance on gas to heat and cook — so it’s a biggie.
HOW WE HEAT AND COOK
Almost all of us will need to install solar panels on our houses — this could cost anywhere up to £6,000. Currently individuals can get an interest free loan if you live in one of four Greater Manchester boroughs, which I know is only a fraction of our 2.7m citizens; we’ll be working on that but right now we can’t promise anything at all especially given the austerity cuts we’ve faced.
Sorry about that.
We’ll need to get rid of our current gas boiler as soon as we can — and we’ll shortly announce a scheme that identifies the most impactful alternative for each home (which might be a more efficient boiler, electric heating, a heat pump or a hybrid heat pump). It is going to cost you a fair whack — but we hope as more renewables come on stream, the costs will reduce.
Because we actually need to phase out gas boilers almost entirely by 2040 and replace them with electric-powered heating.
To be precise, within 21 years, 60% of housing in GM must be heated by new low-carbon methods. To make it even more real for us all — we basically need 69,000 households in GM every year for the next 21 years to switch to low-carbon heating. Where are we now? Not so far…
Gas heats 95% of our houses in GM with only tiny fraction of a % heated via the low carbon methods we will need to introduce.
What do we mean by low-carbon heating?
It’s one of two things (currently) — either a heat network — which is a way of heating lots of homes using eg heat from biomass (a fancy word for wood or other organic material) or waste — or a heat pump — basically electric-powered heat conveyed by air or water (as per radiators).
I know in the UK we haven’t ever really used air heat pumps, whereas they are the norm in countries like the USA but we’ll need to get over that…unless the new air-to-water-heated versions come up trumps (they are still largely in development).
On top of the sheer volume of boiler changeovers needed — we have a further problem that we have no real low-carbon heating or building supply chain that can do this work. More on that in a bit.
So — if you want a business opportunity — fitting out 61,000 houses a year for 19 years — step forward! Cowboys need not apply.
We think there will be other low-carbon heating sources coming along — there are high hopes for hydrogen — but no-one has really invented them yet because sadly the government has to date put a lot of subsidies into dirty fuel (coal, gas etc) that might have been spent on this and we don’t really know how ‘green’ hydrogen will be as it depends on how that gas is made
Having said that there are some things you can do now — you can switch your operator — this is a great tool to enable you to move to a supplier that promises to match your electricity use with renewable sourced- electricity (because the UK doesn’t yet have a national grid that is set up to be fully powered by renewable sources, this is how it has to be done for now).
SAVING ENERGY IS OUR NO 1 PRIORITY
But that is a drop in the ocean given how much we are all going to have to reduce the energy we use every day to heat our houses, cook and wash — this one’s no longer optional. We all already know how to do that — put on a jumper, turn your heating down a degree, use lower temperatures on your washing.
But yada yada yada — we’ve known about those for years haven’t we?
This is different — we need to change how we feel about energy — to feel the same way about wasting precious resources like heat or water as we do about ‘blowing smoke in babies faces’. End of.
When it comes to wasting energy — my report put it like this: ‘a step change in energy efficiency performance of existing domestic and non-domestic property will have to be achieved’.
Perhaps this might be a better line: You know how our home is our castle in this country? Well it now needs to keep energy inside it better than the Prisoner of Zenda!
Also, to be honest — the more affluent among us need to cough up NOW to insulate our home better to decrease energy demand. In my published green plan we couched this in rather diplomatic terms — ‘our main issue to date has been {lack of} take up by able-to-pay home owners’.
Let me get a bit more to the point on ‘able-to-pay’; There are loads of us who could afford to do this who aren’t — instead we are just whacking up the thermostat and wasting gas because we can afford to. We need to stop that now — and do the decent thing and put our hand in our pocket and insulate our houses properly.
And folks, hate to break it to you, but we’re not just talking a couple of draft excluders and decent double glazing (though that is a start).
I know when I launched the plan I said that you might save up to £1000 on your energy bills — that is true — but what I didn’t say was we are also going to have to spend many thousands of pounds, possibly even into five figures, to get all this sorted on each of our homes — and as it stands they’re aren’t really any grants.
(Manchester’s energy cooperatives, The Carbon Co-op and Red Coop are the best place to find out more).
RETROFIT REVOLUTION
You may not be familiar with the word ‘retrofit’ — but get used to it! (4)
It sounds fairly simple — but what it means is a programme of extensive energy saving measures ranging from underfloor insulation, wall insulation (which can mean adding a new interior wall to front and new exterior wall to back, triple glazing and more — and some other energy generating measures already mentioned (like solar panels and heat pumps).
16. So we’re also going to need a huge retrofitting programme to bring older homes up to the energy efficiency standards needed to meet these targets.
But as already mentioned we really do not yet have a supply sector that is fit and able to do this work
Carbon Coop is doing some work to address that — helping small builders get trained up and for pioneers to share knowledge because we know people generally use local firms for work — but the project’s funding has been stalled by the recent impasse in government…
I’m a bit vague about how we’ll do all this to be honest — will householders be responsible for doing this voluntarily? Will there be grants?. Will we ask the government for funds to employ contractors? Sorry — No lo sé!
But we are talking about a LOT of properties — when half a million do not even have basic cavity wall or loft insulation.
So on top of all those gas boilers we need to get rid of and replace with heat pumps (69,000 a year remember), we are also going to have to carry out retrofitting of energy efficiency measures in 61,000 houses a year for the next 19 years.
By the way, solar hot water panels can be a good option — they work on a cloudy day and directly replace gas — but can’t usually be used with a combi boiler.
Actually, just reaching straight for the solar panels is not where the experts recommend you start — as you will still be putting unnecessary and unsustainable demands on our energy supply.
Because most of our houses are wasting enormous amounts of energy (eg if you have an open fire you are wasting as much energy as insulating your loft, wall and floor combined would save you).
So reducing our use of energy is the ‘first step’, as in ‘do not pass go until complete’, that we all need to do to reduce our impact on the earth.
CAN YOU HELP??
If you want to find out more you can use this simple energy efficiency calculator to put in your postcode and see what is recommended and how much it might cost.
I suppose in a way it would be a lot easier if we did all this work on the same houses and the same time — but that’s unlikely not least because of the costs involved.
So that’s a programme of work in 130,000 houses every year. For 19 years. But we can look at a street by street approach for at least some of the retrofits — that will reduce the overall costs and allows more rapid delivery.
Oh and we’re not alone — the energy used and carbon emitted by the UK’s old and inefficient housing sector is probably the biggest ‘carbon timebomb’ facing the UK — as our rising demand for gas to heat our houses is going to see us miss our emissions targets in the coming years.
We will do our utmost to keep this retrofit programme on track — unlike the energy industry’s rollout of smart meters (which enable people to see their energy use in real time).
That one really set all us back because with all the costs and disruptions retrofit involves, we know it helps people to see how much energy they are using/ wasting. Well, some people anyway.
But we don’t really know how we’re going to persuade people to do any of this given the costs and upheaval involved.
What would help do you think?
This page is part of a series critiquing and presenting the Greater Manchester Environment Plan, in the style of fictional leader Sandy Turnham.
All measures and facts and descriptions are accurate as far as my understanding but some artistic licence has been taken with tone in order to #TellTheTruth.
3. Our homes and the energy we use
5. Our cars and how we get around
7. Our food and the waste we create
8. Our businesses and their responsibility
