“The UK Government needs to utilise the tools at their disposal to increase investment in green homes and incentivise decarbonisation,” said Sarah Hunter, non-executive director of public policy at the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
Speaking on the ‘10 Years to Change the System: Can We Achieve the Impossible?’ panel on day one of the inaugural Innovation Zero event, Hunter highlighted the need to decarbonise British homes as a means to reduce energy costs and cut carbon emissions.
This is something fellow speaker Ravi Gurumurthy, CEO and chair of the behavioural insights team at Nesta believes is “hanging in the balance”.
“We initially set a goal to reduce emissions by 60% by 2050. We’re already 50% down on 1990 levels and people said it was impossible. The area most in balance however is the transformation of homes and things there are lagging,” Gurumurthy said.
One of the biggest issues that has led to the decarbonisation of buildings lagging behind other technologies, such as EVs, is the failure of the Green Homes Grant.
The Green Homes Grant scheme is widely reported to have been plagued with various issues since its inception in September 2020. It closed in early 2022 as a result.
It was reported that members of the public had been waiting months to be issued vouchers and there were delays in installers being paid. This led the Environmental Audit Committee to describe the domestic decarbonisation support as “woefully inadequate”.
This had been backed up by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) having found that despite awareness for the scheme being “fairly high” only 113,739 properties made applications for the Green Homes Grant Voucher Scheme (GHGVS). The scheme had made funding available for around 600,000 homes.
Gurumurthy told the conference that the UK should follow in the footsteps of other countries such as Finland with “15% of energy coming from heat pumps”.
Hunter believes that the UK Government has halted the adoption of heat pumps and the decarbonisation of homes due to “not being joined up” on the common goal.
“The government needs to be joined up on heat pumps and the decarbonisation of homes. Enormous amounts of money is already being spent on homes and these need to be decarbonised,” Hunter said.
“They [the UK Government] need to be a lot more creative about procurement and planning but they don’t want to take the political hits. But housing is critical to get right.”
Hunter also believes competition could be very important in supporting the energy transition and helping various technologies to “take off”. This has been aided by the private sector “only recently having become more interested in renewable technologies”.
“The role of capitalism has a role to play in the climate debate, in fact it could be very advantageous,” she said.
Hunter also cast her eye across the pond and highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as an excellent legislation to help incentivise renewable technologies – something the UK could learn from.
“The IRA is a brilliant bit of legislation in the US – very radical – it’s a great case study,” she said.
