Domestic energy efficiency

A four-year, multi-partner project aims to provide householders with a one-stop shop for technology tailor-made to lower the energy needed to provide heating and hot water.

The rate of building renewal runs at about 10 per cent a year, so even if all new-build housing is zero carbon by 2050, existing stock needs to be made more energy efficient through retrofit or refurbishment to achieve government targets.

The CALEBRE (Consumer-Appealing Low Energy Technologies for Building Retrofitting) project aims to address this by reducing energy demand, decarbonising the supply to buildings and developing policy to promote that process.

Prof Dennis Loveday, of the sustainability research school at Loughborough University, said: ‘The core issue is the householders themselves, what kind of interventions they are prepared to accept and how they interact with them.’

The EPSRC and E.ON UK provided £2m in funding to promote energy research in this area and brought together research groups from six universities — Warwick, Ulster, Nottingham, Oxford, Herriot-Watt and Loughborough.