Problem Addressed

With possibly the oldest and leakiest housing stocks in western Europe, 29 million homes will need retrofitting before 2050. UKGBC is calling for a nationwide strategy to upgrade 19 million of these homes in the next decade. While there are many challenges associated with an individual home energy retrofit, it is even more difficult retrofitting an entire portfolio of homes. Local authorities and asset managers need a vast amount of data to plan large-scale retrofit initiatives while ensuring that the homes most suitable for retrofit are identified without straining time or resources.

Solution Overview

Home Analytics is a tool developed to help governments, local authorities, housing associations, and business better understand a particular housing stock to develop, target, and deliver investment, retrofit projects, and social programmes. This extensive database combines information on residential properties across Great Britain including energy efficiency metrics, property attributes, geographical factors, and socio-demographic information. This extensive array of variables provides a unique dataset of homes, with details available down to the level of individual addresses.

The data used by Home Analytics is sourced from a wide variety of existing datasets including: Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), the Home Energy Efficiency Database (HEED), national datasets (such as the English Housing Survey and Census), and geospatial data from Ordinance Survey. The information from these sources is recorded in different formats, so Home Analytics matches data to a Unique Property Reference Number, makes sure the records are up to date, and cross references data to correct for skews and errors. This raw data currently represents about 65% of the housing stock, so Home Analytics use this data to model the remaining 55% of properties. Data aggregation and modelling techniques allow Home Analytics to provide both detailed and varied information on the entire Great Britain Housing stock. Currently, over 90 different variables are available for each home.

Local authorities and housing associations already use Home Analytics to support climate emergency and carbon reduction planning. The information can be used to identify which homes are eligible for certain government grants to help efficiently provide support to the residents who need it the most. With data on the levels of insulation, property age and archetype, boiler type, and customer vulnerabilities you can save time and resources when optimising retrofit planning and investment or support households based on energy, income, and fuel poverty characteristics. Home Analytics can also provide Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) ratings for assessing a home’s energy rating and can predict SAP score increases when energy efficiency measures are installed. With all this information available through a single dataset, users can minimise wasted resources on other methods of property identification while ensuring intervention strategies are clearly mapped.

Case Study

Home Analytics was used to access the current state of the housing stock in the North of Tyne to better inform a business case for a large-scale housing retrofit programme. Each home was classified into one of 67,000 unique archetypes and benchmarked against regional and national trends comparing building fabric, heating systems, SAP characteristics, local area conditions, and deprivation. The Energy Saving Trust’s Portfolio Energy Assessment Tool was then used to model an optimal retrofit for each archetype while providing the anticipated cost, carbon savings, and energy efficiency improvements. A ‘business as usual’ scenario was compared with a Net Zero approach. Data was made available through interactive dashboards alongside a review of the key findings.

Facts and Figures

90+
SAP

This page presents data, evidence, and solutions that are provided by our partners and members and should therefore not be attributed to UKGBC. While we showcase these solutions for inspiration, to build consensus, and create momentum for climate action, UKGBC does not offer commercial endorsement of individual solutions. If you would like to quote something from this page, or more information, please contact our Communications team at media@ukgbc.org.

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