Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce: UK experts bid to overcome barriers to greener buildings

A broad coalition of experts from finance, energy, construction and national and local government has joined together as part of the Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce, a new effort launched yesterday to drive the rapid decarbonisation of the UK's home and buildings heating supply.

Heating and hot water in homes account for almost 40 per cent of UK's energy consumption and around 20 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, and it is an area therefore widely seen as one of the toughest challenges in achieving net zero emissions by 2050, as it requires the complete phase out of natural fossil fuel gas to heat homes and businesses.

Aimed at taking meeting the daunting challenge, therefore, the new Taskforce launched today by the Green Finance Institute convenes members of the Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings (CEEB) to design, launch and scale the financing mechanisms needed to enable the rapid adoption of zero-carbon heating technologies.

Comprising representatives from financial services, local and national government, the energy and construction industries, academia and civil society, and experts from the heating sector, the Taskforce plans to carry out a detailed review to identify the barriers to investment in low-carbon heating across the UK housing market, it said. The review will consider what can be done to incentivise green heating, encompassing both on and off gas grid homes, new builds, and district heating networks.

The Taskforce then plans to then draw on the findings of the review to co-design and launch a series of new financial products and non-financial enablers to help channel investment into the sector, it expained.

"To decarbonise the UK's heating, it needs to be more attractive to invest in low carbon heating, including city-scale heat networks, than in fossil gas boilers and fossil gas networks," said Charlotte Owen, policy manager at The Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE), another key member of the taskforce. "To achieve this, we need to reform the signals to investors and ensure policy incentivises investment in a low cost, low carbon, high comfort offer to consumers."

The project builds on the work of the CEEB, which launched in December 2019 and has since built up compelling evidence in favour of retrofitting buildings to high energy efficiency standards, as well as analysing how a mix of government intervention and private capital could help overcome the market failures that have hampered attempts to improve the efficiency of the UK's housing stock. As part of this, the Coalition stitched together a portfolio of 21 'demonstrator' financial solutions it said were all potentially commercial, scalable, and capable of mobilising capital flows towards retrofitting UK homes.

"Focusing on the heating and hot water in our homes is a natural next step for the Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings, which is working to create financial pathways to the widescale adoption of retrofitting across all residential tenures," said Green Finance Institute CEO Dr Rhian-Mari Thomas.

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• Topics
• Infrastructure
• Investment
• Green Finance Institute
• Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings
• Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce
• CEEB
• Association for Decentralised Energy
• heat
• heating
• heat networks
• low-carbon heating
• heat pumps
• district heating