Achieving Zero Carbon Homes
A new report on the role of renewable energy in house-building recommends the Government should speed things up.
Renewables are essential to meet zero carbon standards in new homes. The current timescale of the government’s policy on ensuring all new homes are zero carbon from 2016 could drive a market for onsite renewable energy worth £2.13bn pa from that time.
But it would create very little demand before that, concludes a report from the Renewables Advisory Board, which advises the government on renewable energy issues.
Other key findings of the report are that:
- The projected annual uptake of onsite generation is greater than UK manufacturing capacity for all renewable energy technology and greater than global manufacturing capacity for a number of the most cost effective technologies.
- Technologies that are likely to experience the highest levels of uptake are biomass combined heat and power and solar photovoltaics but this is sensitive to the level at which the government allows offsite generation.
- The average cost of meeting zero carbon standards from onsite renewables is expected to be £6,000 per dwelling, with the highest costs for small urban developments and the lowest for large rural ones.
Headline recommendations to government arising from the report are:
- Encourage local authorities to use the planning system to require zero carbon standards in the largest housing developments before 2016.
- Accelerate the technological and commercial development of biomass combined heat and power technology.
- Minimise the use of remote offsite energy generation - for example by setting a tight cap on its use and a high ‘buy-out’ cost for any offsite generation fund.
‘The role of onsite energy generation in delivering zero carbon homes’ (Urn 07/1555) is available at http://tinyurl.com/3bpcfb (pdf) (DBERR Publications Orderline; tel: 0845 015 0010).
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