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ID:
113487
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
A changing climate will produce summertime overheating where conventional domestic building design approaches do not adequately address future warming risk. This risk cannot be fully identified and avoided unless future climate information and building related adaptation measures are considered. The Low Carbon Futures project is developing a tool that uses UKCP09 climate projections input to predict dwelling overheating risks. To enhance the usefulness of this tool for the building industry, and to better understand current building design processes, interviews were conducted with building professionals, allowing industry preferences for the tool to be sought and to provide clearer indications of proposed outcomes. This paper examines results from a questionnaire, focus groups and semi-structured interviews with building industry professionals. The research shows that the housing industry maintains adherence to traditional designing methods where overheating, whether current or future, is not considered a serious concern. No design stage detailed overheating assessments are currently undertaken to reduce the UK's increased room air-conditioner sales, despite drives for low energy/zero carbon homes. The collated feedback will help tailor the tool and its eventual outputs, with this paper attempting to converge on a set of recommendations for low carbon dwelling design with reduced overheating risk.
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| 2 |
ID:
166405
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| Summary/Abstract |
Improving energy efficiency, de-carbonising heating and cooling, and increasing renewable microgeneration in existing residential buildings, is crucial for meeting social and climate policy objectives. This paper explores the challenges of financing this ‘retrofit’ activity. First, it develops a typology of finance mechanisms for residential retrofit highlighting their key design features, including: the source of capital; the financial instrument(s); the project performance requirements; the point of sale; the nature of the security and underwriting the repayment channel and customer journey. Combining information from interviews and documentary sources, the paper explores how these design features influence the success of the finance mechanisms in different contexts. First, it is shown that a low cost of capital for retrofit finance is critical to the economic viability of whole-house retrofits. Second, by funding non-energy measures such as general improvement works, finance mechanisms can enable broader sources of value that are more highly prized by households. Thirdly, mechanisms that reduce complexity by simplifying the customer journey are likely to achieve much higher levels of uptake. Most importantly we discuss how finance alone is unlikely to be a driver of demand for whole-house retrofit, and so instead should be viewed as a necessary component of a much broader retrofit strategy.
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