A story of data, kindness and collaboration for maximum impact
I run CarbonLaces, and I am so grateful for this. Our journey is one of wanting to reverse the Climate impact of excess carbon emissions through collaboration, transparency and accuracy. At the heart of this journey is how we can unite and lift by harnessing the climate opportunity amidst energy security, cost of living and NetZero targets, costs and implications.
To this extent, it’s a personal message; I spent nine days in the Arctic in 2009, which changed the course of my life. If you have seen this magnificence, you will know where I am coming from; if not, I can only say that I come to solve problems collectively from this aspect. If you have been there, you will know the urgency.
So, let’s unpack the Times article and various messages. I will respond to all the main themes I have picked. First, thank you for acknowledging and mentioning us in your message @Elmhurst and highlighting some key points in your blog; we see multiple meeting points.
And all on Twitter, thank you for your comments. I would appreciate the respect I have shown you to be extended to my colleagues and CarbonLaces. As I said this morning, if we were to have this conversation in person, you would not say anything you put out on Twitter. Be kind, and let’s work together and not against each other.
No one is against EPC. EPCs are being used for applications it wasn’t designed for. Its origins were to look at a national rating for fuel poverty across the country. As Elmhurst rightly pointed out, it was to look at standard occupancy and does that well. Today, it’s used for policy, planning, financing, retrofitting, ECO4, etc. We have thrown the kitchen sink at it. Yet, we know occupancy, market, location, and behaviour play a considerable role. We used the smart meter data to show some of this. We also admit that some of these require a deeper dive and are unique.
Our objective was to show three things.
1) Energy consumption plays a significant role and impacts how we live, and currently, with the cost-of-living crisis, it starts to reveal a pattern. To this extent, many on Twitter asked, we used Energy consumption current from the EPC table, which is defined in the register under
ENERGY_CONSUMPTION_CURRENT FLOAT: The property’s estimated total energy consumption in 12 months (kWh/m2). Displayed on EPC as the current primary energy use per square metre of floor area.
We ran this data with half-hourly data for over 17K smart meters over 300+ days and did various data quality checks from our side to get the highest fidelity.
2) Decisions and policies are being made based on those upper bands of the EPC, especially for the bands from E, F and G. Yet, who will pay for them, the taxpayer? Today, we know retrofits have a planning problem with the high upfront costs and most of the funding going towards planning and very little to the actual doing. Why? Because we have those data gaps, and they are filled by solutions that don’t scale. And more importantly, the tinkering on the edges, often in silos and almost always against each other, perpetuates poor housing, health and overall national productivity. Can we work smarter, cheaper and faster? Yes, can we use data to make this happen? Let’s sit down at the table.
3) The UK was the first country to enshrine its decarbonisation targets in law and, in doing so, became a thought leader. Can we be an example to the rest of the world? In the last 24 hours, I have received messages from half a dozen countries saying the same thing. The data is an issue. So, let all of us come together; it’s one planet. Buildings have a massive role in decarbonisation; they are 40% of emissions, but can they change the game’s rules by going carbon-negative and becoming revenue generators?