British homeowners face financial obstacles to making net-zero upgrades to their homes, according to a new report citing upfront costs and a lack of interest in borrowing as significant factors.
The charity said that these “changes have the potential to be disruptive as well as costly.”
It added that improvements needed to meet net-zero targets would be “unmanageable for many without significant changes.”
The charity estimated that the average cost of “improving the energy efficiency of a home” or “transitioning to low carbon heat” is just under £15,000.
The report highlighted that while almost two in five homeowners have over £20,000 in savings, one in two have less than £10,000, and over 1 in 10 have no savings.
Almost two in three homeowners asked in the survey said they aren’t interested in a heat pump, citing concerns about high costs, the effectiveness of new technology, and suitability for their properties as factors impacting their interest.
It also found that four in five homeowners were unwilling to borrow to fund either “energy efficiency measures or low carbon technologies.”
Heat Pumps
The UK has signed into law a policy to achieve net zero by 2050 with the Conservative government setting out a strategy called “Build Back Greener” to decarbonise all sectors of the UK economy.The UK faces the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars and gas boilers and calls from statutory bodies like the Climate Change Committee to cut meat by 20 percent in 2030 and by 35 percent by 2050.
According to its Heat Pump Investment Roadmap strategy, released in April, reducing the UK’s carbon emissions to Net Zero by 2050 means it must decarbonise the heating of over 30 million homes across the UK in a little over 25 years.
The government claims that a heat pump can reduce carbon emissions by up to 70 percent compared with a gas boiler. It plans to phase out the installation of new and replacement natural gas boilers by 2035 at the latest.
Last year the government allocated £450 million to the scheme, which will cover around 90,000 households. Environmental activists have called for the scheme to be extended.
The UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) projects that by 2050 all heating in British homes will be provided by low-carbon sources, of which 52 percent will be heat pumps, which run on electricity and work like a fridge in reverse to extract energy from the air or ground.
‘Hide the Cost’
Gordon Hughes, a former professor of Economics at Edinburgh and former senior adviser on energy and environmental policy at the World Bank until 2001, told The Epoch Times that the government should just say that “the transition cannot operate at a cost that the public is willing to bare.”Hughes was the co-author of one of the first international analyses of climate change and has criticised the massive scale of expenditures required to implement Net Zero policies.
“Of course, people can be persuaded to reduce their emissions of carbon or their use of gas if prices were high enough, but no politician will survive pursuing that policy for very long,” he added.
“What they’re trying to do is to achieve a change by intervening in the market and thereby trying just hide the costs but the cost turn up is a different form. Instead of very high prices for gas, they turn up in the form of absurdly high costs for trying to convert the housing stock,” he added.
“The idea that market forces won’t work is simply a political statement,” said Hughes.
He said that it’s a way for the government to say that it doesn’t “have the consent of the population at large to change the way in which we behave at considerable cost.”
In March, the industry body representing gas heating specialists The Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA) hit out at proposals to require boiler manufacturers to supply a set number of heat pumps as a proportion of their sales, calling it an “absurd, Soviet-style production quota.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson told The Epoch Times by email: “The Government is improving energy efficiency and has made significant progress, with the proportion of homes in England with a rating of C or above increasing from 14% in 2010 to 47% in 2022.
“Energy efficiency measures can help households to make substantial savings. To make them even more affordable, our Great British Insulation Scheme is set to upgrade around 300,000 of the country’s least energy efficient homes, we’ve committed to invest £6.6 billion in energy efficiency upgrades this parliament, and a further £6 billion to 2028.”
