4: Fuel poverty and net zero — leaving no-one behind
Fuel poverty is a pervasive and persistent issue for some of society's most vulnerable groups. How can the push for net zero help to end fuel poverty, and how can local solutions help? We meet fuel poor households in Glasgow, and visit Orkney - which has some of the UK's worst fuel poverty - but also some of the most innovative solutions.
We hear from:
Prof Aimee Ambrose, Energy Policy professor at Sheffield Hallam University and chair of the UK's Fuel Poverty Research Network
Luke Fraser from The Orkney Islands Council on Orkney's pioneering energy project ReFLEX.
Gareth Davies from Orkney-based company Aquatera, also on ReFLEX.
Episode transcript
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Hello, I’m Dr Rebecca Ford.
Matthew: Hi, and I’m Dr Matt Hannon. Welcome to Local Zero. This is a podcast that gives you a guide to taking climate action at the local level.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: This is episode four where we’re going to be focusing our holiday season spirit and thinking about others, especially as the temperatures start to plummet and many people might be struggling to pay their energy bills or keep warm inside their homes.
Matthew: Fuel poverty is a critical and persistent issue for some of society’s most vulnerable groups and individuals. In this episode, we ask what kind of action is required to eradicate fuel poverty for good.
Rebecca: So Matt, I’m sure you’re feeling the same as me. It’s getting colder here in Glasgow. We’ve had evenings down to 10 or 20. I’m actually sitting here right now with my electric blanket on, snuggled up in my office and struggling to keep warm in the big room that I’m working in [laughter]. It brings me back to when I lived in New Zealand. I spent five years there and fuel poverty is a huge issue, particularly on South Island, not because people are necessarily poor but because we’ve got such terrible building stock there. Actually, it was so extreme that I remember a physics professor did this experiment where they looked at measuring temperatures inside the students’ homes because the students tended to live in the worst homes in the city. They found in one of the homes that the temperature inside their house was colder than the temperature inside of their working refrigerator.
Matthew: I mean I’m no expert on thermo-dynamics but that doesn’t sound good.
Rebecca: Actually, a lot of students that we talked to when I lived in New Zealand would try and get out of their homes in winter, go to the libraries or wrap up warm somewhere else. Sometimes, it encouraged them to come into university which was no bad thing. Really, looking at where we’re at and what COVID means, our students might struggle to do that this year.
Matthew: Yeah, absolutely and I don’t think it just stops with students there, does it? I’ve heard of plenty of people finding that moment’s warmth at work because they can’t afford to heat their homes. That would be where they would typically be saving on their energy bills and, of course, COVID is really starting to push many of us back into our homes and having to really ramp up the heating and ramp up our energy bills.
Rebecca: Actually, thinking about students and younger people, probably Fraser is a lot closer to them than we are, so I’d like to welcome Fraser Stewart with us this episode and every episode. Hi, Fraser.
Fraser: Hello, hello. Yes, here in my drafty tenement building in the Southside of Glasgow, I totally know what you mean. Actually, rather than from a student’s perspective, this is a topic that’s super close to my heart. I grew up experiencing these issues. I grew up in quite a rough area just outside of Dundee. I remember, during the winters, having a shower before school in the morning and it being an electric shower and the shower cutting out because we couldn’t afford to have heating on during the winter and to run a shower, run a boiler or anything like that. So I’m glad that we’re doing this episode. I remember being outside with shampoo in my hair and a towel on trying to put the emergency electricity box on on the outside. I’ve moved on from that, thankfully, into a nice, drafty, old tenement building which is no cheaper to run and it feels very pertinent just now, so I’m glad we’re doing this topic this episode.
Matthew: And, of course, Fraser, in the context that you just laid out there, for some people and for some families, their energy bills will rocket this winter. There was some research that came out of Energy Helpline back in September, I think it was, that suggests that this winter, they expect bills to grow between £100-£110 for those working at home. We’re looking at adding a tremendous amount on for some families and there are big questions marks about whether they’re going to be able to pay.
Rebecca: Yeah, and presumably, that’s thinking about largely homes that might be using, say, gas central heating and looking at price increases because of that. Obviously, clear in my head is also thinking about that report that came out from the UK Energy Research Centre that looked at just what needs to change if we’re going to be meeting our net zero targets. Of course, that means moving away from gas and starting to look at other options like heat pumps and so on. Of course, in today’s climate, that’s a lot more expensive to run and so not only is COVID going to be creating this squeeze by seeing people at home more and needing to heat their homes even warmer but in our transition, could we start to see increasing problems there as well?
Matthew: It really was quite shocking to me anyway to read the UK government’s recent 10-point plan Building Back Better and the Green Industrial Revolution and the fact that fuel poverty and the fuel poor weren’t mentioned once.
Rebecca: No.
Matthew: Some of the schemes that maybe are designed to help alleviate that were such as things like the Green Home Grants and they’re looking to extend that by a year. But the big question is is the government focused squarely on dealing with this issue with the policies that were laid out in that document.
Fraser: When you think about similar previous policies as well and we look at even things like the Feed-in Tariff or the Green Homes Grant which, we know, has had its own major issues, so rarely, even when there’s an inbuilt priority for low-income households and even when we talk about fuel poor explicitly within these policies, they’re still very, very bad at actually reaching the people who need them most.
Matthew: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more and I think that’s why we’re here, right? That’s why we’re talking about local action and who can do what, who can help individuals and who can help households at the local level, whether it’s councils, community groups or charities.
Rebecca: Yeah, absolutely and I think what we need to do and what we’re focusing this episode on is making sure that our push towards this green energy transition doesn’t leave anyone behind. Right now, we’re going to be channelling that holiday season spirit to focus this episode on thinking about others.
Matthew: You’re listening to Matt, Becky and Fraser at Local Zero and so if you want to follow us on social media, use the hashtag #LocalZero and you’ll find us @EnergyREV_UK and if you want to send us any questions you want answered, we’re happy to do so and we’ll get right back to you later in the series.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: So as mentioned at the beginning of the show, fuel poverty is an issue that’s very personal to me. I grew up experiencing that reality and still remember it quite vividly. However, it is also something that I’ve been lucky enough to move on from. For millions of others, fuel poverty is still very much a reality today. We’ve kept this short because the audio quality isn’t great but I’ve been speaking to people here in Glasgow about what being fuel poor means to them.
[Music flourish]
Robert: The bar fire was costing me a fortune. It was something ridiculous like £60 a week I was paying.
Fraser: Wow! Just for the bar fires? That’s wild.
Robert: Yeah.
Fraser: Robert has some mobility issues and lives alone in a tenement flat on Glasgow’s Southside and has done for over a decade now. Around five years ago, Robert reached out to local energy advocacy group, South Seeds, who we met in our last episode, to help with his heating bills due to living in an old rented flat with no central heating and no double-glazing. It’s a classic, old, run-down Glasgow tenement.
Robert: The house is always freezing. I always had a heater in both of the bedrooms but they were costing a fortune.
Fraser: In order to keep his home heated, Robert was forced to spend the vast majority of his disability allowance on electricity meaning that he would then struggle to afford food for the rest of the month.
Robert: I was getting travel expenses extra which was £60 and that was more or less getting used up.
Fraser: They burn through money, don’t they, the bar heaters?
Robert: Oh, aye.
Fraser: I remember having them when we were growing up as well.
Robert: Mhmm.
Fraser: Robert also couldn’t afford additional mobility services required to let him have any sort of social or leisure time outside of the home. Fuel poverty can be an exceptionally tough but also quite a lonely situation to be in. This was not helped by quite a turbulent relationship with Robert’s landlord at the property who was reluctant to spend the substantial additional costs needed to bring the flat up to any kind of decent efficiency standards. We’ll hear more about the issues in the private rented sector later in the show. Luckily for Robert, some local help was on hand through South Seeds. By connecting with South Seeds, Robert was able to source Warmer Homes Grant funding to install a central heating system; a genuinely, genuinely life-changing event in Robert’s life. From not being able to afford food, Robert told me that the enormous savings from the new central heating system have allowed him to afford a new mobility car which means he can get out and about to local events much more easily. He still doesn’t have his double-glazing just yet but there’s no doubt that Robert’s life has been vastly improved by something that many of us often do take for granted.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Since the central heating went in, have you noticed that your costs have come down?
Robert: Oh, yeah, they’ve halved.
Fraser: Oh, wow!
Robert: Yeah, definitely halved. It’s put an extra £50 in my pocket.
Fraser: That’s an unbelievable saving.
Robert: Oh, it’s changed my life.
Fraser: Fantastic.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Evidently then, fuel poverty is still a huge and pressing issue for many people in their day-to-day lives. While each person’s experience is unique to them, there are some common issues that persist; issues that haven’t really changed since I was growing up. People still face the choice between heating and eating and are forced to decide between powering the home and enjoying healthy or social and physical lives. What is also clear, however, is that there are things that can be done at the local level to tackle fuel poverty and make people’s lives better in a very significant way.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: That’s really set us up for the rest of the episode to help contextualise what we’re going to talk about and the reality of what people are experiencing in their everyday lives. Our next guest is Professor Aimee Ambrose. She’s a professor of Energy Policy at Sheffield Hallam University and she’s also the chair of the UK’s Fuel Poverty Research Network.
[Music flourish]
Aimee: If you’re in poverty, you’re probably more likely to also be in fuel poverty but not universally so. So some groups that are on a low income and in poverty may live in social housing. Social housing tends to perform better in terms of energy performance and you may not be in fuel poverty or in fuel poverty to the same extent. If you’re on a low income and you live in the private rented sector, you are highly likely to also be in fuel poverty. But actually, rurality is a factor as well and so if you’re off the gas network, that’s a major risk factor as well. If you’re using oil or something else to heat your home, that makes you more likely to be in fuel poverty too. But it disproportionately affects people in the private rented sector because that’s where our poorest quality accommodation and our most vulnerable segments of the population are disproportionately concentrated.
Matthew: So with COVID, there seems to have been a fair amount of research in the last few months pointing to how energy bills are going up with people working from home. There are other debates that actually, you may see a reduction in costs. For instance, those people who are working from home are not having to commute and so there’s an added saving there. I guess there are two questions to that. The first is do we see some of the cost savings in other elements of our lives may be offsetting the increased cost? I think the bigger question is are we actually talking about the right people here because some homes are actually able to shift their work to home?
Aimee: I don’t have any hard and fast figures on this but I would be most concerned about those people who are actually out of work because of the pandemic or on furlough. The idea of the lack of transport costs offsetting energy costs, I don’t think we can really buy into that. Energy is one of the largest household expenditures that any of us face, particularly during the winter months, and so I really doubt that those kinds of savings are going to offset the increase in energy costs from working at home. Estimates that I’ve read suggest we’re going to spend 90% of our time in the home this winter. The costs of entertaining children at home as well and the additional electricity costs that that involves have to be factored in as well.
Matthew: That’s a really important point. You’re not just increasing your energy consumption because you’re working from home but you’re also playing from home or, for want of a better word, living at home.
Aimee: You’re doing everything, yeah. Your home is your world at the moment, isn’t it?
Matthew: Yeah, and the downward pressure on jobs and, as you say, furlough which obviously is not 100% of your wage. I think OFGEM were talking about the price energy cap as COVID reared its head and there was a reduction in the energy price cap but now, I think in the last week, there are some noises coming out that they’re going to have to reduce the reduction, as it were, to account for some of the defaulting on energy bills. Would that worry you as a fuel poverty researcher?
Aimee: Absolutely. The cap is there to protect the most vulnerable people in society [laughter] and you can’t mess around with those protections in order to offset the level of debt that’s happening as a result of the pandemic. I was really dismayed to see that, actually; the changes to the price cap. I think we need to be looking somewhere else to deal with that fuel debt and perhaps we actually look to the profits of the energy companies.
Rebecca: One of the things we’re talking about is what we’re doing to address climate change and I think we’re clearly going to have to shift away from gas, whether that’s towards heat pumps, towards district heating schemes or possibly even hydrogen in the future, there are going to be changes. Do you see this shift away from gas as something that could start to exacerbate fuel poverty, so it either makes it worse for people that might already be in fuel poverty or start to see more and more people feeling the effects of fuel poverty?
Aimee: Yeah, so the gas transition is something I’ve been thinking a lot about and actually, quite a fuel poverty alleviation schemes are still actually relying on connecting people to the gas grid to alleviate fuel poverty. There’s no doubt that gas is our cheapest option in terms of heating our homes, so it is still a key prong in our approach to alleviating fuel poverty which is a concern when we know that we need to phase out gas and pretty rapidly. By 2025, it won’t be possible to put new gas connections into new housing. I don’t think that’s soon enough actually because we’re building a huge amount of new housing at the moment and wouldn’t it be a good opportunity to but apparently, the alternative technology is not there. The government are still looking into the possibility of putting nuclear-generated hydrogen through the gas network and I think there’s still a lot of work to do on that. The other solution that’s being bandied around is air-source heat pumps. As someone who has spent some time living in New Zealand, Becky, you might have picked up that they’re not the panacea that a lot of people think they are. The property they’re put into needs to be a well-insulated envelope for them to be effective, otherwise, they’re just plugging away, they’re working so hard and they’re not achieving a great deal. They’re not great as the temperature dips down below 50 and you people living in Scotland, I’m pretty sure that happens a bit more frequently than it does down here. Some research I’ve done suggests that actually, if they’re not well-explained to the end user, then they could end up costing them an awful lot more. So there’s no really convincing alternative at the moment. The other thing that happened around when we transitioned to gas central heating, which really was a major transition in the 1970s and it’s changed all of our lives, it was a middle-class-led transition. The middle classes benefitted from these new systems first and with this transition, we need to reverse that. We need to make sure that the most vulnerable in society, those who are in fuel poverty, get the best out of this transition first but my concern is that they’re going to become the guinea pigs for these new systems and they already are because the social housing sector tends to pick up these innovations first. So their tenants tend to be the guinea pigs but they get a lot of support, hopefully, from their landlords around that but what worries me is the private rented sector. I feel like the private rented sector needs to come first but the chances are, it won’t.
Matthew: I think the context you’ve just framed there is of occupants who don’t necessarily have control over how they heat their homes. How might we put control back in the hands of tenants, either private rented or social, because it feels like there are some important decisions that need to be made when these people are living in these environments themselves?
Aimee: Honestly, I don’t know how you’d do it. It’s a really tough one. It’s called the split incentive where the person who’s paying for the improvement doesn’t benefit directly from it, so there’s no incentive to really do it. You’ve got to somehow give more rights to the tenant and make them enforceable as well because there is regulation around the private rented sector and energy efficiency that doesn’t get enforced because local authorities are just so hard-pressed.
Matthew: Where it gets quite complicated is it may be that a saving on your energy bill may then leak into consumption outside the home. If you take your average income-earning house, you save £300 on the bill a year, they may then spend that £300 on flights for a holiday or to run their car more. Is this something that you’ve picked up in the research about that indirect energy rebound?
Aimee: It certainly makes sense as an argument but fuel-poor households are not using the money they save to go and splash out on lavish holidays and, to be honest, I wouldn’t begrudge them if they did [laughter].
Matthew: I’m absolutely not suggesting that they are [laughter].
Aimee: I know you’re not. They face multiple deprivations in life and you’ve heard the heat or eat maxim that’s often talked about and that is a real choice. I’ve come across it in my research where households definitely choose between not whether they eat or heat the home but what they eat. I’ve spoken to a lot of people eating cold food out of tins, relying on those cheap packets of noodles and cheap, white bread to fill their kids’ stomachs up. So any saving on an energy bill is probably going to go into a more nutritious diet or servicing the other debts that you’re not able to or buying essentials that your children need. It’s unlikely to go into fueling the kind of problematic consumption that we see around us. I do think the middle classes will benefit first from this and I don’t think that’s necessarily right. I think we need to make sure people benefit across the board.
Rebecca: So who needs to take a lead to help us do that? In the middle class, a lot of their transition is down to market dynamics. Do we need other incentives or policies, either coming from national government, regional, or local authorities to help drive this forward in different ways?
Aimee: It’s a good question. I hate to keep coming back to tenure but I think it’s a key factor here. The middle classes will come on board when the market dynamics are right and when they can see a tangible financial benefit where the cost-benefit ratio is at the right level. The social housing sector will come on board because they’re often subsidised to try these things, to adopt these technologies and they have conditions attached to their social housing grants that mean they have to do more in terms of renewable energy and carbon reduction. The big gap is the private rented sector in the middle. Who needs to take the lead? Well, you know, it would be great to see government making more of a stand on this but local authorities are really best placed to know their area best. They have the local intelligence in terms of what’s going to work. They have the relationships with the housing providers, the residents and the networks of voluntary and community sector organisations that are really well placed to communicate with householders but I think they’re hugely under-resourced and stretched at the moment. We see this in their inability to enforce the minimum energy efficiency standards. They’re just really stretched but I feel like they’re best placed.
Matthew: If you were having to recommend any particular measure, either existing or new, to government, what would it be to really tackle the issue of fuel poverty?
Aimee: There has got to be a national insulation programme. It should be publically funded and it shouldn’t cost low-income homeowners anything. So I’m not saying we should go in and insulate wealthy people’s homes for free and I think the majority of homes we should be insulating for free. If you launch a national insulation programme that’s going to cover the majority of existing homes in the country, it would be a huge opportunity for the economy, for employment and for upskilling. It wouldn’t be simple and straightforward. There are lots of different property types with lots of complexities but I believe that’s the way forward.
Rebecca: Thanks, Aimee. This has been absolutely brilliant. You’ve opened up a lot of interesting insights for us through our conversation today, so I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. It’s been great.
Aimee: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me rant [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Matthew: Next on Local Zero, we’re hearing from Luke Fraser at the Orkney Islands Council and Gareth Davies from Aquatera. Both were involved with Orkney’s new flagship energy project ReFLEX. Becky, what on earth is ReFLEX?
Rebecca: Yeah, we need to do a bit of jargon-busting to set things up here, don’t we? [Laughter] So the project ReFLEX, which is led by the European Marine Energy Centre or EMEC for short, is funded through the UK’s Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme. ReFLEX is trying to bring together the local authority, local businesses and the communities to help maximise the use of renewable energy on the island while also trying to reduce the very high levels of fuel poverty that they’re experiencing there.
[Music flourish]
Luke: I’m Luke Fraser. I work for Orkney Islands Council and my team run all our energy efficiency programmes for the private sector.
Gareth: My name is Gareth Davies. I’m Managing Director of a company called Aquatera. We’re based in Stromness in Orkney. We get involved in a lot of consultancy work associated with sustainable energy solutions for communities and industries.
Rebecca: So welcome Luke and Gareth. It’s great to have you both here. But for many people, when they hear Orkney, they might not necessarily think about fuel poverty. They probably think about some of the great energy innovations and the strides forward that are being made in Orkney around renewable energy but my understanding is that fuel poverty is actually quite a big issue in Orkney.
Gareth: Orkney is very well-known for the level of wind, wave and tide that we have there and the amount of energy that we generate but that same raw energy is one of the reasons that we have quite high fuel poverty because basically, any house that’s sticking up above the ground, basically, the wind just wicks the heat away from that house because it’s quite exposed to the raw energy and the damp wind laden with salt from the sea. So that’s a big factor in the amount of energy that our households use. One of the other factors is the age of a lot of the housing stock. The third thing, before I hand over to Luke and he can talk a bit more about the technical side, is that in terms of the price that we pay for energy in many of the forms of energy that other people are used to in other parts of the UK, they’re more expensive in Orkney. For example, we don’t have mains gas and so that means that we have to rely on other forms of heating.
Rebecca: So Luke, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the stuff that you guys have been doing in the council. Have you been running programmes to address this?
Luke: Yeah, we’ve been running a programme for a number of years. The Scottish government hands out funding to councils on a yearly basis for energy efficiency programmes to try and tackle fuel poverty. It’s called the HEEPS: ABS Scheme which is the home energy efficiency programme for Scotland area-based schemes. It’s largely an insulation programme, so it’s aimed at the fabric first. We try and improve the fabric of the building first, as Gareth has mentioned. A lot of our heating stock is not mains gas. It’s oil or it’s electric, so it’s quite expensive being electric or it’s quite dirty being oil. One of the key challenges we have in Orkney is the size of the housing stock. We don’t have tower blocks. We don’t have tenements and terraces where you’ve got one external wall or maybe two. We’ve got a lot of detached housing and so you’re treating all four walls of the property. So an external wall insulation job can be into the £20,000s without any problems and not because it’s a big, big house but just because you’re treating all four elevations which also means you’re getting the weathering on all four sides as well.
Matthew: I think just looking at some of the other projects that you’re undertaking to try and tackle fuel poverty on the Orkney Islands, I wanted to talk a little bit about the ReFLEX project and how this is hoping to harness some of the indigenous power, particularly indigenous to the island. How are you looking to harness that to make people’s lives greener but also more affordable?
Gareth: The concept that we’ve come up with is that really, as a society, we’ve kind of fragmented our use of energy over the decade. So we’ve got used to buying one form of energy from one supplier and another form of energy from another supplier and that’s not been joined up together. What that means is, as a householder, we’re not really aware of our total energy picture and we’re not currently in control of all of the elements that lead to energy costs. So one of the things that ReFLEX does is it’s going to bring the supply of electricity, the supply of heat and the supply of mobility solutions (transport) to households together under one integrated service. That concept of a service is also important because, as I said, as householders, we’re kind of left to get on with it. Choose your own supplier. Choose the technology you’re going to apply and you live the life that you lead [laughter]. What we want to do with ReFLEX is help people make more informed choices about a suite of services and technologies that can link together in one way. It may be that your transport and mobility solution helps provide support for electricity or heat at other times of the day. It may be that you make strategic choices about how you use electricity which helps reduce costs as well. So it’s integrating all of that into one bundled-up service and then helping the householder understand how to drive down the costs and the efficiency of that system.
Rebecca: So this is really exciting but I think when we look at past transitions or the uptake of these new technologies or innovations, we tend to see them being taken up by the middle classes first or those that can afford it first. Are you doing anything, in particular, to make sure that you’re bringing everyone along with you in Orkney and in this project?
Luke: Yeah, I think one of the key things we’re looking at doing is we’re trying to tie in a lot of the funding that’s available through our insulation programme through things like RHI and others as well. We’re trying to finance things upfront so there are no upfront payments for households, so you’re trying to get them into the ReFLEX project through that door. We have certainly found with things like Renewable Heat Incentive, if you can afford to pay the upfront costs of installation, that’s brilliant because you can then claim the RHI over the seven years but a lot of the lower-income households can’t afford that £10,000 plus for a heat pump, even if they can get an interest-free loan from the Scottish government. Older households don’t want to take on a loan. They don’t want the debt and the risk there and so we try and fund things upfront as much as we possibly can. We do that through the insulation grant. We’re trying to take the funding, and the things we have and other funds and other partners, and bring that together alongside ReFLEX so that when somebody comes through the door asking about a new tariff or asking about a battery or something, we can also potentially offer and say, ‘Yeah, that’s brilliant but we’ve got this other stuff over here that can help you keep your home warm as well. We’ve got these other funds we can bring in.’
Matthew: Fantastic. The ReFLEX project which is £28.5m funded through the UK government’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. If we look forward a few years and we take that grant funding out, I think you mentioned some of the other subsidies like the Renewable Heat Incentive, maybe the Feed-in Tariff and maybe other forms of ongoing subsidy, how does this generate income for the Orkney Islands in a few years’ time without subsidy?
Gareth: The challenge with any subsidy is to be clear about what it’s doing. Very often, subsidies are used to help the early adoption of new transformational technologies. Obviously, the reality is that energy use within a household, a business or a public building, that’s not new and we have already. At the moment, it’s been a pretty carbon-full energy system that we’ve used and that’s come at a certain price and it’s had certain consequences. One of those is that in a place like Orkney, perhaps 64-65% of the households are in fuel poverty as measured by the government. So the status quo isn’t without its considerable problems. What ReFLEX is doing, as well as integrating those energy modes into one package, is it’s then thinking strategically about how we help households and businesses reach a more affordable status of energy use. Now affordability is driven by a number of different things. If you’ve got a house that’s leaking heat into the environment because the wind is blowing on all four walls, as Luke was explaining, that means that you’re going to be paying more for your energy. So if you can insulate it, you’re going to reduce costs. If we can use local energy which doesn’t have to be transmitted down gridlines from other parts of the UK, that should make it more cost-effective because we’re not having the losses down the system. If we can be smart about how we use energy so that... at the moment, our energy use through the day and the night varies considerably. If we can smooth that out so that our energy system can work in a more levelised way, that means that we can be more efficient about, for example, the size of the grid that we have serving each of the houses. So each of these mechanisms is an example of how we can make the energy system more efficient. What we’re doing is empowering the customer to take on new technology and new behaviour but sharing the value of that with them directly because they become a partner, if you like, in that transaction of the energy that’s supplied to them.
Matthew: I think that really speaks to quite an interesting situation there. So the Orkney Islands face a unique blend of challenges that we’ve talked about but you’ve also got a unique blend of opportunities and resources to be able to solve them.
Gareth: I mean what we’ve been able to do is to free our minds up and we’re not trying to recreate what we’ve had in the past. We’re really trying to say, ‘Look, the past wasn’t good enough. What can we do in the future?’ It’s come at the right time with the whole movement around climate change. Greta Thunberg has come onto the scene and really pushed us in our consciousness to think about what we’re doing. Government policy has moved and set the net zero targets. So it forces everybody to think... if the UK is saying, at the moment, 2050 (maybe that will come forward) and Scotland is saying 2045, we can’t all end up in 2044 and suddenly expect to jump across on Hogmanay from a carbonised state into a decarbonised state. So one of the things that we say in Orkney is that we need communities who are going to be the lighthouse communities that get to decarbonisation first. Now Orkney has made so much of that journey and our wind turbines are already providing more energy than we need for our electricity system. Over 100% of our electricity demand comes from renewables already, so we’ve achieved that target but we now need to move on to transport. We need to move on to heating. If we want to be at the front, we need to be that lighthouse community, as I said. It’s that going back to the collectivism and the shared ambition. It’s the realisation that that’s what we have to achieve that’s binding us together and creating that sense of purpose.
Luke: So we see people coming to Orkney and saying, ‘You guys are ten years ahead because you don’t have mains gas to fall back on. You’re electrifying heating. You’re putting in heat pumps. You’re doing all this skills change because you have to.’ If they phase out heating oil, we have electric and we have heating oil. We’ve got 4,000 properties on heating oil that need to be transferred onto something else and heat pumps are the way to do it.
Rebecca: So do you think that a big part of this is because you are an island community and you’ve got such a uniqueness? How transferable do you think some of the things that you’ve done and the approaches that you’ve taken might be to other communities or regions throughout the UK?
Gareth: What differentiates us in the sense of being able to move fast is around the unification of boundaries. Within an island setting, every single organisation shares the same organisational boundary which is basically, the coastline of the islands. Within Orkney, everybody in Orkney and everybody that sees Orkney knows what Orkney is and we can work in a more stable and progressive way. So the transferability of that might be that it might be a lesson to us in our government systems to say, ‘Is it really sensible to have these boundaries which overlap all the time? Could we actually unify boundaries into one organisational structure?’ I think it’s been fair to say that Orkney, given that we’ve already got 100% of our electricity covered from renewables, we’re ahead of the curve. What we’re always trying to do is to pull people along behind us and say, ‘Look, we’ve proven this is possible. Let’s get after it on a bigger scale.’ When people come to Orkney and see what’s possible (basically, the art of the achievable), it really encourages them to be more ambitious themselves.
Matthew: Absolutely. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Well, thank you, Luke. Thank you, Gareth. You’re welcome anytime.
Rebecca: Yeah, I’m sure we’ll have you back over the course of the series.
Fraser: Thank you both.
Rebecca: Thanks for joining us.
Matthew: Take care. See you soon.
Fraser: Bye then.
Rebecca: Bye.
[Music flourish]
So we’ve had three very interesting conversations about fuel poverty from three very, very different angles and particularly for me, what came through strongest, when we were talking to Luke and Gareth, was that fuel poverty isn’t something that we can just address on its own. It’s part of a much bigger system of issues. So trying to address it on its own might not be the best solution but embedding it in wider climate initiatives or initiatives to address environmental solutions and problems could actually be the way forward.
Matthew: Spot on and I think the interesting thing with the Orkney Islands is you’ve got an island which is looking to transform its energy system but also it’s trying to transform its economy. They’re leading the UK in terms of heat pump deployment per capita. They’ve got almost more EVs per hectare, or however you want to describe it, than anywhere else. Moving from the Orkney Islands’ example to maybe the broader issue of fuel poverty and what Aimee was saying, some things really stood out for me and I think tenure was the big one. Many of us think of fuel poverty as an issue, or at least paying over the odds for our energy is an issue, that can be solved with things like switching, lagging your loft and taking key decisions within your home about changing the thermostat. Many of the key decisions about the building envelope and the fabric that we live in but also how much we pay for our energy, much of this can be dictated by your social housing provider or your private landlord, so it isn’t that simple for these people.
Fraser: I think that’s very interesting as well on the topic of tenure. This is something that Lucy picked up on in the previous episode as well. What people like South Seeds, who are helping on the ground to help alleviate fuel poverty, find is that tenure is also a hugely critical component. What I think I’ve learned or what seems to have shaken out from the interviews and the discussions today but also from previous episodes and from discussions that we’ve had with Polly and from discussions that we’ve had with Roddy as well is that understanding the lived experienced of people who are going through fuel poverty, as much anything else, the whole systems approach but focusing in on that lived experience is absolutely crucial to getting anywhere near addressing not just the issue of fuel poverty but that wider just transition to net zero.
Rebecca: It’s probably important not to villainize the people on the other side of the coin, right? We talk a lot about tenure from the perspective of the person that’s living in that privately rented accommodation but actually, their landlords probably aren’t the devil. They’re probably going through a whole load of challenges and issues themselves where the context, perhaps, isn’t set up in a way that enables them to address some of the more systemic issues.
Matthew: Well, I think this is a prime spot for regulation. A landlord isn’t a benevolent charity. They’re not somebody who is there to provide – and I’m talking the private rented sector – something for nothing and so they will operate like any other business which is up against the boundaries of what is permissible by regulation. We really need to take a hard look at this and ask private landlords not only what would force them to make these changes but what would help them to make these changes. For me, it’s never helpful to look any industry as the villain and I’m certainly not standing up for all the dodgy landlords I’ve had in the past – some were good and some weren’t.
Rebecca: Yeah, there’s probably a whole other load of players in this that we haven’t thought about. So I know that when I lived in my past accommodation which was privately rented, we had some really serious issues. We actually had floods and holes in the ceiling and my landlords were brilliant and wanted to help the best they could and were completely constrained by what the insurance company would let them do. Who are the other really important kind of keyholders in this? Who can help unlock addressing fuel poverty across the board?
[Music flourish]
Matthew: And now it’s time for something completely different. Our final segment of the show, Future or Fiction? In this segment, Fraser pitches an exciting and innovative energy technology idea and Becky and I have to decide if we think it’s the future or it’s complete tosh. So Fraser, what do you have for us today?
Fraser: I have a brand new super-exciting technology called Good Vibrations. Scientists have found a new use for a rare metal that can absorb vibrations in sound and convert that into usable energy. The metal can be used to create batteries. It’s cited to have huge military potential and it can even, allegedly, be woven into fabric. Do we think it’s the future or do we think it’s fiction?
[Music flourish]
Matthew: It’s certainly got a catchy name.
Rebecca: It does, doesn’t it?
Matthew: Very Beach Boys [laughter], yeah.
Rebecca: I’m hearing the theme song. This is ringing tunes of something we had in a previous episode around converting those vibrations into usable energy. I feel like this isn’t too far away from that. I don’t know if that helps me or not. Is it that it’s fairly close and, therefore, I believe it or is it fairly close and, therefore, I believe Fraser has made it up? [Laughter]
Matthew: It’s a kind of a double bluff, isn’t it? You’re not sure [laughter]. Well, we’ve got to think through this logically, right? I guess vibrations are just a form of kinetic energy or a transfer of kinetic energy.
Fraser: This is specifically vibrations from sound as opposed to previously, when we had kinetic energy about your person.
Matthew: Oh, so this is acoustic?
Fraser: Acoustic, yes.
Matthew: Right, so, in theory, we could wrap whatever device this is around the Sydney Opera House and that’s going to generate some power for next door. Am I about right?
Fraser: Don’t be ridiculous, Matt. That might be pushing it a little bit too far [laughter]. Yeah, I guess if you had enough of it, sure.
Matthew: Okay, it sounds possible. So this is just sound waves or are we talking about this as something that’s being captured through transfer? Let’s say we’re putting these devices next to the M6 and each time an HGV rolls by, it’s absorbing the energy from that and converting it into power.
Fraser: That’s vaguely my understanding of it. One of the things that I either read or made up about it is that it has potential military applications which I took to mean – I don’t know – like an armoured vehicle or the noise of military vehicles could be harnessed somehow. I don’t know.
Matthew: Okay, Becky, you don’t look convinced [laughter].
Rebecca: I’m more convinced than I was about space-based solar which turned out to be true [laughter].
Matthew: Which turned out to be a bankable technology [laughter].
Rebecca: So purely based on that, I feel like I have to go for future.
Matthew: Yeah, I’m not sure that you and I would make very good venture capitalists actually. Firstly, I like the name and I would invest in that, Fraser. I’m going for I think this is nonsense, sorry.
[Low steady beat]
Fraser: That’s the final answers locked in?
Rebecca: Yeah.
Matthew: Yeah.
Fraser: I like the disagreement here [laughter]. Good Vibrations, this is... fiction I’m afraid, Becky.
Matthew: I’ve finally got one right [laughter].
Fraser: Fans of the Marvel cinematic universe will recognise this as vibranium from the Black Panther movie.
Rebecca: Which I’ve even watched [laughter].
Fraser: Ah, that’s satisfying.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: So you’ve been listening to Local Zero with Matt Hannon, Rebecca Ford and Fraser Stewart. Thanks for joining us. Remember to find us on Twitter. Use the hashtag #LocalZero or @EnergyREV_UK. Join in the conversation, ask us questions and we’ll try and get to them later in the series but for now, thanks and bye.
Matthew: See you later.
Fraser: Bye.
[Music flourish]
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