Teli; Dimitriou; James; Bahaj; Ellison; Waggot, 2016
Summary
Social housing retrofit is often seen as a way to contribute to carbon reductions as it typically encompasses large-scale interventions managed by one landlord. This work investigates the carbon savings potential of a deep retrofit in a local authority owned 107-flat tower block, taking into account the tenants’ pre-retrofit heating strategies. Prior to the retrofit, temperature and relative humidity monitoring have been undertaken in 18 flats for 35 days. The measurements are then used to develop occupant heating profiles in the 18 homes. Dynamic thermal simulation of the flats pre- and post-retrofit using the identified user heating profiles highlights that for these fuel poverty-constrained flats, the estimated carbon savings of retrofit will be typically half those predicted using standard rules for temperatures in living spaces. For practical application, the findings presented in this paper demonstrate the impact of fuel poverty on the expected benefits from social housing retrofit schemes, providing information relevant to multiple stakeholders such as the building industry: The study highlights the need to use empirical data in building energy modelling, as typical conditions could be far from representative in social homes. In addition, policy makers and social landlords should consider that targets for CO2 reduction may not be achieved through retrofitting, but the social impact could be much greater and more critical than assumed. The findings under this work help to direct incentives for retrofit schemes towards the social and health benefits achieved.
Barbier, Edward, 2014
Summary
Climate change mitigation policies include a wide range of actions, including efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel combustion, energy efficiency and end-use innovations, and reducing carbon emissions through avoided deforestation. Such policies can affect poverty in developing countries either directly or indirectly. Direct impacts on poverty include payments for avoided deforestation that affect the livelihoods of the poor, reduced GHG emissions that also produce co-benefits of improved air quality and health, and clean energy and energy efficiency effects on energy poverty. Indirect impacts on the poor in developing countries occur through the changes in trade, economic growth, and other economy-wide effects. To date, there is a lack of systematic or comprehensive analyses of these direct and indirect impacts of mitigation policies on the poor. Although such policies may benefit the poor, some actions may worsen poverty and hinder its alleviation. This suggests that a more comprehensive approach should be employed in analysing how mitigation policies affect the poor in developing countries, and in particular, in assessing how policy design and implementation can influence the potential trade-offs between the positive and negative impacts on poverty alleviation.
Rosenow, Jan;Platt, Reg; Flanagan, Brooke, 2013
Summary
Energy efficiency obligations (or white certificates) are increasingly used to reduce carbon emissions. While the energy efficiency obligations were originally intended as carbon reduction and not fuel poverty policies, due to recognition of the potential for regressive outcomes they often include provisions for vulnerable and low-income customers. Intuitively, reducing carbon emissions and alleviating fuel poverty seem to be two sides of the same coin. There are, however, considerable tensions between the two when addressed through energy efficiency obligations, particularly arising from the potentially regressive impacts of rising energy prices resulting from such obligations, but also the complexity of targeting fuel poor households and the implications for deliverability. Despite those tensions, the UK government decided to use energy efficiency obligations, the supplier obligation, as the main policy for reducing fuel poverty. In light of the proposals, this paper provides an analysis of the main tensions between carbon reduction and fuel poverty alleviation within energy efficiency obligations, outlines the fuel poverty provisions of the British Supplier Obligation, assesses its rules for identifying the fuel poor, and provides a critical analysis of the planned policy changes. Based on this analysis, alternative approaches to targeting fuel poverty within future supplier obligations are proposed.
Ürge-Vorsatz, Diana; Herrero, Sergio Tirado, 2011
Summary
Even though energy poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation are inextricably linked policy goals, they have remained as relatively disconnected fields of research inquiry and policy development. Acknowledging this gap, this paper explores the mainstream academic and policy literatures to provide a taxonomy of interactions and identify synergies and trade-offs between them. The most important trade-off identified is the potential increase in energy poverty levels as a result of strong climate change action if the internalisation of the external costs of carbon emissions is not offset by efficiency gains. The most significant synergy is found in deep energy efficiency in buildings. The paper argues that neither of the two problems – deep reductions in GHG emissions by mid-century, and energy poverty eradication – is likely to be solved fully on their own merit, while joining the two policy goals may provide a very solid case for deep efficiency improvements. Thus, the paper calls for a strong integration of these two policy goals (plus other key related benefits like energy security or employment), in order to provide sufficient policy motivation to mobilise a wide-scale implementation of deep energy efficiency standards.
DianaÜrge-Vorsatz, Agnes Kelemen, Sergio Tirado-Herrero, StefanThomas, Johannes Thema, Nora Mzavanadze, Dorothea Hauptstock, Felix Suerkemper, Jens Teubler, Mukesh Gupta, Souran Chatterjee, 2016
Summary
The paper identifies a few key challenges to the evaluation of the co-impacts of low-carbon options and demonstrates that these are more complex for co-impacts than for the direct ones. Such challenges include several layers of additionality, high context dependency, and accounting for distributional effects.