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Ed Milibrand, the UK Minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change has announced a plan to give the United Kingdom’s 27 million homes a “sustainability makeover”. This 6.5+ billion pounds/year program will operate with three core elements:

• A universal, street by street, house by house approach with everyone offered comprehensive and free or low-cost advice.
• A plan for finance which all can have access to, linked to the house not the individual
• And a commitment to ensure fairness in what we deliver and the way we deliver it.

Street by street, providing paths for all residences to meet 21st century energy efficiency standards as part of the UK’s efforts to cut emissions by 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

NOTE: This is a plan offered for three months of comments, not yet announced government policy.

Rather nicely for lining up, the UK’s 27 million homes account for 27 percent of the UK’s emissions. The announced plan would target having seven million homes renovated for energy efficiency and, at least some, energy production by 2020 and all 27 million homes having had the opportunity by 2030. Potentially: a 27% cut in UK emissions just from this one measure by 2030 …

House to house, street by street

Milibrand emphasized that the UK has done this before. After the discovery of North Sea natural gas,

Every cooker, every boiler, every gas fire in the country had to be adjusted.
Changing more than 32 million appliances, of 8,000 different makes and models.
Each appliance, house by house, visiting more than 14 million homes.
And in today’s prices, the cost they estimated for this was almost £6 billion.
But they did it.
Why did they do it? Because they thought long-term and realised that the shift that they started before I was even born would still benefit us today.
We face the same situation again.

Target: every house that can have cavity insulation will have it by 2015.

And, full ‘sustainability’ retrofits of seven million homes by 2020.

So this can’t be about helping a few million homes; we have to think bigger than that.
That is why we want to ensure that the Great British Refurb is based on a plan which over time covers every area and every house in every area.

Finance

That little problem of how to get people to pay for things …

Because the scale of the changes we will need are of a different order to what has gone before, we also need new ways of financing them.

We need to make it easier for people to do the right thing.

The cost will be attached to the house and utility bills will be used to pay back the costs. Sell the home and you sell the debt. The intent is to have utility bills, including repaying for the sustainability renovation, lower than what they would be paying for all the wasted energy.

Pay-as-you-save insulation … is good for families, companies, and the environment.

Fairness.

In addition, the concept has pats to assure that ‘the poorest areas of the country and its poorest citizens also reap the benefits of living in energy efficient dwellings.

Going beyond the UK

What has been proposed in the United Kingdom is the very sort of comprehensive retrofit of the existing and to come building stock that must be a core element of any serious effort to turn the tide on Global Warming’s rising seas. This type of thinking is at the core of Architecture 2030‘s work.

What Milibrand is missing in this speech is a discussion of the huge economic benefits of this plan. Rather than burning up fossil fuels and paying other countries for that energy (and reaping the externalized costs from fossil fuel pollution), this is creating jobs for the home energy retrofits. And, creating homes that are healthier and more comfortable to live in.

This is a plan to watch and to emulate …