introduction
Aspire Housing has a long term goal of reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions across its entire operations, including its housing stock of 8,500 homes, office buildings and business travel. This is to improve conditions for tenants, and to improve the long-term sustainability of Aspire's housing portfolio, especially in the current economic climate of rising fuel costs and increasing numbers falling into fuel poverty.
challenge
In order to meet these aims a long-term strategy was developed, but Aspire wanted the details on where best to apply specific energy efficiency improvement measures, and which measures would be most cost effective to improve their stock.
solution
Taking Aspire's existing housing stock data as a starting point, Sustain used its specialist buildings' expertise and software to establish baseline figures for each property for a number of key energy efficiency indicators, including SAP, energy costs, and CO2 emissions. From this baseline, Sustain modelled the impact on the indicators of a wide range of potential measures, from low cost options such as loft insulation to more advanced technologies like air-source heat pumps
By combining the baseline and modelled SAP data with costing information, we were able to produce a value for money analysis, showing the relative cost for each scenario for the same improvements in SAP.
As well as providing the resulting data analysis in a standard database and summary form, we also published it on web-based map, allowing Aspire's staff to navigate to individual properties, and to visualise geographically based patterns in the results. This showed clusters of particularly low or high ratings. An added advantage of this approach is that we were also able to integrate external indicators such as Fuel Poverty and Index of Multiple Deprivation into the map, providing Aspire with a range of data to guide their strategic development and targeting for improvements.
outcome
With access to the core data and the map-based version, Aspire have been able to develop their programme of energy efficiency improvements in such a way as to make the most effective use of the limited resources available.
Sustain have assisted the development of Aspire's asset management strategy to treat less thermally efficient properties and given them priorities in terms of where to direct energy advice and support to households at risk of fuel poverty.
Sustain also added a solar PV generation layer to the map, which gave Aspire information on the feasibility of installing PV. This included the capacity of each individual roof, the potential income to Aspire, the cost saving to the tenant and the payback period for investment. This information made it possible for Aspire to present a strong business case for solar PV.
