HEEPS of good

Andy Deacon from EST talks about London's HEEP  - Heat and Energy Efficiency Programme, which sends people into homes to implement the '10 easy measures' = bulbs, drafts, radiator foil etc - and flags up potential for other approaches.

In Mancherter, AWARM is a fuel poverty alleviation programme run by EST in partnership with local providers where the delivery channel, generating 2500 referrals in less than 12 months - is using health professionals to take messages into households.

The EST's Green Communities support services is aiming to go deeper, and go beyond a helpline and training nd online community carbon measures, to 'lending out' experts and fulfilling action with the members that they've already got. One example: Davyhulme project grew out of an eco-congregation who wanted to serve their wider community - did home energy check forms, lobbied their LA, set up discount insulation offer, referrals. A single community of intertest can have a wider impact in partnership.

CSREG - Community Scale Renewable Energy Generation - having look at potentially interesting funding models where say revenue from a community owned wind farm is being recycled into domestic energy saving. EST love these 'revolving loan' projects.

Energising behaviour change

More insights from the Energy Saving Trust

The key drivers, being reported by lots of different sources that range from Ariel washing powder, Tetley tea (less water in the kettle please) are making the right things the norm for a lot more people.

There is still a lot of room for improvement, and there's a caveat for inaccuracies caused by self-reporting of behaviour uptake. Most people don't make the link between hot water and energy use - only 8% do. There's a perception in many parts of the country that there's no issue: "there's a lot of water around in our part of the country, so why would we save water - the South East is a long way from here"

The government has decided that within 10 years or so, every home will have a smart meter, and it's important that people know what the information on the displays actually means. Potentially, older people will need more.

There are roughly 250,000 cavity walls without insulation in Wales (350,000 tonnes of carbon a year potential saving). Some people don't understand / like the technology - 4% of people - Andy Bull's experience at Severn Wye Energy is that much of the dooubt is (naturally) based on inaccurate information and 'friends of friends' who say 'it creates damp, when it doesn't. Affordability is the reason for 42% of people in Wales - partly because people over-estimate how much it will cost relative to the savings, others lack the knowledge or the motivation (I couldn't figure what this meant in detail) - maybe couldn't be bothered to find out the actual information that was needed. We may well need added incentives such as council tax rebates or use of stronger measures for say, the private rented sector.

Higher cost measures such as microgen and solid wall insulation have different challenges. 5000 properties out of 430,000 properties with solid walls. By 2020 Wale needs to have 120,000 additional properties to have been fixed. 50,000 of electric and heat microgen installations are needed by 2020. The real barriers around solid wall insulation are a general lack of interest -interest decreases when owner-occupiers find out cost, disruption, space and aesthetic impact - with none of the turbine type signals that people are doing the right thing. Solid wall insulation is just a wall at the end of the day!

There's still a big gap in knowledge in terms of many of the technologies; 47% of housholds say that they're interested in finding out whether their proprety is suitable for micro-generation. For those that don't find their way to EST, people want to know that a) the tech is suitable, b) it works - without this, it's very easy for scepticism to grow.

What's needed? Advice for builders on materials etc, better access to demonstration projects, field trials of technologies, use of the new Feed In Tariffs, and roll out of PAYS pilots.

We still have choice

With the COP15 Copenhagen climate talks starting in a few days, there may not yet be much of a feeling of optimism in the crisp autumn air, and there is widespread recognition that the liklihood of a binding, realistic and strong set of emissions targets is small. We do however, have many choices still in front of us.

• Regardless of the COP15 outputs, we'd still be smart, at some stage soon, to make some choices about:
• When to start creating a robust plan for food resilience
• When to implement planning restrictions on low level coastal land
• When to integrate potential responses to peak oil and energy security into our strategies.

George Monbiot put it neatly in the Guardian the other day:

In its new World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency (IEA) maintains that, to meet new demand and replace old equipment and exhausted reserves, the world will have to invest $25.6tn in energy supply infrastructure between now and 2030. The industrialised nations would also need to pay a fortune to the Opec countries to maintain their oil and gas supplies: the IEA predicts that the oil producers' income will rise fivefold in this period, to $30tn. These costs will be much higher if oil supplies peak.If moving to a low-carbon economy looks implausible, so does maintaining the high-carbon economy. Whichever route is taken, staggering amounts of money need to be spent. As resources become harder to extract and concentrated in fewer countries, it shouldn't be too difficult to persuade world leaders that the money might as well be spent on exploiting ambient energy, which will neither run out nor allow us to be held to ransom.