Introduction
In this blog post, we’ll introduce some of the key principles of funding for getting energy efficiency measures installed into homes and get into some detail about the best way of going about securing your own funding in the most effective ways possible. We’re Optify, specialists in optimising retrofit funding for home owners, landlords, social housing organisations and building contractors.
Back To Basics: What's All This About?
You can’t turn very far without hearing about the climate crisis on the news. After years of reports about melting ice caps and extreme weather patterns, it’s universally accepted that global warming exists and that the time is now to start taking drastic measures to try and reverse the effects for our future generations.
We’ve recently seen academic research papers that suggest the efforts we need to go through to achieve this will touch everybody and every job in some way, such is the extremity of what we’ll need to do to fix the problem. All sectors of the economy will have to play their part and housing is included in this which altogether, according to the Committee on Climate Change, contributes around 40% of the UK’s entire greenhouse gas emissions so taking collective action is an important step to achieving the kind of greenhouse gas reductions we need to see.
For housing, the big things we can do to contribute are to use less energy and generate clean power. It’s relatively easy to incorporate these measures into new houses that are built, and that’s being done, albeit at slightly higher cost. The hard yards to achieving decarbonisation targets for housing is incorporating these measures into the millions of existing homes up and down the country, work that is being termed “retrofit”.
Funding Retrofit
The core principle of retrofit is that we’ll be installing various measures into homes to make them more energy efficient, reducing energy use and therefore reducing emissions and saving money at the same time. The principles of this are relatively straightforward but there are many complexities involved once you start getting into the details of how to achieve it. One of these is around affordability. The extent of retrofit work required to achieve emission reduction targets is huge. Estimates on the total cost of retrofit to the UK vary widely but will be somewhere in the range of £300 billion to £500 billion over the next two decades.
UK Central government and devolved governments around the UK have been planning for this for some time and significant amounts of funding have been set aside to make progress with retrofit on a large scale.
It is however important to understand that funding currently available will nowhere near complete the job so finding new funding sources and helping the funding available to go further are priorities.
Making Retrofit More Affordable: Optimising How Much Funding You Can Claim
If you’ve read this far, you’ll have a feel for why Optify was set up. We exist to help funding get into the right hands at the right time and to bring additional funding forward in order to help facilitate more retrofit, therefore contributing towards net zero targets.
What we’ve found is that getting the available funding is complex, daunting and time consuming. There are numerous funding sources available and each is constrained by complex eligibility criteria. Certain funding schemes will be relevant to certain properties or occupants whilst other schemes may relate to how energy efficient a property is already.
It is currently commonplace that when someone becomes aware of a funding source that they go ahead and apply for what is free money without considering if it’s the best thing to do.
In a lot of cases, getting that money could be the wrong thing to do. For many retrofit projects, it will be the case that the project could qualify for numerous funding sources, as long as the project is planned with this in mind. Taking a big picture approach to planning the funding of a retrofit project where you consider the eligibility criteria of all the funding sources can pay dividends as by applying for funding and doing retrofit work in a deliberate order could help you qualify for multiple funding sources.
Every one of the funding sources is complex. Multiply that by the number of funding schemes available and you’ll get an idea of how difficult it is to have a whole of market view and make the most of the funding opportunity that’s out there. That’s exactly why Optify is here – to deal with that complexity for you so that you don’t have to. We’ve built the expertise to optimise funding claims for our clients to help them claim more of the available funding and make retrofit more affordable.
How To Optimise Your Retrofit Funding
Getting this right is really important. If you’re planning a retrofit project, get in touch with us before you do anything else. We’ll help guide you through the most effective process to being able to optimise your retrofit funding. We can help homeowners find funding for their homes as well as tenants and landlords of rented properties. We also help social housing organisations plan their retrofit journeys and work with building contractors to help their clients do funded retrofit projects.
The emphasis here is planning for funding optimisation before you do anything else. Get in touch today to learn more about what this means for you.
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