Hywel Lloyd, Government Engagement Manager
Part of the Active Building Centre’s mission is to raise awareness of Active Buildings and their benefits, and provide information, evidence and data to inform future policy.
Reducing fuel poverty or securing energy wealth
In their recent consultation ‘Tackling fuel poverty 2020 – 2035’ the Welsh Government proposed greater urgency and action, significantly reducing the number of households facing fuel poverty and ensure that by 2035 ‘No households are estimated to be living in severe or persistent fuel poverty.’ This consultation sought to ensure that all possibly approaches and evidence fed into the ten priority actions, covering identifying and prioritising those in need, delivering measures that help decarbonise, while also influencing wider UK government and regulator policy.
From our specific perspective on the future of homes and energy we have highlighted that, most fundamentally of all, any government should seek to create ‘energy wealth’ for citizens, both home owners and tenants. We argue that – too much effort goes into avoiding or reducing fuel poverty (there is now even an annual debate in Westminster!) and not enough into promoting and securing energy wealth.
With a focus on energy wealth we can all start to look at both reducing demand for energy AND increasing local, community and especially home ownership of energy, which in turn will result in reducing, or even eradicating, fuel poverty.
Active building’s role
Active Buildings are a powerful device for delivering high energy efficiency, with consequential low demand; AND meaningful amounts of building ‘owned’ energy through the deployment of energy capture, generation and storage devices on and in buildings.
As part of this consultation response we explore how best to ‘Activate’ the existing stock, and turn homes from sources of fuel poverty, into sources of energy wealth.
The full consultation is available here: Tackling-fuel-poverty