Home is where the heat is – and we must try to keep it there

IT MAY come as a surprise to many that homes create over a quarter of the UK's carbon dioxide emissions, through heating, hot water, cooking, lighting, domestic appliances and home entertainment systems. Heating accounts for by far the biggest part of these emissions. There is an urgent need to make homes in Scotland more energy efficient, reducing fuel bills and emissions.

Building regulations can be used to improve the energy efficiency standards of new housing. However, the vast majority of Scottish housing predates current standards and therefore there is an urgent need to improve the energy performance of these existing homes.

Scotland has a large proportion of existing housing that is hard to make energy efficient, owing to the age or design of the house. Evidence suggests a quarter of Scottish homes have solid walls, more than 20 per cent are tenements, a third are off the gas network and a quarter have no lofts. All these factors make it harder to improve energy efficiency, producing so-called "hard to treat" homes. Increasing the energy performance of these properties requires solutions which are more complex than simple loft or cavity wall insulation.

Many people in Scotland suffer from fuel poverty; they spend more than 10 per cent of their income, net of housing costs, on heating their home and find it very hard to afford this

Among a raft of measures to improve energy efficiency and reduce fuel poverty the Scottish Government last year launched the Energy Efficiency Design Awards, a prize fund worth 1 million annually. It aims to improve housing, drive innovative solutions for the retrofit market, as well as develop skills and businesses, and support local supply chains. The awards are managed by the Energy Saving Trust, and projects put forward must improve homes to produce savings of at least 40 per cent.

Five winners shared the money last year with projects based right across Scotland, in Fife, Aberdeenshire, Skye and Orkney. All the projects involved existing housing that is considered hard to treat, with two based in listed buildings. The residents of four of the projects were social tenants, while the other mainly involved owner-occupiers.

Of the projects, Kingdom and Link Group Housing Associations in Fife both installed combined heat and power units into listed buildings. These units can produce both heat and electricity which will make the properties easier and cheaper to heat.

Aberdeenshire Council and Skye and Lochalsh Housing Association both took a different route, upgrading cold and exposed rural properties by installing high specification solid wall insulation and upgrading the heating. Skye and Lochalsh Housing Association replaced coal fires with ultra-modern and energy-efficient exhaust air heat pumps while Aberdeenshire Council installed A-rated gas boilers.

This all goes a long way to show that cutting carbon dioxide emissions in existing housing can be done, and very successfully. The five projects all reduced emissions by more than 45 per cent – with some achieving 70 per cent. All illustrate that there is the expertise in Scotland to improve our housing, cut energy bills and make a real contribution to combating climate change by reducing emissions from existing housing.

It's a win-win situation – and we need to encourage more Scottish communities, architects, housing providers and the construction industry to join forces to find the best energy efficiency solutions for Scotland's homes.

• Mike Thornton is the Energy Saving Trust's director in Scotland