Bonny in Clyde
/Scottish housing association cracks the safe on decarbonising social housing
Passive House Plus magazine, August 2023
How do you solve a problem like decarbonising social housing, and do so rapidly, en masse, in a manner that lifts vulnerable people out of fuel poverty while delivering warm, healthy homes? River Clyde Homes may be about to pull off the seemingly impossible.
Greenock, INVERclyde. Photo by Duncan smith.
Rapidly decarbonising our built environment is an urgent task, but it poses a vicious puzzle: how to do it fast, but do it well? And how to pay for it? Deep retrofit is complex, and poorly executed upgrades have a history of causing damp and mould.
The UK and Ireland both plan to become zero carbon societies by 2050. Both countries will need to upgrade a large majority of their homes — two million dwellings in Ireland, twenty-seven million in the UK— by 2050. This will require an unprecedented scaling up of retrofit, and an unprecedented level of investment.
The UK government sees heat pumps as one answer to this challenge — it wants to install 600,000 every year from 2028 onwards to deliver low carbon heat to homes, with less emphasis on fabric upgrades.
But heat pumps require careful design and installation, and if electricity prices are high, they can run up frightful bills in poorly insulated homes. Deep fabric upgrades are better at cutting fuel poverty and making homes comfortable, but they can be complex and expensive.
One housing association in Scotland has come up with a different answer to this puzzle. River Clyde Homes, which manages 6,000 dwellings in Inverclyde, west of Glasgow, wants to decarbonise its housing stock through a mix of whole-house retrofit, low carbon heat networks, and by generating its own renewable energy.