Energy efficiency in existing buildings - a new report highlights problems

A new report out from the Economic and Social Research Council and Technology Strategy Board makes interesting reading.

The report states that some 27% of emissions come from domestic buildings - twice the emissions of commercial and public buildings and five times that of industrial buildings.

According to Professor Kevin Lomas, University of Loughborough, virtually all the 24 million existing buildings in the UK would need some attention to reduce their emissions by just 40 per cent. 'To complete the task in 40 years we would need to refurbish an entire city the size of Cambridge every month. If we assume that each intervention would take a team of trained workers two weeks, we would need 23,000 teams of people to work at this rate non-stop for the next 500 months,' he warns.

A long job. Particularly as, it appears, energy saving devices do not always save energy. The report goes on to say that ‘occupants of buildings do not always understand or use these devices in the way their designers intended’.

Oh dear! We obviously have a long way to go!