City Science is developing a tool to provide investors, portfolio managers/owners and tenants with an understanding of the retrofit options for their home and to more accurately quantify the financial, environmental and social returns on investment.
Overview
We hear time and time again in the retrofit industry that it will cost a huge amount to retrofit the UK housing stock but also that there is a huge commercial opportunity in retrofit and that there is funding waiting to be invested. The challenge is matching up funding with need and doing it in a way that provides investors with confidence, reduces carbon emissions and improves the quality of life of occupants.
The IGP project aims to provide investors, portfolio managers/owners and tenants with a tool to understand the retrofit options for their home and to more accurately quantify the financial, environmental and social returns on investment. The solution will help to unlock both public and private investment across different tenancy types by finding a range of retrofit pathways and present/facilitate the optimum financing options which satisfy all parties involved.
Our approach
As uncertainty is such a key feature in commercialising retrofit solutions, a highly evidenced, data driven approach will form the basis of the technical methodology in the IGP project. The tool developed as part of IGP project will build upon our expertise in building monitoring and modelling. As part of the testing and validation within this project, we will coordinate a number of retrofit projects. We will monitor the performance of the building before and after the retrofits to quantify the energy savings and fuel cost savings. This monitoring will provide confidence to all parties that property upgrades are having the intended impact allowing parties to invest in homes with confidence.
Research
The IGP project brings together research that we have conducted over various projects into one place, bringing in knowledge of building monitoring and modelling tools from our Heat Pump Ready Projects and combining it with expertise in online tool development in our software development team.
The research questions in IGP include:
- What are the pain and gain points for stakeholders in retrofit?
- What information about properties and potential upgrades is needed to unlock investment? How does this change with different parties who have different priorities?
- Who needs this information and to what level of accuracy?
- What is the impact of retrofit in terms of energy savings, carbon savings, improved health and comfort? How confident can we be in our quantification of savings for an individual home or across a portfolio of homes?
Outcomes
The key outcome of this project is a scalable, commercial, software-based service that has been developed via heavy engagement with users and wider stakeholders, used to both guide and validate our solution. This service will take in information about a property and return retrofit and energy saving suggestions, quantifying the impact of those suggestions in terms of energy, carbon, fuel costs, capex and EPC rating with the option for ongoing monitoring. The monitoring service will be tested via live retrofit trials in homes.