Local energy mapping using publicly available data for urban energy retrofit

Abstract

There is an urgent need to improve the energy performance of the built environment, so as to help alleviate fuel poverty, meet national carbon targets, and improve the local economy. This is why local authorities have targets to reduce carbon emissions and fuel poverty and to create long-term, high-quality jobs in their areas. Large-scale energy retrofit schemes can address these objectives but they need to be better targeted, more cost-effective and result in a higher uptake. This chapter investigates how publicly available datasets on housing and energy can be used to plan mass retrofit and provide targeted low carbon measures across a city, in order to address the challenges of having: incomplete data on which homes could benefit from which retrofit measures and the inability to aggregate private sector housing retrofit activities to minimise installation costs. Energy-related assessments are preformed using publicly available national and local data throughout Bicester, Oxfordshire, and presented using a GIS platform. Key datasets include Ordnance Survey (OS) Mastermap, OS Address-point, Energy Performance Certificate data (EPC), and Sub-national energy statistics. The EPC data (6000 properties) and sub-national data for Bicester are used to identify areas with high energy consumption, fuel poverty, and those in need of wall and roof insulation. Interestingly, when the entire EPC dataset for Bicester was compared to the entire town of Bicester’s sub-national figure, the values were only off by ~800 kWh. On the other hand at a house level, there appears to be an overestimate of between 3000 and 4000 kWh/yr. in the mean energy figure for the EPCs, as compared to sub-national data.