Affordable zero-carbon housing in the Eastern New Energy project
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Urgent need for affordable zero-carbon housing
There is an urgent need for affordable, zero-carbon housing.
The UK faces:
- A housing shortage
- A housing affordability crisis
- A climate crisis
- A productivity and quality challenge in the construction sector
Eastern New Energy (ENE)
Eastern New Energy is an action research and demonstration project.
Our purpose is to collaborate with organisations to remove barriers that prevent us from rapidly decarbonising our communities, buildings, transport and lives.
We aim to demonstrate only affordable, rapidly scalable solutions.
The housing workstream in Eastern New Energy
One workstream is focusing on delivering zero-carbon affordable housing.
Beside the severe shortage of affordable housing (even at modest environmental performance levels), nobody can currently supply both zero carbon and true affordability in the same solution – whether with modern methods (MMC) or traditional construction.
In this workstream, we are working with those with a need to build and provide affordable zero-carbon housing, and wish to participate/collaborate in the ENE project to deliver the initial schemes.
Closing in on affordable zero-carbon housing
Our initial approach is to combine some or all of the following elements:
- Modern Methods of Construction (MMC)
- MMC improves quality, reduces errors, and speeds up construction.
- A ‘Digital Twin’ of the physical system – this allows for:
- Close collaboration and efficient communication in project development and delivery
- Efficiencies in customer consultation, design, manufacture and construction
- Co-design with end-users
- Adaptation of the core design to meet local site and end-user needs
- Materials and processes – incorporating, for example:
- Low or zero-carbon versions of conventional materials (concrete, steel, insulation, etc)
- New and advanced materials to achieve enhanced performance (e.g. super-thermal core structure and fabric)
- Alternative foundation methods (screw-piles) to reduce the need for concrete
- Energy Services Company
- An ‘ESCO (Energy Service Company) for developers service. This is a simplified/small scale ESCO. It will combine on and offsite renewables to enable netting-off of residual emissions from any development. The ESCO takes on the capital cost of the renewables, which reduces build costs.
- Cheap, patient capital to refinance projects on completion
- This is most relevant to community land trusts. We will experiment with: Community Municipal Bond issues.
- Aggregating smaller projects into a single portfolio that can be refinanced via a bond.
Creating social, economic and environmental value
We plan to incorporate into the pilot developments:
- ‘Design for wellbeing’ considerations
- Support for community wealth building
- Support Programmes to:
- Retrain and reskill the existing workforce in MMC
- Bring new workers and businesses into the industry.
- Support the younger generation to build careers in construction
Wider benefits we hope we can demonstrate will emerge from a transition to MMC include:
- The emergence of a more diverse and competitive housebuilding industry
- A new wave of housebuilding (and retrofit) contributing to local economic development by creating:
- New businesses and business opportunities
- New jobs
- New skills
- A more diverse (and younger) workforce
For more information please contact terry.mcgivern@ukcommunityworks.org
