Low Carb Lane

Problem

Leading a lifestyle with low environmental impact is a great intention, but can low-income households afford it?

Response

Asking residents in an average street in the North East what they really think about energy efficiency revealed that other social and financial problems are more pressing concerns.

Result

A blueprint for energy saving with an investment service called SaverBox and an energy reduction service called NESCO was developed by working with local people.

Similarities with Cornwall

• The Low Carb Lane project looked for new incentives to help people to commit to being more energy efficient – with innovative schemes that have the potential to be rolled out across the country. Dott Cornwall’s Living Well [link] project is co-discovering methods of greener living in everyday life to inspire communities, stakeholders and service providers across the UK.
   
• Money was a key factor in Low Carb Lane, so Dott Cornwall’s Living Well [link] project is also looking at how sustainable living projects could strengthen the economy by creating more jobs – jobs that would generate work for hard-pressed local people.

The average UK household produces enough carbon dioxide every year to fill more than 30 double-decker buses. The government has set a target to reduce household energy use by 60% by 2050 – enough to power the country’s streetlights for six years.

As part of Dott 07 designers wanted to tackle domestic energy consumption. So a design team set themselves the aim of reducing the energy consumption of one house in Castle Terrace, Ashington, by 60%.

Alex Webb Allen, from service design agency live|work, which led the Low Carb Lane project, sums up the challenge: ‘If you have £500 to spare, the chances are you are not going to spend it on insulation. There are no incentives for people. You have got to be really committed to the environment to invest the hundreds and possibly thousands of pounds it takes to “green” your home and your lifestyle.’

Energy refurbishment

The live|work team felt it was vital to get hands-on experience of renovating a home to high energy-efficiency standards. They wanted to show people living nearby what could be achieved in a house like their own but also discover what obstacles stood in the way.

While at the house in Castle Terrace, they talked to neighbours, interviewed community groups and found out that there are more pressing problems for residents than reducing the household carbon footprint. People told the team they wanted to live in a community with spirit rather than drug problems, strained landlord/tenant relations and vandalism. And many residents said that, even if they wanted to, they would struggle to afford energy-saving measures. Bill Wilkinson lives in a flat on Castle Terrace. ‘We can’t afford all this energy efficient stuff so our bills are high, and there’s a lot of old people dying every year in this country because they can’t afford to keep themselves warm,’ he said.

But he was keen to see how low-carb living could work: ‘People know very little about carbon emissions except what’s on the news. Not many people here fly or have cars, so we don’t think there’s anything we can do.’

Fellow resident Les Ritson agreed: ‘People around here aren’t so bothered by carbon emissions. It’s the local arsonist they’re worried about.’

Mrs Smith told researchers she lives opposite a burnt out garage and that no matter what improvements she made to her house, she’d never be able to sell it while the street seemed such a mess.

Pauline Thompson, a local councillor, says the split between private landlords, tenants and owner-occupiers means no one can agree on how to improve the street: ‘The street’s in decline. The private landlords are to blame. No one wants to live here any more.’

Bill Wilkinson felt the age of the houses meant there was too much work to do. ‘The government should have a rolling programme for old houses like these to bring them all up to scratch and cut down on emissions. It would be more use than trying to stop people using cars.’

The scale of the problem

After speaking to local people, the Low Carb Lane team identified some common problems stopping the community from becoming more energy efficient:

• The technical skills and time needed to re-fit a house with energy-saving devices were beyond them.
• Insulation or energy-saving appliances were beyond their budget.
• Tenants didn’t want to make long-term investments only for the landlord to benefit through higher rents when they move out.
• Landlords didn’t always want to invest if they couldn’t guarantee the investment would be looked after and if they couldn’t charge more rent to cover the cost.
• Health problems such as infant mortality and ear and chest infections occur more than average in the area because of poor housing and damp, cold and draughty conditions.
• Energy bills were often difficult to understand.

The residents’ shared desire to reduce energy bills and benefit from the savings helped the design team start to focus on more than refurbishment in their quest to make Castle Terrace a Low Carb Lane.

The Outcomes

Alex Webb Allen, service designer from live|work, says: ‘There I was trying to engage the residents in energy saving and discussion around conservation and they didn’t really want to know because it is not on their radar. ‘I felt embarrassed to be mentioning carbon saving when there seem to be complex and more pressing social issues to deal with.’ But there was one concern which united every resident and every problem – money.

None of the residents felt they could afford to be energy-efficient. They described a Catch 22 situation where landlords were unlikely to invest money in bringing their property up to a higher level of energy efficiency and tenants had little incentive to invest to take care of their homes themselves. So neither would benefit from a well maintained, well heated, but energy efficient property.

The designers realised that ‘it’s not directly about energy saving, it’s about providing something that actually benefits the residents,’ explains Webb Allen. ‘We’re trying to attribute a value to energy saving so that if residents save energy they can benefit individually and as a community. Ultimately this takes the form of a financial product, we can release the value of the energy savings for households through a system of no interest or low-interest borrowing, using a not-for-profit business model.’

NESCO

North East Energy Service Co-operative, or NESCO, is the prototype of a not-for-profit energy utility: it would work for the benefit of members by putting them in control of their energy use, encouraging energy efficiency and making energy payment processes transparent.

If a community like Castle Terrace in Ashington set up their own NESCO energy company, it would buy energy in bulk and get savings as a result. It would sell energy on to its members at the normal market rate, with the profits going into a ‘pot’ to fund a reward points scheme to encourage energy saving. The Low Carb Lane team agreed cheaper energy was not, in itself, an incentive for using less energy.

NESCO members could use their reward points to invest in a real-time energy ‘dashboard’ delivered through their TV screens to help them keep track of how much energy they use and make more savings, more easily. If, at the end of the month, they’d used less energy than anticipated, they’d earn reward points. For example, if they saved £10 of energy they might get £10 of cinema tickets or vouchers for home improvement.

Webb Allen says the idea arose from residents’ negative feelings about energy providers: ‘The NESCO idea is a new model for an energy company. It’s a non-profit social enterprise, which is all well and good, but the fact is that most people don’t like their energy companies because most of them don’t care about their customers.
‘If we propose an energy company which does care about its customers and helps them to save energy and money, it might not be as profitable as npower, but it will achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.’

The NESCO reward scheme could operate in any community of any size. The ‘pot’ could be used to fund the installation of the home energy TV dashboard for all members, and provide the funding for communities to buy renewable energy technologies, such as solar thermal systems, heat pumps and wood-chip boiler systems.

Through service innovation and making service better and more efficient, or replacing a product with a service, you can make it more profitable, more socially sustainable and better for the environment. Our services are based on the triple bottom line. We’re not environmental consultants, but in making services more effective, we can make them more socially and economically sustainable.

Webb Allen from live|work

SaverBox

The design team developed a second financial service to encourage residents to install energy saving products. The designers knew that a lack of money stood in the way of many people’s desire to become more energy efficient. So they designed a ‘pay-as you- save’ scheme called SaverBox, which helps people pay for energy-efficient home improvements.

The SaverBox idea is simple. After a home energy audit by an official SaverBox representative, residents agree which energy saving devices would do most to reduce their energy losses at a price they can afford. The resident helps decide whether they need loft or cavity-wall insulation or a more efficient boiler or energy saving appliances.
The householder then ‘buys’ a SaverBox zero interest loan package from a local credit union, and the loft insulation, condensing boiler or double glazing is provided at no up-front cost. Then, each month, the household agrees to pay off the loan from the money they have saved on their energy bills. If the new loft insulation means they are paying £20 a month less for their heating, they might pay half towards the cost of the loft-insulation and keep £10 for themselves.

The Low Carb Lane team is continuing to test its TV dashboard, NESCO and SaverBox prototypes in more homes. After talking to residents and researching the cost and availability of energy saving products, the team used some strategic thinking to link apparently unrelated problems (vandalism and wasted energy) to create a proposal for more than just an energy efficient home. They have developed service prototypes to create a more efficient community.

Being on the scene, talking to users, encouraging community participation and developing solutions collaboratively can be done anywhere to help design better energy-efficiency into more homes and communities, says the design team.

What’s happened since 2007?

The scheme is currently being implemented by National Energy Action (NEA) with funding of £365,000 from regional development agency One North East.

NEA has agreed a deal with the local credit union to provide loans and used part of its funding to employ someone at the credit union to work on their behalf. Funding pays for the design and development work and the credit union.

As a result of the funding, Saverbox is being tested at the moment. NEA have door-dropped over 1,000 homes. Official figures say 300 houses contacted them as a result and 11 houses have so far installed it. However, they are all low-income houses and therefore qualify for free installation. No one has yet used the credit union loan scheme.