Call for equal focus on consumption, cost, emissions in EPCs

Elmhurst Energy is renewing its call to the government to redesign energy performance certificates to give equal focus to energy consumption, cost and carbon emissions.

“The domestic EPC was set up in 2007 as a cost metric and hasn’t been updated since,” said Stuart Fairlie, managing director of Elmhurst. “Unfortunately, EPC ratings are now being used as a policy tool to reduce carbon emissions and therefore climate change. This just doesn’t work.”

Fairlie says the national calculation methodologies (SAP and SBEM) can present all three metrics and believes all three should be presented in the EPC.  

“Once we have made this change to EPCs, governments can align their regulations to the relevant metric,” he added. “For example, policy initiatives to tackle fuel poverty can focus on cost, while initiatives on reducing energy use could be measured by energy consumption, and climate change regulations could be based on a measurement of carbon emissions.”

Elmhurst’s views on redesigning EPCs  are laid out in detail in the company’s new almanac for energy efficiency professionals. The almanac captures key facts and figures about the current state of the energy performance of UK buildings and provides links to all the most important policy developments, consultations and regulatory developments affecting the sector in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.

 The Elmhurst Almanac is available here.