87 social housing projects have been chosen as part of a ?17 million UK government experimentation to test low-carbon building technology. The programme, called Retrofit for the Future, will see new technologies retrofitted into social houses in the UK.
The aim of the project is to see the results shared and see how it can be used to make the UK?s current housing stock use energy more efficiently.
From a phase that saw over 190 organizations receiving up to ?20,000 to devise proposals from fully feasible studies, 87 were given proof of concept development contracts to carry out retrofits on current social houses. An average of ?142,000 will be given to the retrofit prototypes to show deep cuts in carbon emissions and exemplar energy efficient measures in UK social housing, reports newstatesman.com.
The Energy Saving Trust will be evaluating each demonstrator house for two years, with the trust assessing the potential for lower cost implementation in volume across the remaining UK social housing stock.
The results will be converted into a database which will be made available to researchers, social landlords and energy companies to ensure that cost effective technologies are employed in future retrofits. It?s hoped that the principles from the Retrofit for the Future prototypes can be used all over the country and that social housing will provide a future blueprint for effective use in terms of energy reduction and CO2 mitigation.
David Bott, director of innovation programs at Technology Strategy Board, said: ?We are delighted to have been selected by the Technology Strategy Board to develop this project and implement innovative home energy efficiency solutions that significantly reduce CO2 emissions and save money on fuel bills for our residents.?
