Westville Group have been working with Nottingham University’s Energy Innovation Department on a fantastic new project to try and reduce fuel poverty and improve energy efficiency across the region.
Here at Westville Group we find it shocking that in the United Kingdom in the 21st century we still have so many families living in poverty – being able to afford to keep their home heated on a regular basis. This also has a knock on effect in the fight against climate change, as houses with fuel poverty issues tend to be inefficient and use much more energy to keep them warm – increasing their carbon footprint.
The official number of families in fuel poverty varies however the latest Government survey on the matter suggested that 11.1% of households are official fuel poor – this equates to over 2.5 million households, and millions of people suffering in the cold.
We are always looking to do all that we can here to bring attention to this issue and help to reduce it as much as possible, which is why we have recently been working with Nottingham University on an interesting project to tackle fuel poverty and improve the energy efficiency across the region..
Working alongside two UON postgraduate students, Soni and Victor, we focused on creating a database of property construction types across all wards in the City of Nottingham boundary. By doing this we could then identify by street and area which properties required solid wall insulation to improve their energy efficiency levels, and we could easily identify areas of high fuel poverty and low energy efficiency levels.
With such a good project-team in place we worked quicker than expected and over-delivered against the project requirements, mapping the data from 14 district areas instead of the 2 originally envisaged. We have already used these outcomes of this work to help local Councils target people in fuel poverty and in need of improved insulation. So the tools are live and being used – not on a shelf gathering dust.
Carrying out this work with Soni and Victor provided us with extremely valuable information, and also showed the benefit of working with fantastic, bright University of Nottingham Students. Moving forwards we hope that having this information will help us to make a dent in the significant fuel poverty numbers in the East Midlands.
You can find out more information about this project on the Nottingham University blog, where I spoke about our experience with the Post graduates and the useful work that they did.
For more information regarding home insulation grants and any anti fuel poverty measures, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Westville team on 0800 1583605.