It's Time to Get Real

It is our contention at Knauf Energy Solutions, that it's never been more important to ensure that homes are low carbon in reality not just on paper.

As the UK government prepares to consult on the Future Homes Standard and EPC reform, a window of opportunity lies in front of us to deliver on the Government's ambition to ensure that the way we measure the energy performance of homes, using Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), can be much more reliable and accurate.

Over the last few years, digital technologies, including Knauf Energy Solutions' own Negawatthour Meter, have emerged, that make it possible to move from calculated energy performance to measured real performance.

Unfortunately, today, the rules that govern EPCs, do not allow such technologies to support these certificates to be more reliable and accurate and cannot help to ensure that buildings deliver in reality.

With the attached Briefing Paper, we hope to launch a conversation around how such digital technologies can be brought into buildings policy. In particular, we believe:

• The technologies exist today - this is no longer a technology challenge as more and more technologies are emerging that can support policy to move from calculated to real performance measurement.

• The policy changes are feasible - the way that the current EPC framework has been developed, allows for the existing calculated Heat Transfer Coefficient (HTC) to be easily replaced by a real performance HTC.

• Accuracy is critical - to ensure that such new approaches deliver on the need for a more reliable and accurate understanding of a home's real energy performance, it will be key that real performance technologies used for supporting policy can demonstrate themselves a high level of accuracy.

These are our views but we would welcome all views on how best to create a route for digital real performance technologies to be brought into the Future Homes Standard and EPC reform.

We therefore encourage people to send views to real.performance@knaufenergy.com so we can get this conversation started.