The Energy Bill Revolution campaign this week received backing from energy experts from the University of Exeter, SSE, Consumers Focus and WWF.
The Energy Bill Revolution is a movement of people committed to ensuring warm homes and lower bills for all, an alliance of children’s and older people’s charities, health and disability groups, environment groups, consumer groups, trade unions, businesses, politicians and public figures.
The support was demonstrated via the publication of the results of a series of roundtables on UK energy policy. The roundtables concluded the government’s draft energy bill and existing energy efficiency policies would – in their current state – fail to deliver a secure, clean and affordable power sector for the UK and would result in missing out on some key economic growth opportunities.
The group called for energy demand to be the centrepiece of energy policy, not an afterthought to make decarbonisation easier. It also highlighted the need to use carbon revenue to make homes super energy efficient to help minimise consumer energy bills and bring an end to the blight of fuel poverty.
One in four households in the UK are now in fuel poverty, meaning they need to spend more than 10% of their income on keeping their homes warm. The problem is likely to get worse, with one in three households projected to be in fuel poverty by 2016.
The campaign would suggest recycling carbon revenue to make homes super-energy efficient could bring nine out of 10 homes out of fuel poverty, and could be used to quadruple savings in carbon emissions compared to the government’s new energy efficiency schemes and create up to 200,000 jobs. Is this what we need to support the UK’s economic recovery? I would be interested to hear your thoughts.
