New building regulations will probably mean fewer solar panels are installed on new buildings in England!
Far from boosting installation of solar pv on new buildings, new building standards that the UK Government will say they will bring in for England are likely to reduce solar installation rates.
The Government has let it be known that homes given planning permission from 2027 will have to reduce carbon emissions by up to 80 per cent compared to pre-2022 new building efficiency standards. This means heat pumps will be effectively mandated. But green building campaigners are disappointed by the fact that not only will the new regulations be delayed until 2027, but solar pv will not be mandatory on new homes (See HERE and HERE).
Under regulations that came into force in June 2022, new buildings have to reduce carbon emissions by 30 percent compared to the previous regulations. This can be mostly achieved simply by putting 2-3 kW of solar panels on the roof of an average new home. Many builders find this more convenient as a means of meeting the regulations. It means they can just carry on with existing work patterns with a bit of an add-on with solar panels. But this practice is likely to come to and end when the next set of regulations comes into force.
Heat Pumps are an alternative to meeting the energy standards for new buildings in place at the moment. Fitting heat pumps in new buildings is not significantly more expensive than achieving the required carbon reduction with solar panels. It is just that many (although not all) builders appear to be reluctant to do the new designs and adopt new techniques needed for homes with heat pumps. And of course, the builders may be friendly with the gas boiler industry.
So, at the moment a lot of new buildings will be fitted with solar (pv) panels. However, when the new building regulations will come into force in 2027, the builders will have to fit heat pumps in order to achieve the bigger carbon reduction requirements (75-80 per cent). But they will not need solar pv so much to achieve the targets.
If the targets are being achieved by fitting heat pumps, which they will have to fit anyway, the builders may simply not bother to add on solar panels. Hence, even though you may think that stricter carbon emissions emission requirements will mean more solar panels, in fact the opposite is likely to happen. Far from ‘encouraging’ solar panels as the Government claims, they will be discouraging them compared to the regulations that are currently in force.
Solar Energy UK, the UK’s solar trade association, has done a lot of campaigning for solar pv to become a standard for new homes (see HERE). However, its efforts have been frustrated by the Government’s latest announcements.
However, there is another big problem with the Government’s position. Even though the Government is saying they will introduce much stricter carbon emissions requirements, they have, sadly, postponed their implementation. They now say that they will not come into force until 2027. Given that buildings take an average of around two years to build following planning consent being awarded, we shall have to wait until 2029 before new buildings will be installed to meet the stricter emission rules.
This has dismayed green building campaigners for two reasons. First, because maybe a million homes will be built from now until 2029 with gas boilers. Second, there is a tangible risk that the regulations may be canceled before they come into force. Back in 2006, the Labour government announced that new homes would have to be ‘zero carbon’ by 2016. But, that rule was canceled by the Government in 2015.
If the Government were definitely serious about mandatory heat pumps in new buildings then why not issue the new regulations now (even if the effect is delayed). This is as opposed to just issuing a press release, as they have done. Press releases are not legally enforceable!
The Future Homes Standard has been planned since 2019 but has been watered down, implemented in stages, and then postponed. All we have at the moment are statements coming from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government that legislation will now be introduced in 2026 and that they will come into force the following year. But why is it necessary to wait 2 years? And when we get to 2026 will we find that the goalposts are being moved again?
Haven’t the building industry had long enough to prepare already for the new regulations? Some builders, such as Redrow, already fit all new homes with heat pumps. A mandatory heat pump rule for new buildings is now in force in Scotland. Why not England? And why cannot the Government come up with a standard that will ensure that solar panels are mandatory, with very few get-outs?
The UK’s record of installing both heat pumps and solar panels on buildings is very poor compared to other countries. You can see this in the two figures below.
Both of these Figures are taken from my book Energy Revolutions - You can buy this for half price NOW in the Pluto Press pre-Xmas sale. Order it now HERE
The number of heat pumps is shown in the Figure below. The UK vies with Hungary for the worst record in the list of western countries.
The UK (and the USA) is well behind other countries in rates of adoption of rooftop solar pv, as can be seen below:
Given data like these, the UK needs to move a lot faster to ensure that its building stock is modernised. If we do not step up to the challenge in the building sector, we shall be dependent on natural gas supplies in a big way for a very long time.
The government's position is broadly right; set a target reduction for carbon reduction and let builders decide how they are going to meet it.
Solar is not appropriate for every roof.
Reducing winter energy use when the grid is under stress is far more important than reducing energy use on sunny days when grid load is light.
Householders will install solar panels for economic reasons if they can generate solar energy cheaper than the cost of taking electricity from the grid which itself is going to have a big solar element in summer months.
Unfortunately we will always be reliant on at least some natural gas or some kind of chemical energy store (natural gas being the cheapest) for the days when there is no wind and no sun and the energy demand for heating is the greatest. You simply cannot economically build enough long term storage with currently available technology because how much are you going to build? If you build more than you need for the very worst possible case that you can imagine, either that case will be exceeded or you will be paying for something to be built and maintained that will never be used. That will not bring fuel bills down for the people least able to afford them. There will have to be a trade off between renewables and natural gas and it will probably be voters who decide where that is. Yes, I know that is unpalatable but we have limits to what is possible with technolgy and financing. If you can't fix the supply then you need to fix the demand and the nature of the demand.