By Peter Mallaburn and Ian Hamilton, UCL Energy Institute

Over the past 25 years, the UK residential sector’s energy efficiency policy has primarily been directed through a combination of: programmes requiring energy suppliers to retrofit efficiency improvements; building regulations; appliance efficiency standards; and more recently a short-lived market-based approach, the ‘Green Deal’.  These programmes have had multiple aims: to reduce general consumer exposure to rising energy prices (sometimes with other benefits eg. warmer and/or quieter homes from double-glazing); to reduce national energy dependence and environmental impacts; and to protect vulnerable customers.

With energy policy once again in a state of flux, it is worth now briefly reviewing some of what has happened within the residential energy policy landscape over the past 25 years, and offer some insights for future policy. (more…)