An ACE effort

The UK’s Association for the Conservation of Energy has produced an excellent “fact-file” comparing fuel poverty and energy efficiency in the UK to 15 other European countries with comparable levels of prosperity and heating need. It ranks these countries against six key indicators for which consistent and recent European data are available to assess the energy efficiency of the UK’s homes. The UK is ranked lowest for energy (or fuel) poverty out of 13 western European countries and near the bottom of the other league tables on affordability of space heating (14 out of 15), share of household expenditure spent on energy (11 out of 13), homes in poor state of repair (11 out of 15), thermal performance (6 out of 8), and the gap between current thermal performance and what the optimal level of insulation should be in each country (7 out of 8). Overall, no other country of the 16 assessed performs as poorly as the UK across the range of indicators.

The UK ranks so low despite the fact that it has amongst the lowest gas and electricity prices in Europe and relatively high household incomes compared to the other countries. And yet it has the highest rate of fuel poverty and amongst the highest rate of excess winter deaths. In this context, the poor energy efficiency of our housing stock emerges as the main cause of these problems. David Cameron recently pledged that he wanted the UK to become “the most energy efficient country in Europe”. This ambition is all the more laudable and appropriate because this fact-file finds that presently, the UK can only be characterised as the ‘cold man of Europe’.

The fact-file, prepared by ACE’s Head of Research, Pedro Guertler, and researcher, Sarah Royston, is available on the ACE website.