New academic paper – “The Green Deal and the Energy Company Obligation”

Jan Rosenow, Senior Consultant at Ricardo-AEA, and Nick Eyre, Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, put together the first comprehensive academic peer-reviewed paper on the British Green Deal published in the journal ‘Energy’ of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers. The Green Deal, introduced alongside the Energy Company Obligation, marks a substantial change from the existing policy regime in a number of ways, notably the explicit aim of supporting higher cost energy efficiency technologies in housing and an attempt to engage new sources of private sector finance. The paper provides a critical analysis of the proposed policy changes both in terms of the institutional changes and the implications of a new finance mechanism for energy efficiency policy, as well as the overall impact on reduction of greenhouse gasses, in particular through the installation of different types of retrofitted insulation. The authors appreciate the innovative nature of the Green Deal but raise a number of concerns regarding its likely impact on energy efficient retrofits.

The paper is available (at a cost) at the ICE website.