Housing Energy Fact File
The Government’s Department of Energy & Climate Change periodically publishes a Housing Energy Fact File (previously Domestic Energy Fact File) for Great Britain. CAR prepared the 2011 Fact File, working with Cambridge Econometrics, Eclipse, the University of Loughborough and BRE.
The Fact File covers the period from 1970 to 2009, and aims to draw together most of the important data about energy use in homes in Great Britain. It is intended for policy-makers, researchers, and interested members of the public, and considers the relationship between domestic energy use and carbon dioxide emissions.
The energy we use in homes accounts for more than a quarter of energy use in Great Britain. How we use energy in homes today is very different from 1970, and if we are to meet the Government target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by four-fifths by 2050, we have to think carefully about how we use energy in our homes.
We will need to transform the energy-efficiency of homes, and at the same time make much greater use of low carbon technologies. The Fact File aims to support informed decision making about how to reduce energy use and CO2 emissions from homes.
The report uses a wide variety of data sources, including the English Housing Survey/English House Condition Survey and the GfK Home Audit, and the Digest of UK Energy Statistics. The report also contains a number of estimates generated by the Building Research Establishment Housing Model for Energy Studies, ‘BREHOMES’.
When we write the 2012 Fact File, we will switch to using CAR’s Cambridge Housing Model to generate energy use estimates for 2010. The Cambridge Housing Model is closely linked to SAP 2009, and it has been published for others to use.
Links to Great Britain’s Housing Energy Fact File 2011, and Excel versions of the tables and plots shown in the fact file, are provided below.