Team:Edinburgh UG/Human Practices
What if you couldn't afford to heat your home?
That's the reality for over 613,000 households in Scotland, 24.9% of the population. This figure reaches 7% or 174,000 household in extreme fuel poverty.
The full Scottish definition of fuel poverty is:
A household is in fuel poverty if, in order to maintain a satisfactory heating regime, it would be required to spend more than 10% of its income on all household fuel use. If over 20% of income is required, then this is termed as being in extreme fuel poverty.
(Source: The Scottish Fuel Poverty Statement, 2002)
A satisfactory heating regime is defined as:
For “vulnerable” households, 23°C in the living room and 18°C in other rooms. For other households, this is 21°C in the living room and 18°C in other rooms.
(Source: Scottish House Condition Survey)
One of the main causes of Fuel Poverty is: high price of domestic fuel – for more information see Energy Trends and Quarterly Prices (BEIS).
So we asked the question: How can we make our renewable energy project parallel with this issue here in Scotland?
So we went to meet with Norman Kerr OBE, of Energy Action Scotland and it became clear our design had to have cost efficiency at its core.
Project Integration
From our consulting with EAS we altered our project in the following ways
- Running our culture on whisky co-product sources to further lower the cost of our produced Hydrogen. This can be found here
- Designing microbial fuel cells that would work as photosynthetic panels, supplying multiple homes and further reducing cost here. Our design integrates these ideas with: cheap acrylic packaging, easy scale up and scale down, easy by-product resource applications.
- Modeling E. coli food sources to consider whisky co-product sources. More details about this process can be found here.
But as we delved further into a complex issue, it became clear it wasn’t that simple: there is a huge discrepancy between rural and city-based fuel poverty. Rural fuel poverty is actually the largest issue in Scotland, with the highest section of fuel poverty growth over the last 5 years. We had further discussions with the Scottish Gas Network and their work getting natural gas out to the most remote areas of Scotland. A main issue is funding this infrastructure. The statistics show the issue is only worsening as rural Scotland gets left behind. Rural households using oil as their primary heating fuel saw the greatest increase in fuel poverty rates with 40% estimated to be in fuel poverty in 2017, up from 26% in 2016. We further built upon our project:
Project Integration:
- Our final design is a remote unit which could be installed to heat a community of remote homes when the alternative is installing non-renewable energy sources such as an extension of the UK gas network. Which can often be infeasible in extremely isolated locations. here.
Solutions and Responsibilities for Action
The Scottish Government was required to eradicate fuel poverty in Scotland as far as was reasonably practicable by November 2016, according to the Housing (Scotland) Act 2001. This statutory duty expired and the target was missed. See Definitions and Targets - Scotland.
Local authorities also contribute to eradicating fuel poverty through their Local Housing Strategies.
The EU also has a role in issuing directives that affect, for example, energy performance and consumer regulation. See EU Policy and Legislation.
As a consequence, there is a range of Policy, Legislation and Schemes in operation at European, UK, Scottish and local levels to address fuel poverty. We wanted to allow science be integrated into the solution for this social problem. As it is clear renewable energy goals need to be coupled with social goals, like the UN #Envision2030 goals: 17 goals for sustainable development, where it’s been recognised both aims must be coupled as we go forward. Despite the UK’s goal for netzero 2030 and Fuel Poverty goals have not been coupled- and doing so would be a huge difference for the outlook of this issue. You can find more about this concept here.
References
GOV.UK. (2019). Annual domestic energy bills. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/annual-domestic-energy-price-statistics [Accessed 12 Oct. 2019].
Eas.org.uk. (2019). EU Policy and Legislation. [online] Available at: https://www.eas.org.uk/en/eu-policy-and-legislation_50557/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2019].
Legislation.gov.uk. (2019). Housing (Scotland) Act 2001. [online] Available at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2001/10/contents [Accessed 12 Oct. 2019].
Gov.scot. (2019). Local Housing Strategy Guidance - gov.scot. [online] Available at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/local-housing-strategy-guidance/pages/12/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2019].
Eas.org.uk. (2019). Target to Eradicate Fuel Poverty in Scotland by 2016. [online] Available at: https://www.eas.org.uk/en/target-to-eradicate-fuel-poverty-in-scotland_50553/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2019].