A Thesis Towards Tackling Vulnerabilities and Carbon Emissions Within the Residential Sector

1st Paper Abstract
The UK residential sector is inefficient and has an overwhelming reliance on natural gas as a heating source. For the UK to meet its 2050 net zero obligations, the sector will need to go through a process of decarbonisation. Previous studies acknowledge the spatial disparities of household energy consumption, but have neglected how consumption varies over time. This paper advances such shortcomings via a sequence and clustering analysis to identify common gas consumption trajectories within neighbourhoods in England and Wales between 2010-2020. Four clusters are identified: "Very High to High Consumption"; "High to Medium Consumption"; "Medium to Low Consumption" and "Low to Very Low Consumption". The clusters were contextualised using spatial datasets representing the socio-economic and built environment. Across all clusters, the proportion of inefficient dwellings were high, but there was a trend of high consumption associated with lower proportions of energy efficient dwellings. The results provide useful insight to policy makers and practitioners about where best to target electrification and retrofitting measures to facilitate a cleaner and more equitable residential sector. Policy targeting of areas with continual high gas consumption will accelerate the decarbonisation process, whilst targeting areas who continually under consume will likely enhance household health and well-being.
2nd Paper Abstract
The UK has a long history of observing energy vulnerability through fuel affordability and energy efficiency. This does not encapsulate the wider drivers that give rise to a household's inability to afford an adequate level of energy service. Research has filled this void through combining known drivers in the form of a composite index. However, these studies are temporally static, where monitoring progress and the identification of areas with entrenched energy vulnerability can't take shape. The consideration of time is a necessity as the physical and mental health implications from energy vulnerability are known to compound overtime. We fill such a void by designing a new spatial temporal composite indicator using socio-economic and dwelling measures at 2011 and 2021 within English and Welsh neighbourhoods. Our results outline a stagnation of energy vulnerabilities, with greater risk assigned towards urban areas. A sensitivity analysis allows us to adapt the weighting of vulnerability domains, with a select few neighbourhoods identified as continually vulnerable across all unique weighting combinations. Such areas have faced an extended period of deprivation, where we advocate policy targeting to raise living standards.
3rd Paper Abstract
The Green Deal Grant was a government funded retrofitting scheme geared towards decarbonising the residential sector. Households applied for finance for energy saving measures, which would be paid off through the energy bill savings that the retrofit would yield. However, the studies which measure the success of the Green Deal using a host of energy related metrics has been limited to date. Using EPC data, this paper uses a difference in difference regression analysis to assess the impact of the retrofit on a household's energy consumption, energy efficiency and carbon dioxide emissions before and after the retrofit has been installed. The scheme was small in scale, but the overall results are favourable. Once the retrofit was installed the dwelling experienced a rise in energy efficiency, and a fall in carbon dioxide and energy consumption. Today the scheme is scaled back from a host of funding and uptake issues. However, we advocate policy to retrofit the UK housing stock on a mass scale to make a meaningful fall in the UK's carbon emissions to better reach net zero obligations.