Local authorities have a statutory obligation to report our energy and carbon performance via the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and we will also be investing in transformative decarbonisation projects and increasing the proportion of green procurement so we can measure, manage and reduce emissions from the production, transportation and disposal of goods and services procured.
Social Housing Retrofit
One of the most ambitious initiatives for any sector under the Climate Action Plan is the requirement for the local authority sector to retrofit their housing stock to bring dwellings more than 40 years old (30% of the social housing stock) to a B2 equivalent BER.
Approximately 135,000 houses were in local authority ownership at year-end 2018, of which 30% will require upgrade to B2 Building Energy Rating (BER) (Government of Ireland, 2019). This equates to retrofitting of approximately 40,500 social houses by the sector. Assuming a constant rate of social housing retrofits, over 4,000 social houses will be retrofitted by local authorities annually to 2030.
This will be managed by the housing departments within each local authority and be supported by the Energy Team and external organisations such as Energy Agencies.
The local authority retrofit programme can also be the catalyst for community-based projects and stimulate aggregation and bundling of privately owned residential stock and other social housing to provide a core for large-scale projects, including energy poor homes.
These area-based retrofit programmes would take advantage of critical mass, ensure economies of scale and make greater use of non-Exchequer funds. They will also generate local employment opportunities and build the confidence of supply chains, which will need to upsize to meet the national ambition of decarbonising our built environment.
Visit Climate Action - Mitigation in our Knowledge Hub and our Case Studies section to see examples of how Local Authorities achieve their carbon emission and energy efficiency targets for 2030 and 2050.