Quality products, rather than high levels of consumer awareness of climate change, are more important for the decarbonisation of heat, industry experts have suggested.
At a recent roundtable hosted by innovation foundation Nesta, several people from a range of companies across the energy sphere discussed how the sector can get consumers on board with domestic low-carbon heating.
Among the topics discussed was the level of knowledge of issues like climate change and whether this was key to encouraging the take-up of green technologies such as heat pumps.
Former director of strategy for what was then the Department of Energy and Climate Change (now BEIS) and current Nesta chief executive Ravi Gurumurthy doubted whether awareness actually mattered and instead suggested it was more important to ensure quality, affordable products were available to consumers.
“Fundamentally I don’t think people are going to be aware and interested in climate change and then make a trade off and have a product that is more costly or not something that they value,” he said.
Gurumurthy suggested big tax and regulation changes were needed instead, similar to vehicle emissions standards.
He added: “You could argue the key part of the pathway is getting enough momentum in early adopters such that you can build the confidence that government can make those big, quite status moves without a consumer backlash.
“So the product needs to be good enough, it needs to be affordable relative to the other options and there needs to be enough momentum, but I’m not sure people need to be deeply green or deeply aware that their boilers are a problem.”
Sharing similar thoughts was Matt Lipson, head of consumer insight at Energy Systems Catapult.
“I always think it’s frankly trivial to raise awareness. Nobody knew what Covid was but then a couple of days later everyone knew what Covid was.
“That’s really quite a simple problem compared to designing and delivering at scale something that is as good as or better than what people on the gas grid who own their homes already have.
“That’s the problem I think we should be focusing on, how do you design something that’s just great and people want to do it because it’s as good as or ideally a bit better than what they currently have. That sounds tough but actually there’s room for doing that.”
As part of our Countdown to Cop series Utility Week recently spoke to Eon chief executive Michael Lewis about the consumer journey and the decarbonisation of heat. You can read the interview here.