The 30 Year House - part 1

A large proportion of our existing homes in the UK are over 50 years old. It follows that modernising and building new homes will require the relevant professions to look into the future.

What will a house look like in 2050?

We have to peer into the future and hope that we are right. What is certain from the COP26 conference (26th UN climate change Conference of the Parties (COP26) Glasgow 2021) is that small steps spell doom.

Go into a modern housing estate. Look up. Are the gutters big? If not, they are not ready for the record-breaking tempests climate change will deliver this year and next. The architect who designs such fixtures should be banned from the Royal Society. Or, perhaps the Royal Institution of Chartered Architects (RICA) should relinquish its Charter status so its members can create rubbish houses without embarrassing the Queen. It is now time to create and build for the future and well beyond the minimum standards introduced by the hosts of COP26, the British Government.

Let’s be certain about this. Restoring, insuring and living in dwellings that are not climate change mitigated is far more expensive than renovating, refurbishing and re-building poorly prepared homes.

It is easy to kick the climate change can down the road but evidence of how it can affect us NOW is frightening but there are some drivers lining up.

The main cause of the 2022 gas price crisis has grown because of the increasing gas demand (organically, following the pandemic) and reduced gas supplies caused by the Ukraine war. Additionally, unseasonably low wind generation in the UK (particularly in September 2021 and the winter of 2022) reduced green energy availability.

Lower pipeline gas flows from Russia to Europe (and other Europeans have similar housing problems and bigger gas supply issues), less storage capacity, and higher carbon prices have focused minds on developing carbon-reduced power. It is a narrow perspective. There is a need for a much wider view of these issues.

The home of the future will need long-term policies to keep the lights on.

My book Climate Change House covered these subjects in greater detail and points to robust research.