Blog26th September 2024
Transform-ER emerged from an Innovate UK funded project that ran from 2024 to 2026 – designed to rethink retrofit with a systemic approach. During our project tenure, we ran a blog series introducing our tactical team of 13 partners.
Now we have launched as a CIC with four founding members from the original consortium offering an integrated retrofit delivery model for social landlords and local authorities.
So, we’re refreshing and resharing these Q&As so you can learn more about the thinking behind the model and how we’re collaborating to enable a sector that can deliver 1m home energy upgrades a year by 2030.
Here’s our conversation with Energiesprong UK’s Emily Braham – covering
Meet Energiesprong UK, the “collaboration champion”
Can you tell me a bit about Energiesprong UK and why you got involved in Transform-ER?
In 2023, I received a tantalisingly tempting invitation from Innovate UK – to join a range of industry experts at its Net Zero Heat: Design Engineering Innovation Lab. The opportunity couldn’t have come at a better time as we were facing a bit of a crossroads at Energiesprong UK.
We’ve spent several years focused on developing our retrofit market to scale the Dutch Energiesprong model that’s worked so well in the Netherlands – delivering deep retrofit ‘in one go’ using innovative solutions to create comfortable, desirable, net-zero homes that are financed by energy and maintenance savings.
Coming to the end of some major projects, we’d spent time reflecting on what we’d learned and what was next. We’d had many successes – helping deliver ground-breaking projects that resulted in innovation, scale and collaboration.
But ultimately, we had to face the hard truth that sector barriers mean the model just isn’t working easily in a UK context, especially because the industry has been slow to adopt more modern methods of construction which are critical to cost-effective, high-quality, rapid-to-install retrofit solutions.
Current market structures are not only ineffective at nurturing innovation – they are in fact geared towards maintaining the status quo. So, Transform-ER was designed to tackle all these challenges in one fell swoop by radically transforming how we do things!
Why was creating a new retrofit delivery model such an important part of the project?
It’s a truly systemic intervention. Since the beginning of Energiesprong UK, we’ve championed new ways of contracting, procuring, managing risk and securing finance as key to unlocking home energy upgrades at scale. But so far, we haven’t quite nailed this in practice.
We’ve learned a lot through previous schemes and paired with our partners’ expertise and in-depth research and stakeholder engagement, and Transform-ER has allowed us to take the ideas to the next level.
Our starting point was to transform the process of home energy refurbishment for all stakeholders – from engagement through to post-occupancy monitoring – so that it’s outcome-led, streamlined, efficient and creates an appealing purchasing proposition for customers.
What’s were the project’s main conclusions about how to shift the industry towards better ways of working?
Our initial focus was bringing all our collective insights together about previous retrofit schemes – what’s worked and what hasn’t – as well as conducting stakeholder engagement to find out what landlords, solution providers, the supply chain and residents need from a delivery vehicle.
It was clear that we need to rethink things like contracting and procurement to unlock successful, multi-stakeholder retrofit schemes, especially if we want to involve SMEs. But it was also clear from our research into forward-thinking contracting and procurement models that culture change is equally important.
For example, both Heathrow T5 and Project 13 incentivised a ‘problem-solving mindset’ by sharing profit and risk across the supply chain. This created a ‘no blame’ culture where the parties were incentivised to find solutions for problems jointly, rather than to protect their own commercial interests.
We’ve also looked at the concept of insurance-backed alliancing, introduced through our interview with Rudi Klein. Insurance can be used to insure risk of overspend and PI – helping support a ‘no-blame culture.”
So, alongside the more process-orientated elements, we explored how to facilitate a much-needed shift towards a more collaborative culture in the sector. This included a questionnaire to gain qualitative feedback on levels of trust between key stakeholders.
What’s your call to action for the sector?
One word I have been hearing time and time again throughout our research and stakeholder engagement is ‘trust.’
We hear it from landlords who need to be able to trust that contractors can deliver projects on-time and to budget. We hear it from residents who need to trust that their interests are being truly considered. We hear it from the supply chain who need to trust that if they invest in creating a solution it will be used at scale.
We’ve long championed collaboration as essential to creating retrofit at scale – simply put, without it we will fail. But at the heart of truly collective working is trust and this requires a level of openness I think we rarely achieve as an industry.
So, my call to action is that we all need to be more honest with each other. Honest about our lessons learned, honest about cost, honest about disruption and honest about our needs.
We saw this in practice during the project and it was a truly transformative shift – you can read about it in this Q&A with our project partner Bow Tie Construction’s Rafael Delimata. He shares how our demonstrator project took a home from EPC D to A in four weeks at half the cost of previous projects – with a highly collaborative project team.
You can also learn more about how we have embedded collaborative culture change at the heart of our work with our collaboration toolkit, which is freely available for download, in this piece with Energiesprong UK’s culture change lead Stephanie Ah Tchou.
This blog was originally published on Energiesprong UK’s website on 26 September 2024.