The value is there – but it's not being captured. That’s one of the shared themes across six new podcasts with pioneering revenue-generating retrofit models that are supporting social landlords to fund home energy upgrades.
And it’s a message we can get on board with. We’ve long championed capturing part of the energy savings from retrofit to help landlords fund programmes – while also ensuring resident bills are reduced.
Until recently, it’s been tricky to put into practice. With the price of solar and batteries plummeting by more than 90% over the last decade and numerous new revenue streams offered by balancing via the electricity grid, the numbers are more compelling.
This has resulted in an influx of new models designed to help social landlords deliver retrofit via solar and battery packages that fund themselves - freeing up grant funding and your investment to tackle harder-to-treat, fuel-poor homes.
Our new Innovative Retrofit Finance playbook with Healthy Homes Hub outlines how landlords can implement these models – and provides a helpful overview and comparison of the main options out there.
Our director Emily Braham sat down to talk with the people behind these models in a special mini-series for the Making Housing Better podcast. Explore high-level insights below and make sure you check out the full podcasts for a tantalising tour of the retrofit finance world.
“The home is now the first point of generation and storage… And that transition brings huge opportunities for landlords, but actually many don't take advantage.”
James is adept at explaining the ins-and-outs of off-balance sheet finance – and is worth a listen for that alone! He says it only works if the investor genuinely takes on performance, installation and maintenance risk.
He also flags how grant-only funding builds inequality between tenants whose homes were eligible and those whose weren't. His advice is to put the 30-year energy spend of the whole stock in front of the board, because it makes the net zero cost look small.
Sero Bright Energy-as-a-Service offer explained
"The size of the prize is massive…Take the leap and don't just sit and wait for the next pot of money to come along."
Caitlin is unequivocal: the urgency of retrofitting our homes means we cannot rely on grant alone and the opportunity for landlords is huge. This doesn’t mean that grant and private capital must be alternatives though. She suggests a small grant contribution alongside private funding could lift the tenant benefit from their model from 20% to 25–30%.
And tenants are at the heart of this podcast – with Caitlin explaining that a catalyst for developing their model was helping make access to renewables more equitable. Like all the other interviewees, she also emphasises the importance of bringing residents along on the journey and that includes making it as easy as possible for them: “It needs to be simple so that tenants don't have to worry about when to use energy.”
Utilita’s Social Spark offer explained
“We've really got to roll-out this low-carbon tech - not just solar battery, but air source heat pumps, EV chargers, and a whole lot more - at scale. And we're going to have to think about it in a smart way.”
Tom’s on-the-ground experience and technical know-how shines through in this conversation. He showcased the insights from developing Octopus’s Tenant Power offer with Together Housing, which was launched last year and is now being trialled by 12 landlord partners.
It’s specifically designed to tackle the split incentive between landlords and tenants when it comes to investing in solar and battery technology.
Build the DNO relationship early – that’s Tom’s big takeaway from delivering area-based home energy upgrade projects. Grid capacity is what’s slowing roll-out most when it comes to 100s of homes with new solar capacity. Give the DNO a list of addresses early and establish that link.
Octopus Energy’s Tenant Power offer explained
Reg’s podcast is also rooted in real-life retrofit – highlighting learning from one of the ‘knottiest’ of use cases. How can you overcome split incentives, invasive wiring and tricky business models to make solar on flats stack up?
Collaborating with Hackney Council, Emergent Energy has installed a megawatt of solar across 27 blocks with 47 individual microgrids reaching 750 flats – the “largest project of its kind for flats as I’m aware” he says.
Reg’s advice for any landlord is to ask where regulatory liability sits. How a model handles metering, contracting and billing decides who carries supply regulation and its risks. Emergent works under the licence exemption regime, so none of that sits with the housing provider, but a different structure would change the answer.
Emergent Energy’s offer explained
“If we can actually encourage people to shift their power to use local power, then we're going to run the whole network more efficiently.”
What if you could share renewable energy with your neighbours? That’s the simple premise at the heart of the Energy Local’s Community Energy Club model. Residents join their local club's selected supplier on a matched tariff, paying below the standard grid rate for local solar - while the energy supplier receives a better return than selling into the wholesale market.
For social housing landlords, this creates an exciting opportunity to combine local energy generation, retrofit and a heat network into a whole-system approach – potentially combining grant funding with patient private capital and community investment.
She outlines how the model can improve network efficiency, encourage communities to work together and share risk and enable long-term smarter energy use. Mary also touches on how she has found a way to work within the regulations to make the model work and push the boundaries of what's possible.
Energy Local’s Community Energy Club model explained
“Data is the heart of everything for us”
With a decade of deploying smart meters under their belts, Metis has seen first-hand the value of data-driven solar + battery management. And Tom’s mantra is to engage residents with data before any retrofit begins.
He references how their free Energy Insights app built on smart meter data has helped residents cut their energy bills by 9% just through small behavioural changes – and app-first deployments saw 85% of residents say yes to the subscription.
He emphasises that’s now a perfect opportunity for landlords to move at pace and seize the opportunity to upgrade their homes while resident engagement is high and energy costs are rising.
Metis (by SMS Group) offer explained
Download the Innovative Retrofit Finance playbook for more details on these different models – and advice on how to deploy them in your retrofit programmes.
