A Scotland without fuel poverty is a fairer Scotland: report
Report by the Scottish Fuel Poverty Strategic Working Group proposing a fresh approach to delivering affordable warmth and energy use in Scotland.
Appendix 8: Monitoring and evaluation - background information
Current M&E associated with HEEPS and fuel poverty schemes:
| HEEPS Schemes |
Annual summary delivery report. [128] |
|---|---|
| HEEPS: ABS | The Scottish Government requires local authorities to provide quarterly progress reports against agreed programmes of measures installed by tenure. In addition local authorities provide quarterly reports on measures completed under ECO. Ultimately this information should be cross referenced with ECO data from Ofgem to give a more detailed picture of what is happening on the ground. |
| HEEPS Cashback | Data is published on the EST website on a regular basis. This scheme is now closed. [129] |
| Warmer Homes Scotland | Quality assurance inspections of work (sample of approximately 20%). Annual review of WHS against operational and strategic objectives. Temperature monitoring of homes before and after upgrade. |
Review of international domestic energy efficiency programmes
A review of international domestic energy efficiency programmes for the Scottish Government found it difficult to assess the impact of the programmes and determine 'lessons learned' due to a lack of robust evaluation. The following problems have been identified in past evaluations of home energy efficiency programmes [130] :
Focus on activity/output rather than impact-related indicators: Often evaluations and government documents provide figures for the amount of money spent and the number of participants rather than the energy savings.
Baseline not defined clearly: It is often not clear how many energy efficiency measures were installed before and after the programme or what the baseline energy use was.
Missing detail and variation in the measures provided: Warmth interventions are very varied, often differing between properties, and yet evaluations often fail to report this detail, or assume that measures are uniform when they are not [131] .
Inconsistency in terms of methodologies employed when undertaking evaluations: For example, some evaluations explicitly consider 'rebound effects' and the technological performance gap (where a technology delivers fewer savings than anticipated based on engineering models) but others do not.
The review found some examples of monitoring that were able to demonstrate the 'value for money' aspect of energy efficiency programmes:
The German KfW loan programme for helping home owners upgrade the energy efficiency of their property evaluated the following impacts:
- Ex-post evaluations are carried out at regular intervals (usually annually) to assess impact of the energy efficiency improvements on energy performance of the building.
- Significant employment impacts have been found and are evaluated on a regular basis as part of the ongoing programme evaluation.
- Fiscal impacts such as the extent to which the costs of energy efficiency programmes are offset by additional tax receipts, savings in unemployment benefits payments, and other revenue streams generated as a result of the activities promoted under the programme.
The Warm up New Zealand: Healthy Homes programme provided grants and loans for the installation of energy efficiency measures and heating systems in homes built prior to 2000. The evaluation found the health benefits of energy efficiency improvements to exceed energy cost savings by far, making improvements in health the most important benefit of the programme, and result in the programme having positive net benefits.
UKERC Literature review on energy efficiency evaluation
A report for UK Energy Research Centre ( UKERC - May 2015)) on energy efficiency evaluation [132] provides some useful insights to bear in mind when designing a monitoring and evaluation programme:
- consider impacts from wider effects such as housing market conditions
- measure economy-wide impacts (co-benefits)
- measure the reach and depth of individual programmes
- include new approaches such as community-led and behaviour change interventions
- measure impacts of specific interventions (e.g. advice, subsidies)
- use innovative combinations of national datasets - eg HEED, household surveys, smart energy data to understand variation in measured results between different households
- multi-disciplinary approach (so all the potential reactions of the householder and the building are taken into account)
- Use multiple methods to measure all effects. - increasingly important given complexity of programmes.
Contact
There is a problem
Thanks for your feedback