Your Home Better

Low Carbon Communities
1

Does anyone know anything about this Your Home Better GMCA retrofit scheme - as well as retrofit services they are offering a solar PV and battery group purchase with option to join this?

Create a community of battery owners so that you can sell your spare energy at peak times

A battery will enable you to not only to store energy to use later but also to sell collectively when you don’t need it. To achieve this we want to install at least 600 batteries in the region (Electricity North West’s operating area) that can be controlled remotely by our Virtual Power Plant partner, Flexitricity working with a new organisation that you can join and jointly control if you wish. Initially this energy will be sold to the National Grid through a process called the Balancing Mechanism.

This has been enabled by changing regulations. Another change is expected in two years time which would also allow us to collectively sell our energy into the wholesale energy markets.

2

Sounds good. I’ve expressed interest and have scheduled a phone call

3

Would be interested to hear what you find out @Jonathan_Whitehead

4

I think it’s Mea Culpa, from me on this one.

I was part of the team that GMCA put together to look at ways to deliver the GM net-zero target of 2038.

Your Homes Better was the winner of the tender issued by GMCA to deliver home retrofit to the “able to pay” sector in GM.

It is fronted by Charlie Baker. Those of you with a long memory of Carbon Coop may remember his driving zeal from the early days of CC.

5

I forgot to update on this. It seems they are offering a similar service to https://retrofit.coop/ - (seemingly with a bigger advertising budget!).

Can’t remember the exact details but I think the first step is paying for an audit of your home. I mentioned we already had an audit done by Carbon Co-op. They reasonably and understandably said I ought to pursue that with Carbon Co-op rather than trying to persuade me to pay them for another audit. As a result I have applied to People Powered Retrofit, been waiting for the next stage for a while …

I’m sure there are differences - I think Claire told me that PPR is more focused on whole house thinking.

6

Thanks Jonathan. I got in touch with them as well, and it seems they are doing something similar but different from PPR. I was curious about the PV/battery/Virtual Power Plant offer, but it’s all very vague, needs a cut down version of a full house survey/report/plan, and nothing much seems to be happening.