At the recent Huntingdonshire District Council Annual Climate Conference 2024, this statistic jumped out. There are over a quarter of a million homes in Cambridgeshire that need to be retrofitted to meet modern specifications. To put this another way, we need to retrofit about 11,000 homes per year for the next 25 years to meet our 2050 National Targets. So this poses a really big question; how can our society retrofit 250,000 homes in Cambridgeshire?

At present, the number of homes undergoing retrofit in Cambridgeshire is well below this target. On our current trajectory, we have no hope of meeting our legal obligations. We are not on a pathway to success.

As a reminder, the UK’s net zero target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 100% by 2050 compared to 1990 levels. This is a legally binding target.

Small steps are being taken. Investment by the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority is creating trained Retrofit Assessors and Retrofit Coordinators. The East Anglian Energy Academy has recently opened in St Ives, and is offering funded training courses in a variety of renewable technologies. So we are taking steps to create a trained workforce.

But we need to increase the scale, scope and ambition of this training enterprise. Bit of napkin maths – we’ll need about 1200 trades people permanently working on this project for the next 25 years. And that is just in Cambridgeshire.

And there are a lot of risks here. We need the right solutions to be created in each home. There isn’t a one-size fits all approach. Where we try to cut corners, or install the wrong solution, we’ll create more problems than we solve.

So we need a highly trained workforce – from design right through to installation – something the UK hasn’t traditionally been good at delivering in the built environment. We need to attract talent into this industry.

The question is – can we put in place the correct incentives to deliver the desired outcomes, and can we do this at pace?

Brimstone Energy are offering an integrated solution to this problem, from Assessment, to Advice, Installation and Aftercare. We call this The Brimstone Eco – System.