Tracking progress in non-residential buildings decarbonisation

Every summer, the CCC publishes the UK Progress Report, assessing UK progress towards Net Zero. For each key sector, we publish a set of indicators to monitor progress. We are currently refreshing our progress monitoring framework, including our indicators for buildings.

In recent years, CCC's indicators for buildings have focussed on residential buildings. Residential buildings comprise a more significant component of buildings emissions, and data is more readily available to track progress. Given the heterogeneous stock of non-residential buildings, indicators counting roll-out of low carbon heating technologies or insulation measures are less robust than for residential buildings.

Despite these challenges, the CCC plans to develop indicator(s) on non-residential building decarbonisation for the 2022 Progress Report. CCC typically divides non-residential buildings into public and commercial buildings, mirroring classifications in datasets such as DUKES.

The main areas of progress we would like to track are:

Given the heterogeneous nature of non-residential buildings, in particular their varying size, we have assessed that tracking energy intensity (kWh/m2) would be a useful indicator of progress in energy efficiency measures in non-residential buildings.

Our internal scoping has identified the ND-NEED dataset as a potential new source of data for an energy intensity indicator. The ND-NEED dataset will be published annually and includes the gas and electricity energy intensity (kWh/m2/year) of non-domestic buildings, broken down into building types (education, health etc). Gas energy intensity is a promising metric for tracking the impact of energy efficiency measures as it addresses the different sizes of non-domestic buildings by taking into account floorspace.

However, the total gas consumption recorded in ND-NEED differs significantly from the total gas consumption in CCC Sixth Carbon Budget (6CB) modelling, even when factories (which aren't considered within buildings in the 6CB modelling) are removed. This makes it challenging to develop milestones for energy intensity based on ND-NEED data. Unless this difference can be addressed, we will need to identify a different indicator source, or take an alternative approach to setting annual milestones for energy intensity (e.g. - have milestones tracking the % change in energy intensity, or only track certain building types which match up with CCC modelling).

*** See Specification for more detail ***