The proposition to suppliers

Birmingham Energy Savers is a pilot project. If all goes according to plan, around £40 million will be spent on whole house retrofit over the next five years in key areas of the City.

If the project is successful, the models and propositions developed will quickly be rolled out more widely (including outside Birmingham) so the potential could be much greater than the initial £40 million.

SCOPE

The scope of the project covers both private and social housing, and also small business premises.

In total, we are expecting to engage with over 50,000 households during the course of the next few years, resulting in around 6,000 installations of energy efficiency and microgeneration technologies on properties. This scale of activity is intended to provide sufficient critical mass to begin to support the development of skilled specialist installation and manufacturing businesses in the city. No energy efficiency or microgeneration technologies are excluded from the scope.

REDUCING SALES AND MATERIALS COSTS

Existing front line staff from the Council and partner organisations are being trained to specify and manage whole house retrofit projects. Combined with use of council call centres to handle initial enquiries, this is intended to reduce selling costs for potential installation businesses significantly.

The project will also provide long-term certainty of demand locally, and the intention is selectively to procure some key materials (for example solar photovoltaic modules and inverters) in bulk through the council, to access global commodity markets where relevant and ensure the best possible deals for both installers and end customers.

BRINGING MANUFACTURING TO BIRMINGHAM

Birmingham Energy Savers was started to attract inward investment to the city and region. The project team will include specialist staff and partners with a strong focus on encouraging this process. As demand grows, we anticipate facilitating migration of manufacturing of the most suitable components into the region, working with local and international partners.

SKILLS TRAINING

The project includes an entire work stream dedicated to ensuring there are sufficient training programmes in local colleges to support demand for installation skills in these new areas. Courses are already being established in South Birmingham College and elsewhere. In practice, the transition from already skilled construction contractor to skilled whole house retrofit installer (or PV installer, etc) is not onerous (typically less than 200 hours training is required).

PROCUREMENT

Providing easy market access to small- and medium-sized businesses is a core objective of the project. With this in mind the council is examining the potential to establish a procurement strategy unique to this project, to ensure as many local firms as possible have the opportunity to participate in the project, with minimum procurement costs all round.

This approach is regarded as particularly important in an area like whole house retrofit, where innovation and the development of new business models are critical to delivery of low cost, efficient solutions to end customers. Global evidence suggests large numbers of small firms are much more flexible and adept at developing such solutions. This was the basis of the success of the first industrial revolution in Birmingham.