Darren Evans: 0:00

What is the most pressing thing on your mind? Well, the election, I think. To be fair, we know that we're at such an important moment in the climate change fight and our net zero journey, and there's a lot of debate over whether it's worth doing net zero. You hear it in the press all the time and I think there is a moment here where, if people get into power and make bad decisions, we're going to struggle. We're going to really struggle to tackle climate change and we're going to be staring down the barrel of the worst effects of it.

Andrew Parkin: 0:35

We really should have been at net zero 2016. Of course, yeah.

Darren Evans: 0:39

That was the plan, wasn't it? You know, we were going to have buildings that were constructed under those building regulations. That never happened, and it was dismantled overnight, wasn't it? And now we are at a stage where we're building buildings that will still need some intervention some form of renewable heating system, probably some more insulation or draft proofing or something, because they're still relatively leaky, and the current building regulations the interim one have only really come into force in the last year, and I don't know how many buildings are actually being built to them, because it's about when they were designed.

Darren Evans: 1:21

And then we've got another set of building regulations coming along, which we suspect we know what the answer will be, but we're not 100 sure because we haven't had the response to the consultation, and that's not going to happen until after the election as well.

Darren Evans: 1:33

And I suppose, coming back to your original question, that's the problem.

Darren Evans: 1:36

At the moment, all the, all the energy and, to coin a phrase, all of the activity within government stops when an election is called, and so we're now waiting on the outcome of about four or five different consultations that all have huge impact in our industry, and we're not sure what that will be, whether then the new government comes in and goes these were great ideas, everybody, we'd like to do this or whether they'll say, yeah, we're not so sure, we want to go back to the drawing board and start again.

Darren Evans: 2:04

I think the building regulations are more set in stone because that's just the way things are, but we don't know which direction they're going to go and if they go option A or option one we're actually going to be building buildings that are, you could argue, are worse than the current interim building regulations In what way they will require more energy. But we've got to have strong leaders and leaders that are brave enough to make difficult decisions and very long-term decisions. They will never see that credit or that payback because they'll be gone. They won't be in power. They might not even be around when those things start to bear fruit.

Andrew Parkin: 2:40

That was one of the things I mentioned in a recent LinkedIn post that I one of the things I um mentioned in a recent linkedin post that I did around the basis of a democratic society means that you need to have leaders in for a short space of time, but those leaders generally are only elected because the people like what they're hearing and what they're saying. Yeah, and the people generally look for things that are short-term because they want to feel it now. So there we've got the conundrum.

Darren Evans: 3:07

And then on the other side of it, you've got sort of dictatorships and long-term governments that have the ability to have that very, very long-termistic view because they know they're never going to relinquish that power, and that's not great. So what you have to have is enough people who are happy enough to work in the middle of ground, in between the, the divisions, um, to make sure things happen. Stay on track. We can't keep making a step forward and then a step back, or, you know, even two steps back we actually now need to be moving forward at pace if we're going to make a dent in this.

Andrew Parkin: 3:48

Do you think we have moved forward so since you came into the industry? If I take that as a timeline, yeah, I think we have. Which was when? 2007?

Darren Evans: 3:56

2007, yeah, we've made progress? Of course we have. I mean, we are able to measure the performance of our buildings number one We've done 25 million of those. I get told every day that there are problems with the EPCs that have been lodged in the data, and of course there are, because human beings are human beings and there are lots of other reasons why you might have bad data in there. But actually, you know, in any data set you've got nonsense, you've got, you've got poor data. You have to do the same things with it. You do. You do sensible analysis of that data and start to use it in smart ways or rent it with other bits of data. You know we've got some really good stuff there. The envy of a lot of other European countries, certainly looking across over at Canada and the like. Over there they're looking over at us going, wow, you guys got on this really quick.

Darren Evans: 4:51

We've also got to improve the way we measure. There are many ways of measuring an asset rating, which is what an EPC is, so you can compare it with one asset, with another and another without skewing things off in directions that make it impossible to compare, and we've used assumed values and calculated results, and that's perfectly reasonable. We're now moving into a world where you can measure those results on site. They're not perfect at this moment in time.

Darren Evans: 5:29

That technology is relatively new. It's not earth-shattering Effectively. You're creating an environment within a building, a relatively controlled environment. You know how much energy it's taken to create that environment and then you measure how quickly that energy moves out of that envelope, out of that building. So that's where we're moving to. You still need the asset rating, you still need the calculations, you still need the assumptions, but then you can plug in some of these measured performance values and get a much clearer picture of how the building is working. We've been doing it for years, by the way. We've been doing air test results on buildings and then plugging that into SAP and and soon RDSAP. So it's that that's the same sort of principle but more specific, but but the same.

Andrew Parkin: 6:17

So let's break that down a little bit. You've used a few acronyms that some people may not be aware of, sap being one of them, and other phrases as well. About asset ratings, can you just break that down? What's an asset rating? What's energy? What is energy performance of the building? The difference between the two? Yeah, and what's a?

Darren Evans: 6:36

SAP. Okay, well, let's start with SAP, which is the standard assessment procedure. It's a bit of a catch-all phrase, but, but essentially it's the way that we assess and model our buildings, our domestic buildings. So SAP is quite a complicated methodology and effectively, without going into oodles of detail, you follow that methodology, you use the calculation as is written and you will get a rating for a building, an asset rating. These things appear on something called an Energy Performance Certificate or an EPC. That's an outcome, that's a report. What other things would come out of that?

Darren Evans: 7:14

So you've got your energy rating, your energy efficiency rating. Efficiency rating that's, I suppose, what everybody refers to and that's what I refer to as the asset rating. That tells you where your building, your asset, is at at that moment in time. So it grades. It grades it, yeah, on an A to G scale. You've got your A rated properties at the top end and your G rated properties at the bottom end, and the things that make the difference are how good are the walls, how good's the floor, the roof, the heating system, etc. Etc. Um, and then you've got a.

Darren Evans: 7:45

You've got a potential rating, which uh is is, uh, the sum of all the things you could do to that building within reason um, from a, I suppose, a menu or a list of recommendations, and that's as high as you could probably get it without spending an absolute fortune on things that probably won't make a huge difference. And again, that takes it up ideally, up the scale up towards the A's and B's. Some buildings can get to an A and B, some can't. Some struggle to get beyond a C. In fact there are buildings out there that don't even make that standard and that's fine because you know these buildings weren't designed with energy efficiency in mind. Many buildings weren't. It's not until the last sort of 20, 30 years that we start thinking about how, as well as making buildings sound and solid and safe and accessible, deal with water and all the other things, did we start really thinking about the energy efficiency?

Andrew Parkin: 8:46

So you're talking of buildings that were built in the 16, 17, 1800s listed buildings? Chances are you get an A-rated listed building. Quite slim, is that what you're saying?

Darren Evans: 8:56

Yeah, but I mean again, it's all. Every building is different, which is why we have this assessment procedure that deals with as many different buildings as possible. Put everything to one side. The long-term goal is to make sure that, when we have done everything that we need to do, we are not polluting the atmosphere because of our actions. That's where we want to get to.

Darren Evans: 9:17

In the here and now, we've got eight million people who are either in fuel poverty or transition, or they're transient people in fuel poverty. One minute, one month they're in, next month they're out, depending on the circumstances, and that's getting worse and worse. Now the fuel prices have gone up, hit record levels, and they're coming down, but they'll never get back to where they were and I think the general trend is an upward trajectory. We know that fuel poverty is getting worse and we need to do something about that. So that's the immediate concern and actually that's what the EPC was designed for and what it still reports on. So our asset rating, a metric that that is influenced by fuel prices, and the problem with electricity.

Darren Evans: 10:04

We all accept that electricity is probably the way of decarbonizing and I think any government that comes in will have to deal with that, that problem at the moment that electricity is four times more, three and a half times more expensive than gas. We need to sort of wean ourselves off this cheap fuel that we've relied upon for 50 years. That was always accepted as being quite clean, compared to electricity. Electricity was, you know, we used to burn coal by the billions of tons, or whatever, in this country and and therefore electricity was considered dirty. It's flipped around now and at some point in the 2030s it will be 100 green by and large. We may have to turn on the odd gas turbine every now and again, but by and large it will be 100 green. So the way to decarbonize is just to put everybody on electric heating, but it's more expensive. So those eight million or so people that are in or close to fuel poverty will suddenly be joined by an awful lot of other people who suddenly have to pay three times more for their heating or not turn it on.

Darren Evans: 11:11

So what do you do about that? Well, you do something called energy efficiency and you reduce their energy demand so that when they do need to put the heat on, they don't need it on for as long and it stays in the building for longer it's. It's simple maths and simple physics, and and really we shouldn't lose sight of that, because the other side of the equation is we're going to be decarbonizing our transportation systems. You know we're going to be moving away from diesel and gasoline powered cars to electrically powered or hydrogen powered vehicles. But if you take anything off the road that was powered by gas and you replace it with electricity, you need to generate more electricity. So we're going to have this sort of power need. So we need to reduce our energy demand, and anybody who thinks there's no other, you know that doesn't matter, just generate more electricity. They're going about it the wrong way. Cheapest unit of energy is the unit you don't use.

Andrew Parkin: 12:09

And so that's one of the things that I've not seen spoken about at all really is the demand. No one's really having the demand debate or demand, and I've seen demand rocket like, skyrocket, massively, especially for electricity, and it will go up even more surely when we have electric vehicles that are more common than what they are now. But think about if you've got children in your home. They will have the TV, they will have the computer, they'll have the phone, they'll have some form of tablet, maybe a games console as well, that's a lot more demand than what it was when I was young, it's an insatiable desire for more and more um technology.

Darren Evans: 12:57

More and more technology is going to use power. The likelihood is that we we are going to see shifts in energy usage. So we're not whether the question is is it a one-for-one shift? Does one unit of fuel over here equal one unit of electricity over here? That's hard to say, because when you do shift things like the usage of vehicles, um, people may alter the way that they work, the way they use them.

Darren Evans: 13:26

So, for example, I know that I could get in my car, my I've got, I've got a diesel powered car and it will do 700 miles on a tank. I don't have to worry about filling it up. If I am presented with a scenario where I can only go 250 miles in any one particular direction and then, as soon as I plug it in anywhere other than home, it's going to cost me pretty much the same as it would cost me at the pump to put fuel in my, my vehicle. I've got a bit of a decision to make and I've moved to an electric vehicle for a number of reasons I want to save the planet, I want to cut my bills, um, I want something that that fits for me. So I'm I'm thinking to myself well, maybe I do, I need to make that trip. Do I move to an online? You know meeting time and I think we are making those decisions.

Darren Evans: 14:13

So it is difficult to say whether by moving from this type of vehicle to this type of vehicle will just mean that we just shift the energy across. I would like to think that we can get to a situation where we do transition across and we reduce our energy demand. Over the last coming back to your original original question, 2007, we have seen something in the region of about a 30 percent drop in energy usage in this country, and that's at a time when things are, you know, there's more technology, as you say, more data centers, um so the demand has gone up, but the usage has gone down yeah, yeah, that's pretty much where we're at, and most of that can be attributed to energy efficiency, reducing the amount of energy.

Darren Evans: 14:57

We need to do something by being more efficient at it, and future generations will look at us our generation, probably the generation below us as well and will judge us on our inability or our ability in this regard. So we've got to do it quickly, but we've also got to make sure that we don't plunge a load of people into fuel poverty or end up burning more and more of our precious resources, even if those resources come from a renewable source. It doesn't make sense, so just waste it. Let's say we put heat pumps in every property. A heat pump should, if designed correctly and is is fit for the house as it, as it it is, so it's got the right radiators and you know it's, it's the right size and it's the right flow temperature should be working at a coefficient of an efficiency level, should I say, just to keep it simple, of about 400%, maybe 450%, and certainly I've seen plenty of systems achieving that now. But for simple maths, let's say it's four times more efficient than the gas boiler. All of a sudden, this line up here, which is our heat demand drops by four times. So it's down here really close now.

Darren Evans: 16:13

So what do we do? Well, let's build some new houses, lots of new houses. Replace the old with the new. It brings it a bit closer. Still got a gap, heck. What do we do? It's called energy efficiency. You make your buildings, your existing buildings, more efficient, and that drops it to that level.

Andrew Parkin: 16:30

So then, in this area that we're talking, this conversation, you're just talking about regulated energy yes yes, so regulated energy. I'll let you, I'll let you define it and then you can go on and talk about unregulated energy, but I think that, when it comes to this demand, the original point that I was making was more around unregulated energy as opposed to regulated energy.

Darren Evans: 16:55

Yeah, and regulated energy for me covers things like heating, hot water. Unregulated is you know what kind of oven you've got. Whether you've gone for a big American fridge freezer or a smaller fridge freezer, it's the stuff you use every day. For a big American fridge freezer or a smaller fridge freezer, it's the stuff you use every day. The reality is that is a small proportion of our energy demand. It's still significant, but compared to heating and hot water and transportation, it is relatively small.

Andrew Parkin: 17:29

So just to clarify here, you're saying that the big demand is regulated energy. So that is the stuff which you don't plug in because it comes fixed with your house, as opposed to the unregulated energy, which is the stuff with a plug on it your oven, your, your fridge, yeah, clearly, if you've got your oven on 24 7, that becomes a big draw of your power.

Darren Evans: 17:44

If you've got a kiln or a swimming pool or something like that, yeah then, and it's important to understand that, and everybody wants a big tv and. But these, these units now I mean you know the, the power drawer on them is not to get too geeky or technical, but when they built the playstation 5, they built it with power in mind. What's the maximum performance we can get out of the minimum amount of power, which is the best way of designing something? Number one it makes it. It makes it mean that you can. You can really understand the performance of your unit and also you can build games to that standard, but you're not going to fry the innards by it's going to last longer, isn't it?

Andrew Parkin: 18:21

Yeah, it's going to last longer. Good, so what is it? Sorry, just changing gears here really quick. What is it that your members are most concerned about?

Darren Evans: 18:29

I think there's probably about three or four things Understanding what change is coming down the line.

Andrew Parkin: 18:35

There's plenty of it, so this is including the election and other things.

Darren Evans: 18:39

Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, the change sort of subject area is massive. For them directly, it's things like the methodologies that they use. So we talked about SAP standard assessment assessment procedure. There's something called RD, sap, which is like the, the child version of it. It's a reduced data version and we use that for assessing homes, people's homes. It allows us to do an assessment on something that we can only see. We're not going to have all the data that belongs to that property saying a file over here, and they're going to change markedly over the next sort of two or three years.

Darren Evans: 19:20

Something called the home energy model is coming out and we're starting to understand what it means. We don't have all the answers at the moment. It's one of the consultations that we're waiting on, but that will. That's going to be fascinating to see come through. It's a big change. Every single assessor who does SAP or RDSAP at some point will need to make the move to that new methodology. We will have to write new software and we will have to bring everybody else who's a stakeholder in the industry along with it as well, and it will have impacts on any other regulation that's attached to things like EPCs or building regulations. But it is hugely. It's got a lot of potential and I'll give you a for instance. We're talking just now about how we've got to build a better grid and have that grid suitable, but we don't know enough about the energy usage or the energy demand as will be in order to make some really smart decisions. We need the methodology the home energy model, to help us here, because what it will do is, instead of calculating how much energy each property will need for each month of the year so just 12 calculations the home energy model will do one. We're waiting on the result on this, but we suspect it'll do one every half an hour. So, however many thousand calculations for each assessment, and what that will do is it will allow us to start to think about time of use, tariffs and if you've got solar panels on the roof or you want solar panels on the roof, it'll be able to work out exactly how much energy those panels will deliver. If you want to put a battery in your property, you'll be able to start thinking about and the government and whoever's looking at this data will be able to start looking at those, those batteries and going.

Darren Evans: 21:07

Well, we've got x number of terawatts of storage potential here. We know the energy is going to spike here and we know it's going to dive here. So we'll start building some smarter grid technology that allows us to draw on electricity from batteries up and down the land. Or we know that people will be able to draw upon their own battery at certain times of peak and what we'll do is that the cost will be high at that point and then we'll make electricity cheaper at these times when there isn't so much demand and people with batteries can put that energy into those batteries and recharge them, or they'll stop using their energy in the house and start charging up because it makes sense to and just draw a bit off the grid.

Darren Evans: 21:58

That smarter use of electricity will be a bit of a game changer, because we can balance the load of the grid. We won't have to build as many power stations, we won't have to turn on as many power stations. We'll know what we can beg and what we can borrow and what we can take, and then we'll know when we can give it back, know what can borrow and what we can take, and then we'll know when we can give it back, and so that's why it's so important. It's also there's loads of other technologies that will rely upon that heat pumps, for example.

Darren Evans: 22:22

Um, knowing when the the demand is going to be and and when the grid is going to be producing a certain amount and when we'll be able to pull from storage. So that's so important. We'll need to be able to communicate that. That's on the minds of our assessors. The other things are other things that I think have always been on their mind. Like our epc is going to disappear overnight, a new government comes in and someone's going to just flick a switch and say we're not going to do that anymore.

Andrew Parkin: 22:48

So can you see a future where someone can actually have a building where it's devalued because the energy performance is not that great, so they've almost got a toxic asset it's?

Darren Evans: 23:01

possible? Yeah, um, it's definitely not a desire. You want to find this happy medium of regulatory drivers to ensure that people don't get caught with a toxic asset. Buildings are going to be worth money, but what will make them worth less is us being in a situation where climate change is having its worst effects, because buildings will either be too hot to live in Nobody wants to live in a building where they're boiling hot for a good proportion of the year. Equally, properties that live near watercourses or rivers, lakes, streams. When you've got a warming climate with lots more rain and lots more water on the land, they're going to get flooded more, and the more they get flooded, the less insurable they are. And if you can't insure a building, who's going to buy that building? So we need to avoid that situation. So it's about getting the balance right.

Andrew Parkin: 23:54

You've been in the industry for a long time and I'm sure that you have heard lots of rumors go around and so now I think if we just go into the demolition zone, we can talk, discuss about a myth or a fallacy and you can help us clear it up.

Darren Evans: 24:10

Yeah.

Andrew Parkin: 24:10

You ready? I'm ready, let's do it.

Darren Evans: 24:15

Yeah, you ready, I'm ready, let's do it. Yeah, jack William, george, this is for you Pay attention.

Andrew Parkin: 24:19

So we have got this construction here that you've got. It's two towers at the side, high structure, a couple of arches. I don't know if it's a donkey, a horse or a dog that you've got there at the front, but it was just in the bag, right. You didn't really have too much of a choice, but you decided to use it and a stop sign.

Darren Evans: 24:38

I've used the two unique bricks. What myth does this represent? I was racking my brains, thinking of something sort of really specific and earth shatteringly new, but the reality is there's still a lot of people out there that don't think climate change exists. Um, you know you hear it in the politics of today that you know we can go on burning gas oil. You know, treating the planet in the way that we've we've treated it for the last 150 years and and expect it to be, uh, to be there when, you know, whenever we need it, and and, sadly, you know that I don't think we're ever going to change their minds. What I'd like to think is that that is a, a generational thing and and it and it goes away over time. Um, it certainly is, I suppose, more convenient to think that we can carry on being the way that we are and we can continue to abuse the planet, but I need it to stop.

Darren Evans: 25:37

I want that myth to disappear really quickly, as quickly as this building, this two-towered thing, um, with arches, um, is going to get demolished. Um, you know it isn't down to the volcanoes yes, volcanoes. Volcanoes produce CO2, plus other things. But you know, the science is there, the science is strong, you can't refute it. We're seeing it today, you know, and in 10 years' time we're going to be seeing a lot more of it, and I don't want to wait until 10 years' time to say I told you so because there won't be time for that. There'll be no virtue in being magnanimous at that point. So, yeah, that's. That's. What I want to demolish today is the incorrect opinion of of certain politicians and and other people of power and significance that can have influence on a lot of other people who believe that climate change has got nothing to do with man.

Andrew Parkin: 26:34

You are free to demolish this myth I.

Darren Evans: 26:40

Didn't hit any of the technology either which, which we're really grateful.

Andrew Parkin: 26:43

Andrew has been great having you on the show. It's been a day in here, thank you, and listening to your passion, your wisdom. It really has been that, it really has been great.