Policy analysis

This chapter describes and discusses some policy scenarios formulated in order to illustrate the use of the model in this book. The illustrative scenarios developed demonstrate how the energy consumption and carbon emissions attributable to the UK housing stock would evolve over the years under different assumptions. The chapter explains the assumptions under the ‘efficiency’ scenario. The scenario generally considers the effects of improvements in energy efficiency measures on household energy consumption and ultimately on household carbon emissions. Also, the chapter describes the ‘behavioural change’ scenario that it tries to model the effects of occupants’ change of energy consumption behaviour on household energy consumption and carbon emissions profile. Further, the ‘economic’ scenario assumes a case of policy change by government favouring energy prices’ reduction, thereby reducing the energy bills payable by the householders and their consequences on household energy consumption and carbon emissions. Lastly, an ‘integrated’ scenario combines the assumptions in the first three scenarios and then analyses their effects on household energy consumption and carbon emissions. The discussion of the output of different scenarios for housing energy and carbon emissions concludes the chapter.