A 2020 report from Connected Places Catapult expressed the challenge at the intersection of the UK's 2050 net zero commitment, and its current domestic emissions:

Making the UK's homes fit for the energy needs of the coming century will require massive changes in energy supply, finance, and homeowner behaviours. The UK Government has published a number of strategy documents setting out their approach to issues such as decarbonising homes and industrial buildings, and developing a more resilient energy supply pipeline.

A steady rise in energy prices since the early 2000s (in part due to the UK's continued dependence on gas, and political inaction on energy efficiency) has already put pressure on the cost of living in the UK, and now Russian sanctions over the war in Ukraine have pushed those prices even higher. Our energy-inefficient homes are really starting to cost us. Industry leaders are already estimating that as many as 40% of Britons could fall into fuel poverty this winter, if energy prices don't fall.

There are a number of actors in this space, including:

• Home owners, private landlords, and rental tenants.
• Social housing providers, and social tenants.
• Local authorities, who may be able to influence the energy efficiency of buildings through planning consent and landlord/social housing legislation.
• Local government bodies, such as the LGA, Local Partnerships, UK100, the WLGA, and the Improvement Service in Scotland, as well as more climate-related bodies like Climate Northern Ireland.
• National government agencies such as Ofgem, the Catapult network, and the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales.
• Customer-facing energy suppliers, and energy infrastructure providers, such as the Data Communications Company which manages the UK's smart meter network, and the Distribution Network Operators that manage the delivery of power to peoples' homes.
• Community energy projects, such as those in Brighton & Hove, Isle of Wight, Oldham, Exeter, and Barnsley, to name just a few.
• Organisations that attempt to support community energy projects, such as RePowering, Community Energy England, Community Energy Wales, Community Energy Scotland, and Energy Saving Trust.
• Built environment industry bodies such as the UK Green Building Council, the Good Homes Alliance, and Futurebuild.
• Organisations campaigning for and implementing clean energy transition, such as Carbon Co-op, Power for People, and the National Energy Foundation.
• Organisations campaigning on fuel poverty, such as End Fuel Poverty Coalition, and National Energy Action.

Much of the attention on home energy thus far has centred around "retrofit" – improvement work on existing buildings, to make them more energy efficient, easier to heat, or less reliant on fossil fuels. Given the longevity of housing stock (outlined in the Connected Places Catapult report quoted above) the retrofitting of old stock is inevitable. But concerns have also been raised over the high upfront costs involved in most retrofit work, making it unpalatable for private rental landlords who won't benefit from lower bills, for example, and feasible to only wealthier homeowners. Some financial providers are exploring ways to incentivise wider retrofit action through mechanisms like Local Climate Bonds and ‘Green Mortgages' (which offer lower interest rates for more energy efficient homes).

In our research for this week, we noticed that there is a strong overlap between organisations encouraging residential energy projects and organisations championing stronger, more resilient local communities. This is one of the reasons we hoped to focus on conditional commitment as a lens through which to explore wider action on home energy.

‘Conditional commitment' services enable users to signal their intention to do something, only if a certain number of other people commit to doing it as well. Kickstarter is a leading example in the world of product design, where projects only become a reality if the required funding threshold is met. mySociety ran a conditional commitment service called PledgeBank between 2005–2015, that encouraged people to take community actions together – such as collecting charity donations, improving the local area, or funding scholarships.

Conditional commitment services are about signalling or sharing information about individual behaviour, in a way that might influence others to modify and signal their behaviour too – which makes them a particularly attractive tool for the challenge of encouraging widespread collective action on home energy changes. When conditional commitment examples work well, they can take on a sort of ‘snowball' effect, where the social proof of existing supporters draws in more and more new supporters, which could quickly transform the emissions footprint of a neighbourhood.