Innovation in Social Housing & Zero Bills
Innovation in Social Housing & Zero Bills
How would you overcome the challenges that exist in the sector? And would you give up control of your heating to pay no energy bills for ten years? Waterstons Innovation: The Dots
This week, we had the pleasure of attending Housing 2024, a yearly Social Housing conference. We even hosted a session about how to inject innovation into the sector. I think it accomplished one of our main goals for it: for it to feel more like a gameshow than a standard conference session. We had prizes and even some mandatory audience participation. In the end though, we left hearing a lot of ideas from the folks who attended. Let’s take a look at what we heard.
What is this? This is The Dots, our newsletter about exciting things we find in the world of innovation. We imagine innovation as connecting the dots; putting together a jigsaw. Our puzzle pieces are the pieces of interesting information we absorb in the world, our partners and their products. This newsletter is about these dots we find and connect.
Ideas in Social Housing
During our session, we showed everyone the image you see above. Alex actually generated it by feeding ChatGPT with some of the major challenges in the Social Housing sector and asking it to draw an image!
We asked (demanded?) the audience to generate a solution to an issue they saw in the image. We only gave them around 2 minutes to come up with something, so we had a fairly wild range of “solutions” given back to us. Coming up with a perfect, revolutionary, money-making idea in 2 minutes is likely impossible. However, is there a kernel of a good idea somewhere in these suggestions? Or, at least, something to prompt your thinking? We will let you be the judge of that.
Some Ideas We Received
Treehouses: A popular idea was to simply turn the house into a treehouse. It already has a tree in it, so I suppose we are already halfway there.
pros: Treehouses are fun. Trees are very eco-friendly, and will likely contribute to your ESG goals. You can continue to rent out the property, albeit in a different form.
cons: Accessibility issues - how will people with mobility issues get up the tree?
An Art Exhibition: It was suggested that if the current residents were re-homed, the site could be turned into an art installation.
pros: You have an interesting and unique way of teaching the public about issues facing the sector. You could sell tickets, and have a new way of generating revenue
cons: You likely do not have much experience running museums or art galleries
Knock It Down And…: many people felt the damage done to the property was too significant to repair, and that demolition was the only option. Two options were given to replace it: a new property, or a new summer music festival.
pros: A new house could be designed to be very eco-friendly. A new property can be an excuse to try something new - for example, an Octopus Zero Bills home.
cons: Specifically for the music festival option - you likely have no interest in organising the hot new summer music festival (to be honest, I think this suggestion came from someone’s disappointment from not getting Glastonbury tickets).
Do you have any ideas on how to overcome some of the challenges shown in the image?
Thoughts on Zero Bills
I’m (Alex) interested in Zero Bills homes. Zero Bills is Octopus Energy’s latest innovative energy plan. If you buy a new house that has the right combination of heat pump, battery and solar panels then it will be eligible for Octopus’s Zero Bills tariff, which, as its name implies, means you won’t get an energy bill for ten years.
It’s a bold position for Octopus to take although I’m not convinced that it’s quite as selfless as the Octopus rep we talked to would have us believe. I can see that there is risk involved in saying residents with the right kinds of houses will have no energy bills for ten years but Octopus and their technology business Kraken seem far too smart to take that risk without there being some hefty mitigations and pretty serious long term upsides.
Last year we kicked off a project looking at the ethics of controlling tenants’ boilers remotely to reduce the likelihood of mould growth. It’s fundamentally an interesting philosophical challenge - you are removing autonomy and agency from tenants but making their houses safer as a result. Talking to one of the Directors at Octopus it sounded like they have fully embraced this removal of agency to make “Zero Bills” work. If you have that perfect combo of heat pump, battery and solar panels then you can rescind responsibility for scheduling your heating to Octopus in return for free heating and electricity for ten years. You can still adjust your thermostat as you normally would but the Kraken back office system uses this as a hint instead of a rule. Your heating might come on at 6am despite you requesting that it comes on at 7am because 6-7 is cheaper rate electricity. Octopus also retain the right to charge and discharge your battery whenever you like and to push energy back into the grid as and when they want.
It sounds to me like they’ve decided to turn as many houses as they can into their own distributed mega battery. I want to be clear that I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing - would a consumer ever really want to manage this process themselves? - but I do think it sounds like Octopus are onto a financial winner here.
For Housing Associations it seems like this could be a big win. With the cost of energy increasing at a frankly abhorrent rate many are leaving their heating off for longer leading to more damp and mould leading to more expensive repairs and refits. One of the questions the ethics project is looking at is who should pay for the heating if it is turned on remotely and that question goes immediately out the window if the house is a Zero Bills house. If the size of their stand at Housing 24 is anything to go by then Octopus think that this could be a big win for them too.
Outside the Housing sector, all this talk about the distribution of power generation has made me wonder whether every business will become a power business in the future. I know that several of Waterstons manufacturing clients are already planning and building their own local power plants and there seem to be businesses cropping up specifically to provide ‘power generation and management as a service’. It’s an interesting swing - if the major power companies are not going to commit to green power generation and are getting a bad rep with consumers then why not look at installing your own solar panels or sinking geothermal heating on your land?