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Unlocking the value of energy in social housing 

  • Specify & Build
  • Sep 23
  • 3 min read

James Williams, Co-Founder and CEO at Sero, explores how social housing can play a part in supporting the UK’s transition to a cleaner, smarter energy system. 

  

The way we use energy in our homes is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As the UK’s social housing sector moves toward electrification – adopting heat pumps, solar panels, and battery storage – there’s a growing need to think beyond installation, to how these technologies can power and heat homes more efficiently, sustainably, and in harmony with the grid.  

 

Sero collaborates with housing providers to develop comprehensive net zero strategies for the UK’s 5.3 million social housing properties. These include financing retrofit projects, leveraging government grants and Energy-as-a-Service models, delivering high-quality installations, and ensuring long-term, efficient operation of domestic energy systems. 

 

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The ultimate goal is to establish investment frameworks that deliver financial and environmental value for landlords while enhancing living standards and reducing energy costs.  

 

As more homes are retrofitted with low-carbon technologies, Sero encourages landlords to think about how homes can actively support the wider energy system by enabling: 

  • On-site generation (eg, solar panels) 

  • Load shifting (eg, using energy during off-peak times) 

  • Load control (eg, allowing aggregators to optimise usage) 

  • Flexible demand 

This not only reduces emissions and costs but also supports grid stability, ensuring the energy transition is both equitable and efficient. 

 

Achieving energy equity 

Residents in social housing often face fuel poverty, with energy costs taking up a disproportionate share of their household income. Landlords, meanwhile, must balance rising costs with the duty to provide safe, warm and affordable homes, all while reducing their carbon footprint. Energy-as-a-Service models move away from traditional energy consumption patterns to focus on using energy more effectively. This benefits the planet, optimises grid performance, and is more economical for residents. By leveraging flexibility markets and technologies such as batteries, landlords can address energy insecurity for their residents by reducing risk and volatility of pricing. Smoothing energy costs and ensuring efficient use of technology supports both affordability and sustainability.  

 

Flipping the energy paradigm 

Landlords, regulators like Ofgem, and industry stakeholders must take a long-term view – failing to integrate homes with the grid today risks higher costs and missed opportunities tomorrow. Social landlords have a unique opportunity to ensure homes are optimised, not just electrified, reducing emissions, lowering bills, and reducing energy demand, not adding to it. Policy frameworks must evolve to support this, empowering landlords to deploy smart technologies and innovative finance models at scale. 

 

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Unlike conventional energy suppliers, Sero isn’t incentivised to sell more energy. Instead, the goal is to reduce energy use and lower costs for residents. By aggregating demand across portfolios of homes, tapping into flexibility markets, and optimising supply, Sero can secure better rates and manage consumption in a way that benefits residents, landlords, and the wider energy system. sInstead of asking residents to chase cheaper tariffs, Sero helps drive down bills through smarter energy use, efficient technologies, and long-term partnerships. 

 

Sero isn’t asking landlords to become energy experts, it’s asking them to think differently about the value their homes can unlock. That means reducing risk, smoothing out price volatility, and being rewarded for the flexibility and stability their homes can offer the grid. Landlords are in the housing business, not the energy business, but their homes are now energy assets. And, when those assets are managed to reduce risk and support the grid, they deliver significant social and financial value: 

  • Reducing bills: There is real potential to cut household energy costs while advancing net zero goals. Aggregating demand and improving system efficiency are more impactful than switching energy suppliers. 

  • New business models: Sero’s fixed service charges align incentives between landlords and residents, unlike outdated consumption-based models. 

  • Financing: The economics of retrofit are dominated not by the cost of energy, but by the financing structure behind it. The financing aspect of retrofits plays a larger role than the commodity cost of energy for its residents. 

 
 

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