The government has reiterated its ambition to reduce national energy consumption by 15% by 2030.

In a meeting with green industries held yesterday by the Treasury at Plexal in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Chancellor launched the Energy Efficiency Taskforce which will work to lay out a plan to help reduce total UK energy demand by 15% from 2021 levels by 2030 across domestic and commercial buildings.

Mr Jeremy Hunt welcomed the appointment of Alison Rose, Group Chief Executive Officer at NatWest, as Co-Chair of the government’s new body.

ELN sat with the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero and asked them about the biggest challenges that arise from this ambition to slash national energy consumption in such a short time frame.

Jeremy Hunt said: “I don’t actually think it’s possible to succeed in that ambition unless we tackle all the areas where there is avoidable energy waste.

“So, we have a big problem with nearly half of the housing stock that hasn’t yet been retrofitted and some of that is some of the oldest housing stock. We also have a very big problem with NHS hospitals and school buildings and it’s precisely because we want to look at all those issues that we have appointed Alison Rose to lead the Energy Efficiency Taskforce.”

Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Grant Shapps told ELN: “I’ll give you a very specific example on this because I just signed off a research budget because when it comes to commercial properties, we are in a much less knowledgeable position – we know houses roughly through the Energy Performance Certificates.

“A lot of commercial properties, we don’t have a database of even which properties need to be, you know specific properties rather than generic numbers, sorted out.

“We have a research project which we are about to launch to actually sort that out so we know where we need to fix the commercial properties, just one of the very many challenges.”