Fellow's Profile
Rafe Bertram
Fellow's Profile
Rafe Bertram
Retrofit Economics: Scaling up energy and climate improvements of UK homes
Fellowship
- Themes
- Focus
-
Making warm, low-carbon homes affordable enough to roll out at speed and scale across the UK.
- Countries
- Fellowship year
-
2026
- Locality
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London
Contact
Biography
I manage Enfield Council's home retrofit and energy efficiency programmes, upgrading existing homes to be warmer, cheaper to run and lower in carbon. My Fellowship is about the economics of retrofit. The UK has some of Europe's oldest, worst-performing homes, yet we improve only a fraction of the number we need to each year. In my experience the biggest barrier isn't technical - it's that doing the right thing often doesn't stack up financially. I want to change that.
Travelling by train, I'll visit a range of EU countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and France, where retrofit is being delivered at scale. I will learn how they make the economics work through smarter funding, financing and policy, and lower cost technologies, and I will bring that thinking home.
I've worked on this at every level: retrofitting my own home, co-founding a community group, and working with regional and national bodies. I don't fly and I cycle everywhere I can, but I know that economics persuade people far more powerfully than principles alone. I aspire to help make warm, efficient homes affordable for everyone, lift people out of fuel poverty and cut carbon emissions at the speed we urgently need.
Disclaimer
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
Disclaimer
All Reports are copyright © the author. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed by any Fellow are those of the Fellow and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners, which have no responsibility or liability for any part of them.
