Energy Company Obligation and the Ethics of Energy Repair

Designing Dignified Decarbonisation

Paper Reference: Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) – Ofgem, 2025
Published by: Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem)

1. Fuel Poverty Meets Climate Repair

In 2025, the UK’s Energy Company Obligation (ECO4) stands as a national experiment in dignified decarbonisation. Designed to reduce carbon emissions and tackle fuel poverty, ECO4 requires energy suppliers to deliver energy efficiency upgrades to low-income and vulnerable households. But this is more than insulation; it’s infrastructure for repair.

The question is no longer how to cut carbon, but how to do so ethically, equitably, and with emotional intelligence. ECO4 reframes energy not as a commodity, but as care.

2. The Bigger Picture: Climate Justice and Domestic Repair

ECO4 operates at the intersection of climate action and social equity. Millions of UK homes remain energy inefficient, with residents facing cold winters, high bills, and health risks. ECO4 targets these homes, especially those rated D, E, F, or G on the Energy Performance Certificate scale and offers upgrades like loft insulation, heat pumps, and boiler replacements.

But the scheme also reveals systemic gaps. Access depends on benefit eligibility, landlord permission, and local authority participation. The ethics of repair must extend beyond technical fixes to relational design, honouring dignity, pacing, and refusal.

3. Enter the Designers: Engineers, Advocates, and Community Architects

ECO4 is shaped by a constellation of actors: energy suppliers, retrofit installers, local councils, and regulatory bodies like Ofgem and TrustMark. But increasingly, community advocates, housing cooperatives, and climate justice groups are co-designing the future of domestic energy.

Their work includes mapping retrofit harms, designing ceremony-rich consent protocols, and embedding emotional pacing into home surveys. They ask not just “what can be installed?” but “how does this feel?” and “who decides?”

4. The Investigation: How ECO4 Works

ECO4 places a Home Heating Cost Reduction Obligation (HHCRO) on medium and large energy suppliers. These suppliers must promote measures that improve the ability of low-income, fuel-poor, and vulnerable households to heat their homes. The overall target is distributed based on each supplier’s market share.

Eligible households may receive upgrades such as:

Internal wall insulation
Loft insulation
Air source heat pumps
Boiler repairs or replacements

Installers conduct home surveys, assess suitability, and propose retrofit packages. But the emotional architecture of these interactions, trust, pacing, and refusal, remains underexplored.

5. The Breakthroughs: From Retrofit to Ritual

Recent developments include:

Modular retrofit kits tailored to housing archetypes
Ceremony-rich onboarding protocols for tenants and homeowners
Community-led retrofit audits that document emotional and relational impacts
Integration of ECO4 with GBIS (Great British Insulation Scheme) for layered support

These breakthroughs show that energy efficiency is not just technical, it’s relational, ceremonial, and reparative.

6. What It Means: Rethinking Home, Heat, and Belonging

ECO4 reframes the home as a site of climate repair. But it also raises questions: Who gets upgraded first? How are refusals honoured? What happens when retrofits disrupt routines, memories, or sensory safety?

In social housing, tenants may feel coerced or unheard. In private rentals, landlords may block upgrades. In owner-occupied homes, consent may be rushed or poorly explained. The ethics of retrofit must include emotional pacing, relational repair, and terrain-mapped refusal.

7. The Road Ahead: Scaling Dignified Decarbonisation

Challenges remain. ECO4’s eligibility criteria exclude many households in need. Retrofit quality varies, and some installations have caused harm. Funding is finite, and public understanding is low.

Yet opportunities abound. Ceremony-rich retrofit protocols. Terrain-mapped energy justice archives. Modular care systems that integrate insulation, emotional safety, and community consent. The future of energy repair is not just scalable, it’s sacred.

8. Final Note: A Vision for Ethical Energy Futures

ECO4 invites a future where decarbonisation is not extractive, but reparative. Where energy upgrades honour grief, pacing, and refusal. Where homes become sites of co-flourishing, not just efficiency.

This research asks us to design energy systems that metabolise harm into healing, insulation into intimacy, and carbon reduction into relational repair.

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