Community Energy Savings Programme (CESP)

This note outlines the Community Energy Saving Programme (CESP). The programme was a three-year obligation on major energy suppliers and generators to offer free or low cost energy efficiency measures in certain low income areas. It ended in December 2012.

Overall CESP was targeted on income-deprived homes in defined areas and concentrated on a community street-by-street approach led by the major energy suppliers/generators and local authorities. The scheme was better at incentivising suppliers to deal with hard-to-treat homes (especially with solid wall insulation) than the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target scheme (that concentrated on individual households).

Despite CESP being slower to implement than planned, (due to planning issues for energy companies and local authorities with large numbers of measures), it did drastically improve in the final year and achieved 84.7% of its overall carbon saving target.