Snow Place Like Home: innovation, energy and affordable
The Snow Place Like Home webinar (watch the recording here) gave participants a sneak peek into Octopus’ internal, Friday afternoon, Zoom calls, which they describe as “family dinner” style. This high-energy, casual and interactive format made for a great discussion. Our thanks to the Octopus team and participants for speaking so honestly about the realities of delivering better homes in a period of uncertainty, rising costs and rapid technological change.
This blog captures the conversation as it unfolded: the pressures participants highlighted, the questions they raised and the possibilities that emerged.
Housing organisations are being required to maintain and deliver more homes, to higher standards, while navigating constant change. The challenge is not a lack of ambition but a lack of stable ground on which to act. It was evident that Octopus, recently the UK’s largest energy supplier, is not an organisation that is waiting for tested solutions but forging ahead in helping their customers decarbonize. Opening the session, Emma Fletcher (Low Carbon Homes Director, Octopus Energy) was clear about the purpose of the webinar: to listen.
Innovation as responsibility, not risk
Innovation was not positioned as disruption for its own sake. Emma reflected that housing’s caution is understandable given public accountability and regulatory pressure. But she also posed a challenge: if existing systems leave residents with high bills, cold homes or technology they cannot control, is standing still really safer?
Against, this backdrop innovation emerged as a way to manage risk, not amplify it — through pilots, trials and learning partnerships that allow ideas to be tested before scaling.
Residents don’t want complexity
A recurring theme was that residents do not want to become energy experts. Whether in new build or retrofit homes, most people simply want to be comfortable and confident their bills are predictable. Nigel Banks (Technical Director, Octopus Energy) and Tom Griffiths (Solar Development Lead, Octopus Energy) both highlighted the growing complexity inside homes: solar panels, batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicles are arriving at pace. The challenge for housing providers, energy suppliers and technology companies, is not just system installation, but integration — ensuring systems work together without burdening residents with complexity. Octopus customer strategy is quite the opposite – fun!
Gaming energy costs
As the grid shifts towards renewables, prices increasingly vary by time of day. This means when energy is used now matters as much as how much. For homes with flexible assets — such as heat pumps, batteries or electric vehicles — this opens new possibilities. Aligning demand with cheaper, cleaner energy periods and smart import/exports to and from the grid can significantly reduce bills. For housing professionals, especially in affordable housing, this turns energy into a design issue, not just an efficiency one.
Very low — even zero — bills are possible not only by reducing demand, but by changing where energy comes from and when, and thus how it is priced.
Octopus explainer on smart tariffs and time-of-use energy
Fabric first — or fabric fifth? Rethinking retrofit priorities
Nigel challenged some long‑held assumptions about retrofit. Drawing on in-depth analysis, he showed that EPC ratings do not always translate into dramatically lower bills. EPCs largely measure heating demand; appliance use and hot water consumption remain broadly similar across homes. He thinks it is likely that under‑heating amongst tenants struggling financially in poorly performing homes may in fact be masking the true scale of energy need.
Using government data, Nigel highlighted the limited bill savings delivered by some traditional measures relative to their cost. Deep fabric retrofits can involve long payback periods, while newer technologies — particularly when combined with smart tariffs — can deliver larger savings more quickly. Rather than abandoning fabric improvements, he described a reprioritisation that he referred to as a “fabric fifth” approach: start with basic measures, then heat pumps, solar and batteries, leaving the most expensive interventions until later if needed.
Nigel Banks on the ‘Fabric Fifth’ approach
From theory to live homes
Tom Griffiths described Octopus’ work with Housing Association Together Housing in Yorkshire, where solar and battery systems are being installed at scale and linked to a dedicated new tariff for social housing tenants – ‘Tenant Power’ (for more see here). The aim is to share benefits fairly: predictable savings for tenants and a return that allows landlords to scale investment in new renewable infrastructure.
Financial savings/income is enabled by charging batteries when renewable energy is abundant and prices low and reducing grid usage and exporting at peak times (when prices are high).
Read more about: Together Housing and Tenant Power here.
For smart systems to work, they need reliable monitoring and control. Solutions such as Tenant Power rely on dedicated data connections linked directly to batteries, avoiding reliance on tenants’ Wi‑Fi and allowing performance to be managed remotely.
Tenant Power has been designed as a lighter touch alternative to their Zero Bills specification and tariff, which is guaranteeing residents £0 bills (including standing charges) for up to ten years.
Funding, scaling and what comes next
While costs for solar panels and batteries have fallen sharply, upfront investment remains a barrier. Emma and Tom discussed emerging approaches — from combined authority loans and ECO funding to potential national mechanisms linked to the Warm Homes Plan (launched on the 20th Jan 2026, since this webinar, check out Nigel Bank’s reflections and next steps here).
Evidence that the technology works and generates returns, is expected to help housing providers access the capital, partnerships and confidence needed to scale it responsibly.
What the conversation points to next
Snow Place Like Home did not produce simple answers, but was an invitation for social landlords to work, innovate and learn in partnership with energy suppliers such as Octopus. In doing so, they can bring their respective knowledge of their customers’ needs and expectations to bear on the design, installation and interaction with home energy systems, making homes (new and old) as comfortable, affordable and easy to run as possible.
This blog was developed with AI-assisted drafting support.
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