The way we use energy in our homes is undergoing a fundamental transformation. As the UK’s social housing sector accelerates the shift toward electrification -adopting technologies like heat pumps, solar panels, and battery storage – there’s a growing need to think beyond installation. The real opportunity lies in how these technologies are used to power and heat homes more efficiently, sustainably, and in harmony with the grid. This shift is not just about reducing bills for residents, it’s about supporting the UK’s transition to a cleaner, smarter energy system.
Sero’s Mission in Social Housing
Sero is a company working at the heart of this energy transition, focusing on the UK’s 5.3 million social housing homes. With a mission to support residents and landlords alike, Sero collaborates directly with housing providers to develop comprehensive Net Zero strategies. These include financing retrofit projects, leveraging government grants and innovative Energy-as-a-Service models, delivering high-quality installations, and ensuring long-term, efficient operation of energy systems within homes.
The ultimate goal is to establish investment frameworks that deliver financial and environmental value for landlords while enhancing the living standards and reducing energy costs for residents. Sero’s work is about unlocking the true value of energy – going beyond the commodity itself to deliver service, security, and sustainability.
The Challenge: Unlocking Whole-System Value Through Electrification
As more homes are retrofitted with low-carbon technologies, Sero encourages landlords to think about how homes can actively support the wider energy system. The UK’s grid is becoming more decentralised and decarbonised, and homes can play a vital role in this transformation.
By enabling:
- On-site generation (e.g. solar panels),
- Load shifting (e.g. using energy during off-peak times),
- Load control (e.g. allowing aggregators to optimise usage), and
- Flexible demand,
landlords can unlock whole-system value. This not only reduces emissions and costs but also supports grid stability, ensuring the energy transition is both equitable and efficient.
Achieving Energy Equity
Residents in social housing often face fuel poverty, with energy costs taking up a disproportionate share of household income. Landlords, meanwhile, must balance rising costs with the duty to provide safe, warm, and affordable homes, all whilst reducing their carbon footprint. In this context, Energy-as-a-Service models play a critical role.
These models move away from traditional energy consumption patterns and instead focus on using energy more effectively. This approach benefits the planet, optimises grid performance, and is more economical for residents. By leveraging flexibility markets and technologies such as batteries, landlords can address energy insecurity for their residents (by reducing risk and volatility of pricing), while also securing funding mechanisms. Smoothing energy costs and ensuring efficient use of technology, supports both affordability and sustainability.
The Role of Landlords and Industry Bodies
With over 5 million homes needing retrofit and 1.5 million new homes planned, the scale of transformation is vast. Landlords, regulators like Ofgem, and industry stakeholders must take a long-term view. Failing to integrate homes with the grid today risks higher costs and missed opportunities tomorrow.
Social landlords have a unique opportunity to act as energy managers, ensuring homes are not just electrified, but optimised. By treating homes as mini power stations, landlords can reduce emissions, lower bills, and support a more resilient energy system by reducing demand and not adding to it.
Policy frameworks must evolve to support this vision, empowering landlords to deploy smart technologies and innovative finance models at scale.
Sero’s Model: Flipping the Energy Paradigm
Sero’s approach turns the traditional utility model on its head. Unlike conventional energy suppliers, Sero isn’t incentivised to sell more energy. In fact, it’s the opposite. The goal is to reduce energy use and lower costs for residents. By aggregating demand across portfolios of homes, tapping into flexibility markets, and optimising supply, Sero can secure better rates and manage consumption in a way that benefits residents, landlords, and the wider energy system.
This shift – from supply to service – marks a fundamental change. Instead of asking residents to chase cheaper tariffs, Sero helps drive down bills through smarter energy use, efficient technologies, and long-term partnerships with landlords.
Importantly, Sero isn’t asking landlords to become energy experts or suppliers, that’s Sero’s role. But it is asking them to think differently about the value their homes can unlock. That means reducing risk, smoothing out price volatility, and being rewarded for the flexibility and stability their homes can offer the grid. Landlords are in the housing business, not the energy business, but their homes are now energy assets. And when those assets are managed to reduce risk and support the grid, they deliver significant social and financial value.
Key Insights and Opportunities
A few key insights from Sero’s work so far:
- Reducing Bills: There is real potential to cut household energy costs while advancing Net Zero goals. Aggregating demand and improving system efficiency are more impactful than switching energy suppliers.
- New Business Models: Sero’s fixed service charges align incentives between landlords and residents, unlike outdated consumption-based models.
- Financing is Key: The economics of retrofit are dominated not by the cost of energy, but by the financing structure behind it. The financing aspect of retrofits plays a larger role than the commodity cost of energy for its residents.
Conclusion
Sero is redefining how energy is delivered and used in social housing. Through long-term strategy, innovative financial models, and a focus on service rather than consumption, Sero is helping social landlords provide comfortable, low-cost, low-carbon homes.
In doing so, Sero not only supports the UK’s Net Zero targets but also ensures that some of the most vulnerable households benefit from the energy transition. Sero continues to invite collaboration and feedback from landlords, policymakers, and residents to strengthen its model and broaden its impact and unlocking the full value of energy in social housing.