No I mean not tender for private contracts to do this. Actually do this in a nationalised way.

Setup a department, NIS (the afore mentioned National Insulation Service), with the motto warmth at the point of use, build a workforce that goes town by town coldest to hottest parts of the country and adds the required missing insulation to however many homes need it starting with low income homes.

Everyone is so keen on nationalising everything so why not kickstart this and do some good. I say the same thing about home building. Set up a government home building project entirely run by government employees funded by the state. I can understand how there would be NIMBY protectionism against that (can't build that here you'll lower the value of my mansion) but who would argue against insulation?

My local city in the US had sent people to do energy audits and gave a slight discount on the next month's electric bill if you let them in.

They would tell you where you needed more insulation and sealing. The city offered rebates for various types of insulation and energy related overhaul.

The city owned the local utility and they determined it was way cheaper to help reduce energy consumption than to scale up production

Perhaps the reason is the people dying every year during heatwaves, caused in large part by depleting oilfields.

🤔

There’s an element of cost and an element of reducing our footprint here.

Be that as it may we are going for a 10 kW south-facing array and 24 kWh battery so I’m hoping we can do the heating on our own juice in all but a couple of months. At least if my calculations hold.

But I’m sending four kids into the world. I’d like to do my bit to avoid making it worse for them, so it’s ok if it all together ends up costing over the next 5-6 years.

Immediate costs are not the only element in the equation. Electricity can be sourced from many sources, whereas fossil fuels don't have an alternative (as in, if oil becomes hard to come by, too bad. Whereas there's many ways to make electricity).

Well, oil prices will surely go down, soon, and the good news is the weather changes that cause all those heatwaves also increase the efficiency of solar.