CSE addresses the climate emergency, tackles the root causes of fuel poverty, and builds a fair, inclusive transition to a net zero energy system that benefits everyone.

The past year has seen the UK take significant steps towards a smarter, cleaner energy system. But if you’re struggling to pay your gas or electricity bills, what difference does it make if record levels of renewable power generation are being achieved? And if you’re unable to use the internet or don’t have an electric car or can’t change when and how you use electricity, you’re effectively excluded from the advantages of the smarter energy system.

This is where CSE makes a difference. Our focus on fairness and on finding practical solutions that benefit the people and communities most at risk of being left behind is unique.

Download our 2025-26 Impact Report (PDF).

From April 2025 to March 2026, we delivered record levels of financial benefit for our clients – £1,685 on average. We deepened the support available to tenants and other groups we identified as struggling to access services, for example the Somali community in Bristol and the armed forces veteran community in Wiltshire.

Our work in housing energy retrofit reaches thousands of fuel-poor customers who would otherwise be missed by grant schemes. As well as securing quality installations for them, our Smart Energy Action Plans and award-winning Energy Choices Tool helped them benefit fully from their new low carbon technology.

Our work can be life-changing for a household and transformational for a community.

Energy re-set

The way we produce and use energy needs to change. It’s one of the main causes of the climate emergency. At the same time, millions of people in the UK face the harsh reality of cold homes which threatens their health and wellbeing.

Our work spans the breadth of the energy transition challenge, from supporting individuals in fuel poverty to empowering communities and advising local authorities and national policy. We’re advancing housing energy retrofit, championing future generations, promoting fairness in the energy transition, and offering expert advice on energy efficiency and renewables.

Through innovative research, policy advocacy work, and practical tools, we tackle the complex challenges of climate change and fuel poverty from every angle. Our work paves the way for a more sustainable, smarter and fairer energy system.

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• Provided energy advice and casework to 20,143 households.
• Secured financial savings worth more than £33.9m for our clients, averaging £1,685 per household.
• Facilitated the installation of 6,969 energy efficiency measures.
• Enabled 871 community organisations to take action on climate or fuel poverty.
• Reached 1,850 young people through our high-quality education and youth leadership programmes.

*Financial benefits are based on recorded data of the real financial savings achieved for each of our advice clients in one year (2025-26 alone). They include benefits claimed, energy efficiency measures installed, fuel vouchers and much more. They exclude future years impacts e.g. savings made over the lifetime of the energy efficiency measures installed.

Our work falls into six work programmes. These are areas where CSE has a strong track record, formidable skills and unique insight, where we are best placed to drive change and maximise our impact.

Our work programmes are the foundation of our 2024 organisational strategy which directs how we work towards our vision and high-level objectives.

• Beneficiaries – we record and evaluate the number of people we’ve supported through our advice service and community support programmes as well as the financial savings achieved by our advice line clients.
• Innovation – we keep track of the new approaches and methods CSE has developed, introduced or pioneered and the outcomes, or changes this influences.
• Support and tools – we assess how widely our tools and resources are used and the real-world impact they create. We measure the effectiveness of our plans, studies and research by how they empower organisations and individuals to make informed decisions and drive meaningful change.
• Policy and learning – we monitor CSE’s influence on national policy and the practical changes we bring about. We record our active engagement, policy consultations and insights shared based on our research and direct engagement with individuals and communities.

Retrofit West is a Community Interest Company (CIC) set up by the Centre for Sustainable Energy to tackle a critical gap in the West of England’s journey to net zero: the lack of a trusted, coordinated approach to help households retrofit their homes.

Since launching in 2023, it’s become one of the UK’s few successful examples of a local one-stop-shop for retrofit – connecting homeowners with independent advice and vetted installers while building a thriving local supply chain.

Since CSE was founded in 1979, we have:

• Provided high-quality, tailored energy advice to more than 400,000 local people to help them take control of their energy use at home.
• Trained and supported more than 76,000 people to empower them to take action on sustainable energy within their own organisations and communities across the UK.
• Reached approximately 58,000 young people with our high-quality education and youth leadership programmes. In particular, we help them become influential energy activists in their own homes, communities and schools. 
• You can read more about our history here.