Decarbonising heat and you
Heating is responsible for around 45-50% of UK energy consumption, 80% of home energy consumption, and one third of all UK emissions.*
Decarbonising heat is seen as essential to the UK meeting its targets for net zero, however efforts are way behind electricity – about 41% of UK electricity came from renewables in 2021, while only about 7.3% for heat.**
Heat is widely seen as harder to address. Most of the changes to electricity generation don’t really impact on the consumer. They happen at a distance and from the consumer perspective of just flicking the switch. The exception is solar PV panels, which some readers will have on their own roofs.
Professor Peter Connor is Associate Professor in Sustainable Energy Policy at the University of Exeter and Project Lead on the SHIFFT project (Sustainable Heat: Implementation of Fossil Free Technology). He says: “Regarding heat, any change will need to happen at the level of your community, your street and your house. Whatever system you use now, a change will be local.”
“Whether you are one of the 85% of consumers on the gas grid, or if you use bottled gas, wood, oil or coal at home, a low carbon system is going to have to be fitted locally. Even a change to hydrogen would mean a new local network and new boilers for everyone if its supply is going to be at 100%, and there are a lot of other issues to consider with that option.”
* Decarbonising heat in homes – House of Commons Report, Feb 2022.
** The Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics (DUKES), July 2022.
“Regarding heat, any change will need to happen at the level of your community, your street and your house. Whatever system you use now, a change will be local.”
It may surprise people who have seen the decades long rise of solar and wind energy to overtake fossil fuels as the cheapest electricity sources, but the key technologies for decarbonising heat already exist and have done for years. The key issues for the UK are the upfront cost, helping people come to trust them as reliable providers of heat in the winter, and scaling them up as fast as possible. But what are the options?
Peter says: “The first step is reducing waste through optimising energy efficiency. Retrofitting existing homes (and building new homes) with high quality insulation and controls to improve their energy performance is essential. These are ‘no regrets’ measures which enhance comfort and cut costs whatever the future zero carbon heat source – particularly as the UK housing stock performs poorly compared to other European countries.
“District heating (DH) pipes waste and other heat to buildings, in the UK this is largely confined to institutions like hospitals, but elsewhere cities like Copenhagen and Reykjavik supply hot water for washing and space heating to hundreds of thousands of homes, most of it waste heat from local power stations. DH is best suited to high density living in cities, but as we have seen in the city of Bruges, a key partner on SHIFFT, this can mean houses and not just apartment blocks.
“You may already have heard of decarbonising heat via electrification; primarily this means installing a heat pump in individual homes or shared buildings, such as flats. Heat pumps work like your fridge, but instead of creating a cool space for food and dumping the excess heat out the back, they take heat from underground or outdoors and bring it into your home. Doing this can mean that using 1 kWh of electricity can add 3-4 kWh of heat inside your home, giving an efficiency of 300-400%. You can also combine heat pumps to add heat to district heating to scale up the demand that can be met.”
The SHIFFT project is an INTERREG 2 SEAS project which has been looking at how to encourage faster uptake of low carbon heating options. The team used a co-creation approach – working with different members of local communities – to determine preferred technologies for pilot installations, but also to get their input into devising and testing a general approach to creating city low carbon heat strategies.
Peter says: “We produced a guide to making a city heat strategy and then tested it in four European cities (populations varying from 8,000 to 118,000), feeding back into and amending the structured approach based on that experience. This has led to the adoption of heat strategies in the four cities, and to us producing a four-module guide which breaks down the key areas for action that towns and cities need to understand in order to develop their own local strategies.
“These are an overview of the technologies and how to choose between them, the range of financial and non-financial policy instruments that can be applied to inform and support adoption of efficient, zero carbon heat, and finally the co-creation methodology, aimed at helping towns and cities to include their own citizens in decisions about actions to decarbonise homes and shared community spaces.”
The overall approach and the four modules are free to access and available at shifftproject.eu and the team have been running events to share their knowledge with interested authorities across Europe.
