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Over £165 million of Heat Networks Investment Project (HNIP) funding has been awarded since the scheme opened for applications in 2019. The most recent recipient is Kent County Council who has secured £2,478,000 to support the development of a low carbon heat network in Maidstone.
The UK’s first houses to demonstrate the use of hydrogen-fuelled appliances in a real-world setting are to be built by Northern Gas Networks (NGN), the company has announced.
“It’s a unique architecture. Rather than sandwiching solar generating materials between glass or other substrates, we take a polymer substrate and in it we create microstructures that are smaller than a human hair to create a dense pattern of solar cells – it’s the same process used to make the holograms you see on credit cards.”
Glass might be great for looking through but, unfortunately, it’s a very poor insulator. In a typical house, windows account for roughly 10% of the total heat lost and two thirds of this is radiation through the glazing itself.
Northern Gas Networks (NGN) has completed the project as part of H21, in collaboration with fellow gas distribution networks Cadent, Scottish Gas Networks and Wales & West Utilities. It builds on the earlier H21 Leeds City Gate project, which established a hydrogen conversion of the gas grid was technically possible and economically viable.
The well-known issue with many renewable technologies is inconsistency in supply. Whilst the UK might have pledged to create 40 GW of installed offshore capacity by 2030, the supply is very dependent on it being windy. On days when it isn’t, we must fall back on stored electricity.
The Heat Pump Association (HPA), which represents around 95% of the heat pump manufacturing market share, has surveyed its members to estimate the supply of heat pumps in 2021. This has revealed that manufactures have placed orders with their supply chains to deliver a total of 67,000 units in 2021. This equates to a nearly double the number of heat pumps on shelves and in warehouses ready for installers to meet the growing consumer demand.
While hydrogen certainly offers great potential, it’s often overlooked that it is untested technology at present and, meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
“The UK also lacks the manufacturing capacity to switch to heat pumps for new builds. Current housing new builds is running at an annual completion level of 177,980 units, but there is only one UK manufacturer of Air Sourced Heat Pumps, Mitsubishi in Scotland, with a capacity of 3,000 units per year. Almost all gas boilers fitted in the UK are built here, so we would be closing a successful UK manufacturing sector to import an inferior overseas product.”
In July last year, ministers passed secondary legislation to allow battery storage to bypass the Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project process in Britain. This relaxing of planning legislation allowed for storage projects above 50MW in England and 350MW in Wales to proceed without approval through the national planning regime.
Panasonic are currently offering installers £800 and their customers an additional £600 as part of their Green Install Cashback Scheme and Green Homes Cashback scheme.
The Gas Users Organisation has branded the government’s commitment to move from gas to heat pumps as ‘premature’ and ‘prohibitively expensive’. This comes on the back of the recent Future Homes Standard consultation, in which the government outlined a heat pump orientated future: “A low carbon heating system will be integral to the specification of the Future Homes Standard and we anticipate that heat pumps will become the primary technology for new homes.”
The government has re-stated its commitment to rolling out heat pump technologies across the UK housing stock
To remedy a problem that’s only going to become ever more prevent as heat pumps proliferate, Grant UK have released five new slimline hot water cylinders.
The UK’s solar industry body has today unveiled a comprehensive rebrand, including a new name and website and an annual impact report to demonstrate the value it has driven for its members.
Ecuity’s extensive expertise in energy, mobility and environmental policy complements Gemserv’s established role as a manager of high-profile projects in the energy and other sectors.
Renewable technologies are constantly evolving, with manufacturers pushing the boundaries in innovation to find new solutions to meet our net zero target.
Oxford PV started life in a lab at Oxford University in 2010, where two men, Professor Henry Snaith and Kevin Arthur, began work on a material known as perovskite. Their initial findings were published in a paper under the bamboozling title: ‘Efficient Hybrid Solar Cells Based on Meso-Superstructured Organometal Halide Perovskites’. It was this information that gave birth to commercial application of perovskite-silicon tandem cell technology for solar pv, which is the focus of the company today.
Building services training provider, GTEC, in partnership with the MCS, has won an almost £1M bid to help existing trades people access discounted training in heat pumps and solar thermal, in order to meet the demand presented by the Green Homes Grant (GHG) – the government’s scheme to improve the energy efficiency of UK housing stock.
Whilst decarbonisation measures that were outlined in the 10-point plan are revisited in further detail, the paper also outlines a range of funding packages to help consumers to reduce both bills and carbon emissions as well as setting out plans for job creation, including support for those making the transition from traditional gas and oil industries.
The Climate Change Committee (CCC) has produced another insightful piece of work with their Sixth Carbon Budget Report.
The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has recommended that the heat pump market is scaled up over the next 10 – 15 years in advance of a fossil fuel phase out of boiler installations in 2033. By 2030, heat pump sales must reach over 1 million per year in new and existing homes.
At the recent Solar & Storage 2020 live conference (2-4 Dec), one point that was consistently raised in the webinars was the critical role installers play in the road to net zero.
It looks like the writing is on the wall for natural gas boilers following the prime minister’s announced intention to reduce emissions by 68% by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. Such an ambitious target cannot be tackled with heat pumps alone, so how to plug the gap?