Install Low-Carbon Heating

Izzy: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me, Isabelle Sparrow. 

Brad: And me, Bradley Ingham.   

Izzy: This is Do Something Bigger, our series about 25 local actions you can take to tackle climate change and restore nature, close to home. We’ve covered everything from fixing your stuff to rewilding our land and today, we’re turning up the thermostat on one of the most important shifts we need to make in our homes and buildings… any guesses Brad? 

Brad: Well going off the title of the episode, we’re going to explore the hot topic of Installing Low Carbon Heating! Izzy would you like to have a guess at what percentage of the UK’s carbon emissions are made up from heating our homes and buildings? 

Izzy: Mmm 5 percent? 

Brad: Well it’s actually a whopping 17%, most of which of course comes from gas boilers. In fact 80% of UK homes are still heated by gas, which is more than almost anywhere in Europe! 

Izzy: Yeah so at this point in the series I wouldn’t say that I’m surprised by that, as we’ve talked about in previous episodes, the UK has some of the worst housing stock in Europe, and heating isn’t just a climate issue, it’s a social one too. Nearly a quarter of households in the UK are in fuel poverty, which means they’re struggling to afford to heat their homes. So installing cleaner, more efficient heating systems will help to reduce emissions and improve people’s living standards! 

Brad: Absolutely, the government has also shifted the focus to making low carbon heating systems more affordable and accesible with the £7,500 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant for heat pumps, and there are other low carbon alternatives as well such as District Heat Networks and solar generation. But of course, if we’re going to reach net zero, we’ll need to scale it up fast.  

Izzy: And while that might sound like a massive challenge, communities around the UK are already showing what’s possible from rural villages finding collective solutions to cities retrofitting old buildings for a low-carbon future. 

Brad: But before we dive into our guests’ stories today, I feel it’s probably important to outline what are the different low carbon heating options these days? Because there are a few different ways to keep warm without burning fossil fuels. 

Izzy: That’s right. So one of the most common options you’ll hear about is the heat pump. It basically works like a fridge, but in reverse so instead of taking the warm air out of the inside and pushing it outside, a heat pump pulls heat from the air from the outside or from the ground and concentrates it to warm your home or your hot water. 

Brad: Here’s a little fact I love about heat pumps, so a typical modern gas boiler runs at around 90% efficiency, so that means if I put in £1 for energy, I’ll get around 90p’s worth of energy back and lose some of the energy as waste heat. Can you guess how efficient a heat pump can be? 

Izzy: I dunno, I guess 100 percent? 

Brad: If installed correctly, a heat pump can be 300% or more! So you’re basically getting triple the energy for your money. Another low carbon option to have is a heat network. Instead of everyone having their own boiler, a whole group of homes or buildings can share one clean heat source, usually powered by big ground or water-source heat pumps, or sometimes waste heat from nearby industries. It’s a bit like a central heating system for a whole community. 

Izzy: I really love district heating schemes, it’s something that you see a lot in northern Europe, particularly parts of Scandinavia. And the idea of using waste heat from factories and other kinds of buildings is such a brilliant one. And one that I think we could see a lot more of in this country as time goes on. They’re really efficient, and they make it easier to decarbonise heating at scale, especially in places like blocks of flats or towns where homes are close together. Which let’s face it, is becoming more and more common here as well. 

Brad: Yeah exactly, and there’s also a simpler but equally as important piece of the puzzle which is insulation and energy efficiency, which we’ve already covered in a previous episode in the series, so we’ll leave a link in the description if you would like to have a listen to that. 

Izzy: So let’s get into it! Our first story takes us to Cambridgeshire, to the village of Swaffham Prior, where residents have swapped oil for clean, renewable heat through the UK’s first rural heat network project. Here’s Ros Hathorn, Councillor for Cambridgeshire Combined Authority, explaining more. 

Ros: Swaffham Prior is a village in rural Cambridgeshire and it is a village of about 300 properties and those properties don’t have mains gas so a lot of the properties are on heating oil. So it was a community where there was a really active community land trust and they’d managed to build some new affordable housing in the village and then I think they thought what next? And they recognised, and they were looking for a real challenge and they recognised this kind of big challenge of heating oil being a real, being a real issue for residents and there’s a carbon issue but there’s also, it’s really not a great heating solution it’s messy, it’s really subject to fluctuations in price so it’s a really non ideal heat source. 

And the people who are leading the project knew of these projects in Scandinavian countries and could we bring this to Cambridgeshire? 

And if this could be brought to Cambridgeshire, actually, this is a way in which we can get that really difficult to reach source of heating down to net zero but the first step has got to be, is there a business case for your village does it make sense for the residents do the residents want it, and have we got the energy to deliver it? So I think that’s sort of how it started. 

Brad: This is a project that’s taken years of planning and persistence, and it was helped by a really strong relationship between the Community Land Trust and the county council. Here’s Nicola Young, Head of Complex Infrastructure at Cambridgeshire County Council who explained for us how the system works. 

Nicola: So we’ve got what we call the Swaffham Prior Energy Centre. And we get heat from a number of sources. So we’ve got three technologies that provide the heat in the energy centre. We’ve got air source heat pumps. We also have ground source heat pumps. So heat from the earth warms the heat network during the winter months. And we’ve got 108, what are called closed loop boreholes that provide heat. We also have some electric boilers which provide emergency backup or support if it’s a very cold day. And those boilers are powered by a cable that connects up to our North Angle Solar Farm, which is another county council renewable site delivering solar energy through to support the Swaffham Prior Energy Project.  

The energy centre heats up water. That heat is delivered to individual homes through a network of insulated pipes that run beneath the streets in Swaffham Prior. And they take the hot water into the property.  And then there’s a unit inside each of the houses that receives the heat from the network and transfers it through into people’s radiators and hot water appliances. So providing them with a good constant source of hot water. 

Izzy: There are so many bits and pieces to think about with this project, but it’s very exciting that it’s off the ground or should I say in the ground… and running! Obviously this is just one kind of low-carbon heating, shared, at a community-scale and in a rural setting. But what about the older buildings in our towns and cities, places that weren’t designed with modern heating in mind? 

Brad: Well Izzy, for that, we head to North London, where Tanuja Pandit, CEO of Power Up North London, is helping retrofit older community buildings for the future. 

Tanuja: Our sort of model project for decarbonisation is the community centre in Archway, Islington, Caxton House Community Centre, where we delivered an end to end decarbonisation, starting with fabric changes and then ending with the introduction of a 50 kilowatt air source heat pump. So in that project, we followed the whole sort of fabric first approach where we looked at the windows. They were in a very poor state. So we got a grant to replace all of those with triple glazed windows. We also very much around the start of the project got a decarbonisation report done so that we could understand the various steps we needed to take in the sequencing of getting the building off gas and what we needed to do in the run up to that. So once we got the windows in, we then moved on to looking at ventilation and also building management systems. So we decided to focus on mechanical ventilation with heat recovery and then put in the air source heat pump. There were a lot of decisions along the way between us sort of starting the project and completing the installation, which happened two years later. So we started around the summer of 2021 and finished the installation of the heat pump in December 2023. 

Izzy: So both of these projects had lots of different challenges, but they had essentially the same goal: making heat cleaner, fairer, and futureproofing for communities. 

Brad: It’s also important to point out of course that projects like these don’t happen in isolation. They rely on partnerships between councils, communities, engineers, and funders. Ros and Nicola told us about how the partnership between the council and the Community Land Trust began and how the project was set-up and funded. 

Ros: What you’re looking for is an organisation big enough to support this, so you would go to your councillors, these are natural places to go to say, hey, this is a project. This is really exciting. Do you want to work with us. And at that time, there was the energy in the council and I think there would still be today but also there were there was the grant funding opportunities and together they could see that there was a project and there was a way forward and you’ve also got engineering firms who are excited, it’s a trial it’s a demonstration project, can we get this one off the ground and then it can unlock other things so if you speak to the right people and there’s enough enthusiasm, you can make it work, and the county council just have the scale to be able to embed a project like this within itself. 

Nicola: So the funding, as we’ve kind of outlined, had some grant funding from the Heat Network Investment Project and Heat Network Development Unit originally and the County Council made a strategic investment in the project. All of our customers, once they’re signed up to the network, they will pay for the heating and hot water supply like you would with any normal utility. So there’s a standing charge and then they’ll pay per unit of heating and hot water that they receive through the system. 

We are still in early stages of the project, as we’ve said. So we’ve got over 100 customers now. We’re building our customer base in order to make sure that the cost of running the centre is recouped through our income from our customers in order to make sure that that business model works. And yeah, we’re looking to continue connecting customers to make sure that it delivers in the way that it is expected to. And it’s really promising at the moment, as Ros said, that we’ve got over 100 homes connected to the network. 

We do review the price every year of the cost of the heating for our customers to make sure that we are competitive with equivalent electricity or gas costs. And I think the key thing for our customers as well is whilst they pay the standing charge and they pay for the heating and hot water, the Council are responsible for operating and managing the heat network. So if there are issues that they’re having with their hot water, they can ring us and we can help to sort that out so they don’t have the sort of maintenance costs in the same way that you might have if you needed to replace your gas boiler or if you needed to get a new oil tank.  We look after the infrastructure that’s delivering the heating and the hot water to the properties. 

Izzy: This is just such a brilliant set-up, it must be such an improvement for those customers, and 100% something I can see more people wanting in their own area. I live in quite a rural area myself and lots of people around here use oil tanks still as their main heating source. It’s just such an exciting thought to think that might become a thing of the past quite soon with more projects springing up like this. That endorsement and support from the council is so important though, and it’s all about trust and showing people that this is actually a viable option. In North London, I wondered how Tanuja and her team built the relationship with Caxton House. 

Tanuja: The relationship with Caxton House goes back to 2018 when I was the chair of a charity that’s located in the Caxton House building. And I said to my fellow directors could they introduce me to the person that runs the building? And so they did. And we started out with a small LED lighting project for Caxton House, because at that time, Islington Council introduced their carbon offset fund. So we got some grant money, we delivered the project. We also did some energy advice work for local residents. And that helped to sort of build our relationship with Caxton House. They could see that we were a professional outfit, that we did what we said we were going to do, that we could also help with grant money. So with that, we were at the start of a relationship which we carried on with from 2018, with small projects here and there delivering energy advice to local people, because supporting a just transition is also very much a part of our objects as an organisation. So with that work, when we got to 2021, and we were in the midst of the pandemic at that point, that was when the London Community Energy Fund, which is the mayor’s carbon offset fund, and the Islington Community Energy Fund were active and were sort of opening new tranches of funding. So I, at that point, approached Sue Collins, who runs Caxton House and said, would you be interested in a heat pump and moving away from gas? And she then said, look, I would, but you know, our windows are in a terrible state. And is that an issue? And I said, it’s absolutely an issue. So let’s try and fix that first. I wasn’t really hopeful that we would get funding for windows, but we did. And that made a huge difference. 

We had to make 11 grant applications in total to fund the project of which eight was successful. So it was a high success rate. In total, we raised 300,000 pounds for the delivery of this project. And we feel it’s been very successful in that it now provides a sort of blueprint for us to look at other community centres that would be interested in doing similar things or other community buildings that might want to decarbonise in a similar way to Caxton House. 

The relationship has gone from strength to strength. I would say we it’s a very much a partnership relationship, because both parties support each other’s efforts in a very positive way. And when things don’t go right, which often they don’t with projects, and we hit hurdles, you know, we have a very mature and grown-up way of tackling that. So that works well. It’s a good relationship. 

[Music] 

Izzy: Is your community a bit on the chilly side? Maybe your local sports centre, school or village hall is too cool for comfort? Well, why not share this episode with others in your area and you could help make your place a warmer and more sustainable one! 

Brad: And while you’re at it, head over to the Carbon Copy website, where you’ll find practical guides and inspiring local examples of how communities across the UK are ditching fossil fuels and switching to low carbon heating. 

Izzy: Whether you’re retrofitting a Victorian terrace or just starting to explore your options, there’s something there for everyone. You’ll find all the links in the show notes. 

[cut music] 

Brad: So we’ve heard from two pretty exciting projects so far, and maybe you’re a listener out there thinking you could make some decarbonisation changes to a building you run or you’re connected to. Tanuja gave us a guide on what’s the best way to get started with what seems like quite a complicated process! 

Tanuja: I would say that getting resources that can support them with project management and with getting a kind of decarbonisation study done is a very good thing so you know if they do nothing more than just apply for a grant to get a decarbonisation study done on their building, they would be doing well because that would then tell them where the heat losses are going occurring and what the kind of big issues are with their building. 

They can then with the help of that project management support determine the stages of decarbonisation and then you know package it up and you know create the right phasing and then look at funding each of those phases of work so so that’s one thing. But the, the other thing is that most of these buildings don’t even have caretakers these days, in the days when they had a bit more funding they might have had a caretaker or a premises manager or a maintenance person whatever you choose to call them. Caxton House doesn’t have one of those people and so it was really power up North London and their office and operations manager who were kind of working in tandem to deliver this and she’s an incredibly capable person with lots of different skills, but we felt that would be actually really helpful if there was some technical lead in the mix as well. If you had a bit more resource on the ground, not necessarily full time every day but a bit more call down resource with technical capability that would have helped us to navigate some of the challenges in the project a bit faster. So, so these are kind of important considerations when you’re setting off down this path and I feel that a lot of community buildings don’t even start because they don’t have those resources, you know, they don’t have the maintenance people or the caretakers or they, they don’t have the technical support that they would need to even begin to consider these, these issues.  

We have partnerships with some architectural practices and technical consultancies, who in this project as well gave us pro bono support with the planning application with the technical acoustic report that was created to be developed without those, you know, those kind of interventions which are professional which are you know high quality and given to us, either pro bono or low bono, we wouldn’t be able to afford to deliver these projects. 

Whether it’s the heat pump supplier or, you know, any of these practices that might give us maybe somebody on secondment and I think, I think this sort of support is available and will become more available. Obviously if they want to fund projects we’d be delighted but it’s the technical expertise that’s equally as important for us. 

Izzy: Ros and Nicola also gave us their input on how you could get started from a community point of view. 

Ros: I guess, recognising it’s a big project and it’s gonna need community energy to get going. So if you just email your councillor and say, this would be nice, that’s not going to be enough. You need someone at this stage when, you know, there’s only one completed in the country. If you want this to happen locally, you’ve got to have a degree of energy, you’ve got to be in it for the longterm and you’ve got to be able to get other people together in your community. But I think once you’ve got those elements there, then if you can find someone to partner with, hopefully a council would be able to support you. 

I think what the people on site and the council say is that a lot of the learning, a lot of the obstacles were things that were never anticipated. So a really big thing has been how the heat network communicates with the community. So as ever, communication ends up being the big thing. And so, you know, if you are progressing with this, do speak, you know, do come to the temperature, do speak to the team and understand what those lessons are and pre-empt them so that things can be as easy as possible. But it is a really special thing and having that community team established on site and being able to build those relationships is a really, really lovely thing. And yes, I really wish, like, if I was in Swaffham Prior, there was no question I would have signed up and I just wish it would stretch as far as my village, which is about 15 miles away.  

And I think once that kind of business case gets established, at some point, we will begin to kind of take off because it is so much better than heating oil and it’s like a cascade, but slow to start. 

Nicola: It’s about making sure you’ve got full sort of support of your community and a real community interest in taking it forward. It is quite, it’s been quite a long journey to deliver the Swaffham Prior network, so don’t underestimate the amount of sort of work and time and energy that it takes to get something like this off the ground. I think local councils are a really good source of being able to signpost people. 

So, you know, we look at whether there is available funding or grants in place, whether that’s the county council or in Cambridge here, it might be the combined authority. And we might be able to sort of signpost people in the right way to have a look at what opportunities and support there is out there for developing similar style of projects. 

Izzy: It certainly sounds like this is a BIG local action for climate change, but there is support out there and as ever, look at projects like this one and the one at Caxton House and learn and copy from them, after all that is what Carbon Copy is all about! To finish off we’re going to hear from Tanuja about what Power Up North London’s aspirations are for the future and what sort of impact this community scale work could have for decarbonising our buildings. 

Tanuja: There are so many such buildings that the demand for the sort of work that we do is endless. I don’t think we’re ever going to be in a situation where there isn’t enough work to be done to support community buildings. And I think that each of these buildings that we help to decarbonise, I mean, just taking the numbers for Caxton House, they went from 44 tonnes a few years ago to seven tonnes of carbon a year. That’s their footprint now. And they’re heading down to become a net zero building. So that’s a great achievement. But it took a lot of effort over multiple years and lots and lots of grant funding to make that happen. So I don’t make light of the effort it takes, but I think it does make a contribution because now they are a sort of beacon. One of our plans, because you asked about the future, is to ramp this up in such a way that we pick areas, zones or neighbourhoods, really try and take a lot of buildings in that area up at the same time, helping to decarbonise a whole space. And we’re trying to do this in Archway in Islington, which is not far from Caxton House, using Caxton House as the kind of anchor institution. And we want to, we’re calling it the Archway Community Energy neighbourhood. We’ve got multiple buildings we’ve identified that we want to help. The process will be very similar to what I was describing, where we will look to get feasibility grants and prepare decarbonisation studies of these buildings and help them initially with some of the simple things, simple actions they can take to save money, so financially benefit their organisations and also reduce carbon. 

 And once they see that, it’s a bit like, you know, winning your spurs and, you know, showing people what you can do, then we feel we’d be able to move on to other things. We’ve got a number of partners involved in this, you know, Caxton House, the Octopus Community Network, the Islington Sustainability Network, Community Energy London. These are all our partners that are going to help us to, you know, take this concept and turn it into reality. So I think doing what we do at scale is where it’s at. We will do this with more commercial organisations coming in to support us in different ways, either through knowledge transfer or, you know, funding or, you know, joint working on pilot schemes or whatever it is. I can see more of that happening.  And the reason for that is because people working for those organisations want to contribute. They love to work on projects like this. They see this frontline work as being incredibly rewarding. It feels as though they are genuinely making a contribution and they can see the impact. If they live in the local area, they can point to the building and say, I worked on that. I did that one. And it suddenly feels as though they are connected to their local community.  

So I’m quite optimistic in that sense about what the future holds for organisations like ours. I think we’ll be doing many more of these projects. The ways in which we do them might change. The models might change. But the objectives of helping community buildings to decarbonise and of helping local people who are struggling with fuel poverty will continue to remain the same. And, you know, we will keep doing our bit to contribute. 

So, you know, we’re very excited. We are going to try and build the organisation up a bit more, take on more stuff so that there is kind of ongoing support for projects. But we will always have this core of professional volunteers, you know, and there are new ones all the time. It’s not the same people. But there are some, you know, regulars like me who will be there in the mix and who will be doing their bit. So yeah, it’s exciting times. 

Brad: Well what a rather inspiring note to end on! So, what have we learned today? Firstly, heating is a huge part of our carbon footprint, but also one of the clearest areas where we can cut emissions fast. 

Izzy: Yeah and community-led projects like the ones Power Up North London are running can help spread the benefits of low carbon heating more fairly, making sure no one gets left behind in the transition. 

Brad: Absolutely and the Swaffham Prior project proves that it’s not just those living in cities that can benefit, now that one village has proven that rural heat networks can work – there is a blueprint for others to copy! 

Izzy: Yeah and we do love copying here at Carbon Copy! 

Brad: The technology is ready, the knowledge is there. It’s about the will, the funding and getting your community on board to create lasting change. 

Izzy: So that’s it for today’s episode Install Low-Carbon Heating. If you’re feeling fired up and you want to find out more about low carbon heating, check out the links in our show notes or visit the Carbon Copy website for more information. And as always, we’d love to hear your feedback, leave a review or rating wherever you’re listening or email us at hello at carboncopy.eco. That’s E C O.   

Brad: You’ve been listening to Do Something Bigger from the Carbon Copy Podcast. It was written and presented by me, Bradley Ingham.  

Izzy: And me, Isabelle Sparrow. Brad also produced and edited this episode. Huge thanks to our guests, Tanuja Pandit, CEO of Power Up North London and Ros Hathorn and Nicola Young from Cambridgeshire County Council. 

Next time, we’re talking about how to Create a Community Hub and yes, we promise it will be warm in there too. So hit subscribe, and join us then. Thanks for listening and goodbye!