The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has awarded grants of £24 million to nine green home innovation projects covering energy efficiency, heat pumps and financing.
The bulk of the funding will go towards the installation of heat pumps in 750 homes across the UK as part of its Electrification of Heat Demonstration Project.
Ovo Energy and its partners have been awarded £4.2 million to install up to £15,000 of green technologies in 250 homes, including air-source heat pumps provided by Mitsubishi and thermal batteries provided by Sunamp.
Kaluza’s flexibility platform will be used to collect and analyse data from the appliances to understand how they are being used. They will then explore how they can be intelligently controlled and coordinated to reduce energy costs and lower emissions.
Participants will also receive up to £5,000 of energy efficiency upgrades, which will be delivered under the guidance of Retrofit Works. Parity Project will use its software to identify the suitable homes and improvements for each.
Kaluza head of flexibility Conor Maher-McWilliams said: “Smart electric heat has game-changing potential for decarbonisation. Not only will this trial help to quantify the rewards for customers, but for the energy system as a whole.
“Uncovering how distributed devices like these could work together to support the grid will be crucial in scaling renewable heat solutions that can strengthen system resilience.”
Eon has been awarded £3.9 million to install heat pumps and other technologies such as thermal storage in 250 in partnership with Newcastle City Council.
The company will use satellite data and information provided by the council to identify suitable households. The project will begin in July and run until March 2022.
Eon UK chief executive Michael Lewis said: “The way we heat our homes is now one of the UK’s largest contributors to climate change. The challenge for us all is to move away from fossil fuels towards something that is cleaner, more efficient and more cost effective.
“Working with BEIS and Newcastle City Council, we’ll demonstrate that heat pumps are one of the smart, personalised and sustainable solutions that will help us in meeting that challenge.
“The timing of this project couldn’t be better. The UK needs a green economic recovery and upgrading the homes we’re all now spending far more time in ticks all the right boxes, creating good local jobs and improving health and wellbeing, as well as reducing emissions.”
Warmworks, a partnership between the Energy Saving Trust, Everwarm and Changeworks that was created to deliver the Scottish government’s Warmer Homes Scotland fuel poverty scheme, has likewise been awarded £4.6 million to install heat pumps in 250 homes in the south east of Scotland. Among the aims of the project is to understand how people perceive the performance of different types of heat pump.
Meanwhile, Cornwall Council, Nottingham City Council and Sutton Council have been awarded a total of £7.7 million to install energy efficiency measures and green technologies, such as heat pumps and solar panels, in more than 300 of their houses as part of BEIS’s Whole House Retrofit project.
And lastly, three projects have been awarded £1.8 million from the government’s Green Home Finance Innovation Fund to develop green mortgage offerings.
They include a project by the start-up Home Infrastructure Technology to develop a digital platform to connect energy efficiency vendors with mortgage lenders, which was granted almost £1.1 million. The platform would allow customers to automatically incorporate the additional financing required to pay got energy efficiency measures into their mortgage when they make purchases.