Government announces £44m green heating cash boost

The government has today announced £44m in funding is to be targeted at supplying low carbon energy for tens of thousands of UK homes and public buildings, as part of its latest efforts to accelerate the development of the green heating and cooling market.

As part of the new funding package £30m from the government's Heat Networks Investment Project will be split between three low-carbon heat network projects planned for South-East London, Manchester, and Cambridgeshire. A further £14.6m will go towards 11 innovative projects that are exploring different ways the UK can develop and use efficient, low-carbon technologies for heating and cooling buildings.

The government said the investments would both cut emissions from buildings and help households save money on energy bills, noting that a projected 22 per cent of carbon emissions could be slashed from homes and buildings connected to heat networks, while curbing energy costs for consumers by up to 15 per cent. The Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy said that heat networks were a "proven, cost-effective way of providing reliable low carbon heat at a fair price to consumers".

"Today's funding package will accelerate the development of low-carbon technologies that will both reduce emissions, and ensure people's homes are warmer, greener and cheaper to run," said Climate Change Minister Lord Callanan.

The new funding will see £12.1m awarded to Cory, a waste management, recycling and energy recovery company in the London Borough of Bexley, which is planning to connect a heat network to it energy from waste facility to supply low carbon heat to 21,000 homes.

Another project to receive funding will see a team at Durham University explore whether water in flooded and abandoned coal mines could be used as a geothermal source of heat. The news follows a report earlier this week that argued heat energy sourced from former underground mines could play a key role in decarbonising UK homes - with a quarter of UK homes and businesses located on former coalfields having the potential to harness the heat source.

Another initiative headed by the University of Birmingham has received funding to investigate ways to store electricity from renewable sources in times of low demand for use in peak periods.

The funding announcement comes ahead of the long-awaited publication of the government's Heat and Buildings Strategy later this year which will set out how carbon emissions from homes and workspaces will be addressed to meet the UK's 2050 climate commitments.

It also comes on the same day as a coalition of green business and energy groups wrote to the government arguing that an investment of just £5bn over the next four years could drastically improve the energy efficiency of the UK's housing stock in the wake of the controversial scrapping of the Green Homes Grant scheme.