Over the next five years, the Government will invest £320 million in schemes across the UK’s towns and cities to take low carbon heat and distribute it to keep homes and buildings warm.
It has been dubbed ‘central heating for cities’ as heat networks in Europe, specifically Scandinavian cities use the scheme to keep homes warm during the winter months. This is with the potential the reduce heating costs by more than 30%.
They state that heat can be taken from a multitude of different sources such as large heat pumps, that are combined heat, power plants and deep geothermal plants which then takes the heat from underground rocks miles below the Earth. Once that’s happened, it is then supplemented and pumped around homes and buildings across the UK which not only brings the cost down, but also carbon emissions as well.
Because we tend to waste a lot of heat on a daily basis by pumping it out into the air from our plants, offices and homes, by implementing this scheme into homeowners lives, all of that will drastically change. By using a network of underground pipes, they can be used to catch the heat and pump it around buildings that are nearby to provide them with the heat when they need it.
“This is an important step in developing more home grown energy”, says the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, they then go onto say that, “this is a vital part of our plan to ensure long term energy security for families and businesses.”
They are currently consulting about the funding they will need in order to achieve these schemes which can then provide low carbon energy that is affordable for people across the UK.