renewable energy

The fully-financed solar generation and smart battery storage solution will help housing associations meet their carbon reduction targets and alleviate rates of fuel poverty amongst tenants

The UK energy services company, SMS plc, has unveiled a unique new solution that aims to radically reduce carbon emissions of Britain’s social housing stock. Through Solopower, SMS is partnering with local councils and housing associations to significantly upgrade the energy performance of social accommodation, delivering solar generation, battery storage, and smart meters to landlords and their residents at zero upfront cost.

In deploying these smart home energy technologies – which are intelligently controlled and optimised by SMS’s FlexiGrid™ aggregation software – Solopower can decarbonise housing electricity by approximately 90% per home. The solution will therefore contribute to the enhancement of Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) ratings and reduce tenant electricity bills by up to 25% (approximately £200 in savings per year).

At last, there is significant interest being shown in the UK in the possibility of using heat pumps to meet the requirements for renewable heat in homes up and down the country. Heat pumps have made huge strides across the rest of Europe, in Scandinavia and Canada - which have far more testing climates than we have here in the UK.
Ground source heat pumps do require significant disruption to install and either a lot of land or an expensive drilling operation to get down into the ground, but air source heat pumps come with no such issues. There are a number of very advanced heat pump products readily available here in the UK now – like LG’s Therma V series - and sales have increased significantly, but they are still very much lower than in comparable European countries – such as Germany or Denmark.

To help people understand the full benefits of air source heat pumps, Mitsubishi Electric have created a series of podcasts all about renewable heating with Ecodan Ambassador, architect and TV Presenter, George Clarke and in one of the latest, they look specifically at the social housing sector.

Joe Bradbury of Housing Association magazine discusses the importance of undertaking maintenance work to your heating systems throughout the summer months.

As we near the end of Spring, we need to be thinking about how to make the most of the lighter days and warmer weather that lie ahead of us. In this article, Joe Bradbury of Housing Association magazine discusses the importance of undertaking maintenance work to your heating systems throughout the summer months and how doing so will save you time, money and heartache in the long run.

With growing interest in a meat-free lifestyle, Mitsubishi Electric’s Russell Jones explores the benefits of cutting down on this carbon-intensive food supply.

Donald Daw looks at whether the world is finally relinquishing its grip on carbon intensive fuel.

The news currently seems full of stories about how much renewable energy is on the rise yet there is still a lot of the World’s economy invested in gas and oil so what will the transition to a low-carbon economy over the next 10-20 years look like and what does this mean for the country’s consumers and businesses?