renewable heating

Decarbonisation is high on the agenda for current housing developments to lower carbon emissions from homes, with the average eco-home capable of cutting energy bills by 30%1. Now is the time to act and start changing the way we heat and cool our homes.  Richard Bishop, Head of Marketing for UK and Ireland for Panasonic, puts forward the significant role that heat pumps can play to help reduce emissions, energy consumption and lowering costs.

Air source heat pumps currently on the market are very reliable, are quiet in operation and highly energy efficient when compared to oil-fired boilers or electric heaters and can be play a large part in lowering carbon emissions. Further efficiencies can be achieved when linked to smart controllers to produce significant savings for heating and domestic hot water (DHW) provision.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news recently and especially stories about carbon reduction targets and the build-up to COP26 in Glasgow, you can’t have missed mention of heat pumps.

There has been good, bad and uninformed comment but the main message is clear: Heat pumps are here now, and they offer a viable solution to heating our homes in a low carbon way that will help tackle climate change.

And the country really needs to find a way to decarbonise society, if we are to get anywhere near the ambitious targets for carbon reduction that the government has signed up to.

And this is where heat pumps can really help!

Social housing can help reduce society’s carbon footprint with renewables

The United Kingdom has set a legal goal of reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To achieve this, the government wants to increase household energy efficiency and transition to greener heating methods by the end of the decade, halving the energy use of new builds.

Considering 40% of UK emissions come from households, it’s clear to see that our homes have an important part to play in meeting the 2030 emissions reductions.

In 2020, around 4 million houses were occupied by households socially renting.

This just goes to show how big a role housing associations and local authorities will play in tackling the climate crisis.

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.

Current construction methods are so wasteful we must effect change. Housing Association Magazine Editor Joe Bradbury looks at ways in which social housing can lead the way to more sustainable construction.
At a recent event at Mitsubishi Electric’s Hatfield headquarters, just shy of 200 specifiers, architects, Housing Associations, housebuilders and heating engineers gathered to hear a passionate presentation from architect and TV presenter, George Clarke where he called on the housing sector to radically transform the way we build homes.