Heating buildings, which overwhelmingly uses fossil fuels, accounts for 21 per cent of the UK’s total carbon emissions. Cutting these emissions through improvements in efficiency and alternative heating is a major part of the government’s decarbonisation plan.
The new heating fund will assist the rollout of the “next generation of heat networks”, which will enable more towns and cities to take up green heating technologies from 2022.
Heat networks, also known as district heating, supply heat to buildings from a central source, avoiding the need for individual buildings to have their own inefficient, energy-intensive heating sources such as gas boilers. At present, there are over 14,000 heat networks in the UK, providing heat to around 480,000 people. As well as improving heating efficiency for homes, heat networks are the only proven way that larger-scale renewable and recovered heat sources – such as excess heat from the London Underground – can be...