Decarbonisationofheat

Although many heating technologies are mature and have been widely used, the UK market in low-carbon heat is small. This project will review the international status of the full range of low-carbon heat technologies and infrastructures including electrification and hydrogen; and how policies have driven their deployment. Building on these reviews, a novel set of diverse, whole systems scenarios for heat will be developed, include narratives of policy, behavioural and market changes; and be refined through stakeholder engagement.

The project will also investigate the aggregation and scaling up of local diversity within these scenarios, and the potential UK-wide impacts. This will integrate statistically similar network models and the Combined Gas and Electricity Network (CGEN) model, developed in UKERC and HubNet projects. This will provide a new capability to quantify the impact of different heat scenarios on physical network constraints. Techno-economic long-term performance (in terms of costs, emissions and security) of the whole energy system will be evaluated to understand impacts of local heating choices on national energy infrastructure.