carbon limited

I’ve been invited to do a short talk at a UK Trade and Industry event for investors in heat networks, giving an overview of innovation in the sector. This gives me an excuse to do some research and summarise it in this post – and also an opportunity to ask readers what I’ve missed.

You could argue that the UK district heat market doesn’t need innovation right now. Instead, it desperately needs to get the basics right and then we can worry about innovation. In other words, it’s not the time for fancy new tech; we just need to catch up with the everyday practices found in bigger, longer established markets.

And luckily, this area of the basics is where some of the most valuable work is being done in this sector. For example, the recent publication of the CIBSE ADE Heat Networks Code of Practice. Until recently, every guide on district heating in the UK had waffled, made gentle suggestions and hedged its bets. In contrast, the Code of Practice sets out minimum design standards and frequently has the cajones to tell project teams exactly what to do (thou shalt – rather than should or may wish to consider). While it’s not perfect, it’s a huge leap forward for an industry that’s repeatedly shown itself to be incredibly conservative, risk averse and slow to evolve.

More unglamorous-but-important work has been going on in some of the large ESCOs and metering service providers as they invest in enterprise level customer management software and improve their internal processes. District heat customers, once seemingly an afterthought of project teams, are moving into their rightful position of primacy.

But while I’m hugely encouraged by these changes, they’re unlikely to get investors excited. Investors want disruption, innovative business models, new technologies that will unlock the huge potential of the UK district heat market. And because this is a viewpoint we can’t ignore, let’s consider the market from this perspective.

So, which companies have got the most innovative ideas in district heat? DECC recently sought to answer this question, offering a pot of £7m to companies for ideas to address cost and performance efficiency challenges on heat networks. They received 57 applications, and of these just 9 made it all the way through to demonstration stage. So DECC has done a lot of winnowing for us already.

We can break these projects down into rough areas: demand management, interesting generation technology and other. Here’s a roundup:

Demand management

Coheat is applying industrial-style controls to a small heat network in Birmingham to actively manage space heating load. More importantly, they’re using highly aggressive hot water demand and diversity assumptions to reduce the diameter of flow and return pipework, thereby greatly reducing CAPEX. They’re calling it 5th generation district heating (5GDH). I’d love for these guys to apply their considerable brain power to helping schemes achieve the more modest (but rarely met) requirements of 4GDH or even 3GDH, but they’re determined to stay right out on the bleeding edge.

Passiv Systems is adapting their networked thermostat system and using predictive algorithms to reduce peak load and reduce flow and return temperatures on a cluster of homes at E.ON’s development at Cranbrook. In terms of general approach, not a million miles away from the Coheat project mentioned above.

Sycous are also trying to reduce demand, albeit passively, by targeting consumer behaviour via its web and mobile application. While this is interesting, in my opinion this company is most innovative for an entirely different reason. They offer CRM software to heat network operators on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, enabling operators to manage their own schemes at low cost. This is in stark contrast to the prevailing model, where operators must either make a very large investment in CRM software or farm out their metering and billing to a third party service provider.

Interesting heat generation technology

Islington Council is attempting to use a water source heat pump in a canal in the borough as a source of heat for the second phase of their Bunhill network. The return water from the heat pump would then be used to help cool a data centre. Fantastic closed loop system making the best of locally available resources. [Update 28/8 – Looks like uncertainty over the RHI has killed this project. Gutting.]

E.ON is putting in a large (c. 2000m²) solar thermal array at their scheme in Cranbrook, running the resulting hot water through a heat pump and then into the main heat network. On completion it’ll be the biggest solar thermal installation in the UK.

Geothermal Engineering is digging a 2km-deep well and sinking a pipe-in-pipe loop into it in order to heat district heat water using geothermal energy. It’s a very cool concept, which they claim will deliver a COP of 50. Not sure if it’s widely applicable or not.

Clean Energy Prospector is (I think!) doing aquifer thermal energy systems, similar to those championed for years by the folks at Fulcrum (as it was then). Basically, it involves having a warm well and a cool well, both part of the same slow-moving aquifer, with a heat pump in the middle.

Other things

Zero Carbon Future is doing, er… something. It’s not really clear what, and they don’t appear to want to talk about it, despite the public funding. If I had to guess, I’d say they were closely managing flow temperatures and flow rates to reduce pumping energy and heat loss.

Cofely had a great idea that didn’t get through to the final round of funding: putting district heat pipework inside external wall insulation. Saves on infrastructure cost (i.e. it’s cheaper than digging trenches) and greatly reduces heat loss. I hope someone tries this concept out somewhere as I think it’s got interesting possibilities.

I’ve saved Guru Systems (where I work) til last. We’re also one of the 9 companies that made the final cut. We’re attempting to radically speed up the development of the UK heat market by building tools for heat network operators to 1) understand and analyse their own energy performance data and 2) share that data with each other. The understand and analyse bit in the first point is based on the application of machine learning algorithms and other big data techniques. This is (obviously) the most innovative project of all and I could go on about it for several pages. But I’ll stop here.

So that’s a short list of some of the key innovations. But no doubt I’ve missed loads. Please let me know in comments or by email what else I should include in my list of innovators.