HEAT: Communiheat, Decarbonising Rossendale & the Chipping Project

With heat making up 30% of UK’s energy needs, decarbonising heat as swiftly as possible is an urgent requirement to tackle climate change.
This session looks at 3 different decarbonising heat projects:

Watch the video recording of this event on YouTube.

1. Decarbonising Rossendale, a project that supports a low income street of high density terraced housing switch to shared heat pumps via a heat storage network. Deryk Allen, Rossendale
2. Chipping Community, Ground source heat energy networks. Paul Smith, Chipping Community Land Trust
3. Communiheat, a project that route maps a planned response to get an off gas grid village, off oil and onto efficient electric heating Nicki Myers Ovesco
   Why Decarbonising Rossendale?
   Decarbonising urban areas is a complex problem, especially considering the electrification of heat and transport and its impact on the grid. Current strategies typically focus on either the macro (heat networks centred around large loads and peripheral areas) or the micro (individual homes) solutions. Many communities will not be appropriate for either, especially terraced streets. Air Source Heat Pumps (ASHPs) are not a feasible solution due to space constraints, noise implications, efficiency losses, maintenance issues and risk of damage in a confined area such as a small back yard. Likewise, 4th generation heat networks prove challenging due to space constraints in locating energy centres and the scale of delivery needed to be commercially viable. The ‘Net Zero Terrace’ is the proposed solution offering an integrated community based and smart solution integrating community energy and heat with other advisory services to enable the transition.
   The Chipping Community Energy Project:
   Following the award of an RCEF grant, CCE was able to: develop a website which explains CCE’s aims to investigate ambient ground source heat pump solutions for the village; plan to survey 20 households within five defined ‘archetypes’, a local school and its village hall for current energy use; and drill a 200m borehole in order to generate data on local geology and potential energy yields from that using ground source heat pump technology. All these aspects have recently been completed and CCE is in the process of working with is energy advisers to analyse the survey results, extrapolate the potential energy requirements for Chipping and its surrounds (circa 550 households) and determine the energy yields from any future ambient ground source heat pump loops serving small groups of households.
   Once this stage of the work is completed by the end of March 2023, CCE anticipates using the data its has produced to develop an outline energy strategy for Chipping and its surrounds that may widen consideration of technological solutions (solar, battery, wind and hydro) and when that is done will consider what further support is required to enable the scope and direction of its strategy to be refined and any consequential implementation plans to be produced.