Seven heat network projects across England awarded government funding
In the latest round of funding from The Green Heat Network, seven state-of-the-art heating schemes will share a total of £91m to invest in projects which will include Britain’s first geothermal heat network in Cornwall.
Heat networks take heat found underground or generated through manufacturing or waste management, and supply heating and hot water to homes and businesses through a connected network.
The Cornwall scheme – which is run by the council – will extract heat from hot granite rocks 5,275m below Langarth Garden Village near Truro, to provide power and heat to 3,800 homes in the village as well as the Royal Cornwall Hospital, local schools and a leisure centre.
Ryan Law, CEO of Geothermal Engineering Limited, said: ‘We use almost 50% of all energy in the UK for heating, yet most of this is currently gas. The potential of geothermal resources to produce renewable heat from our natural resources will play a large part of decarbonising this form of energy over the next decade. The great thing about a deep geothermal plant is that the heat will always benefit the immediate area surrounding it as it cannot be exported to a grid. Langarth will be an excellent example of a local community directly benefiting from having a geothermal initiative nearby.’
The Green Heat Network Fund is a £288m scheme that opened in March last year and is expected to run until 2025. In contrast to the Heat Networks Investment Project which it replaced, the GHNF scheme only funds projects where there is a low-carbon heat source.
The projects chosen for funding are:
- Bradford Energy Limited – £20m to build an air source heat pump heat network, to supply businesses and other buildings in the city centre
- Cornwall Council – £22m to develop the Langarth Deep Geothermal Heat Network – the first of its kind in the UK that will use geothermal energy from hot granite rocks beneath Cornwall to heat 3,800 local homes and public facilities in the region
- East Riding of Yorkshire Council – £12m to create the new Goole District Energy Network, that will use waste heat from a manufacturing plant to power local homes and businesses, cutting the town’s carbon emissions by 322,000 tonnes over 40 years and creating 40 new skilled jobs
- Rotherham Energy Limited – £25m to build a new Rotherham Energy Network to deliver a heating and hot water to 34 homes and businesses in the town centre
- Kirklees Council – £8.2m to create the Huddersfield District Energy Network, that will provide low-carbon heat and electricity to public and private sector buildings in and around the centre of the town, helping the council reach its goal of net zero carbon emissions by 2038
- East London Energy – £1.76m to expand the heat network to supply more homes in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford
- University of Reading – £2.1m to help decarbonize its Whiteknights Campus, currently powered by a combined heat and power led district heating network