Anthony Coates Smith, Managing Director of Insite Energy, takes a look at developments in the data-driven heating systems helping our cities reach net zero.
Heat networks – communal heating systems fed by a single, often locally generated, renewable, heat source – are a crucial component of government strategy to clean up the UK’s energy supply. With strong potential to reduce carbon emissions in urban areas, they’re fast becoming the norm in modern residential and commercial developments. In fact, they’re expected* to meet up to 43% of the country’s residential heat demand by our 2050 net-zero deadline – a meteoric rise from just 2% in 2018.
The key word here, though, is ‘potential’. Compared to other European countries, advanced heat network technologies are still vastly underused and widely unfamiliar in the UK. The market has not yet had time to accumulate the experience and expertise needed to design, operate and maintain these highly complex systems at their optimum. Consequently, most are running at just 35-45% efficiency** leaving the entire sector in a precarious position.
It can be helpful to think of a heat network as a bit like a luxury car. It’s a high-value, expertly engineered asset that needs skilful and consistent servicing to protect its value and ensure its reliability and longevity. If you compare a modern vehicle to a 1980s equivalent, the technology is very different. It’s much greener and more efficient, with a far greater emphasis on digitalisation and data.
UK catch-up
The same is true of heat networks, but the UK industry still has a way to go to take full advantage of these developments. We’re on a mission to change that. We work with heat network operators to help them use data and digital technologies to reduce costs and carbon emissions, enhance efficiency and reliability, change consumer behaviours, boost engagement and improve customer experience.
One way we do this is by developing and introducing new technologies and services into the UK heat network market that already exist in other countries or other industries but have no precedent here.
A notable example is KURVE. The first web-app for heat network residents to monitor their energy consumption and pay their bills, KURVE brings the same levels of customer experience and functionality that banking customers, for example, have benefitted from for years.
Giving people real-time information that empowers them to manage their energy use can significantly reduce consumption. In households using KURVE, it drops by around 24% on average. Furthermore, the data analysis KURVE has enabled has informed and improved industry best practice around sustainability and user experience.
The power of pricing
Another recent innovation was our introduction of motivational tariffs to the UK heat network sector in 2023. This is a form of variable pricing providing financial incentives to encourage energy-saving behaviours. It directly tackles the ‘What’s in it for me?’ problem inherent in communal heating systems, where customers’ heating bills are at least as dependent on their neighbours’ actions as their own.
Motivational tariffs have been used to great effect in Denmark, where 64% of homes are on heat networks. In the UK, results have included lower bills for 81% of residents and a seven-fold increase in uptake of equipment-servicing visits.
A third example is the use of digital twinning to tackle poor operational performance. A heat network is a vast web of interconnected components; any intervention will have impacts across the entire system that are not always predictable. Creating an accurate virtual model of its hydronic design enables you to see if it’s as good as it can be – and if not, why not. You can then try out different options to obtain the best results – without the expense, risk or disruption of real-world alterations.
Over the past five years, digital twins have, among other things, helped a member of our team optimise the heat network supplying the world-famous green houses at Kew Gardens and prevent a huge engineering undertaking that would have had little impact at a 190-unit London apartment building. Despite the evident benefits however, we’re still alone in the UK in proselytising and practising digital twinning for these types of purposes.
Mainstream
I’m glad to say that some data-driven technologies have been widely adopted to good effect. Smart meters, in-home devices and pay-as-you-go billing systems are now common, giving residents accurate real-time information and better control over their energy use. Smart technology is also deployed in plant rooms and across networks to monitor and respond to changes in demand and environmental conditions.
Heat network operators are increasingly waking up to the importance of continuous and meticulous monitoring of performance data to spot faults and inefficiencies quickly and tailor heat supply to minimise network losses. This can happen remotely using cloud-based services, which can also help to diagnose and even fix some issues, keeping repair costs low.
What’s next?
An area where there’s likely to be further innovation in the near future is big data visualisation to make performance monitoring easier and more effective. As many heat network operators are organisations like housing associations and local authorities, with numerous competing concerns vying for their attention, anything that can translate complex technical information into simple graphics is welcome. And linked to this will be further enhancements in performance reporting and visualisation for customers.
We can also expect to see greater use of integrated heat source optimisation, whereby dynamic monitoring and switching are used to select the lowest cost/carbon heat source at any given time.
One thing we don’t anticipate any time soon, however, is AI chat bots replacing human customer-service interactions. While there’s a place for AI in heat network customer care, it’s more at the smart information services end of the spectrum. The recent energy and cost-of-living crises have underlined the importance of the human touch when it comes to something as fundamental as heating your home.
*Source: 2018 UK Market Report from The Association for Decentralised Energy** Source: The Heat Trust
- Data & AI
