{"id":166748,"date":"2026-10-19T14:41:35","date_gmt":"2026-10-19T13:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/?p=166748"},"modified":"2026-10-19T14:41:35","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T13:41:35","slug":"the-heat-network-sector-still-only-talking-about-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/energy-news\/the-heat-network-sector-still-only-talking-about-heat\/166748\/","title":{"rendered":"The heat network sector is still only talking about heat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Neil Lawson BEng (Hons) discusses how the sector is largely ignoring cooling, and how this can be detrimental to meeting carbon targets as well as the needs of buildings<\/h2>\n

The ADE’s Cost of Heat report makes the right argument about what we count. It then applies it to only half the thermal load.<\/p>\n

The Association for Decentralised Energy has done the sector a service. Its Cost of Heat<\/a> report argues that we have been comparing heating technologies on the wrong basis, counting only capital and operating expenditure while ignoring the carbon, the air quality, the grid reinforcement and the jobs that each choice either creates or avoids. Count all of it, and networked heat comes out at 12.25 pence per kilowatt hour against 23.5 pence for a gas boiler.<\/p>\n

That is a good argument, honestly made, and I agree with it.<\/p>\n

Now look at the units.<\/p>\n

Every figure in that report is a cost of heat. Pence per kilowatt hour of heat. The technologies are ranked by how cheaply they warm a building, and the externalities are priced against the delivery of heat.<\/p>\n

In a dense urban area, heat is not the load. It is half of it.<\/p>\n

What a hot pipe does not solve<\/h3>\n

A conventional high-temperature heat network delivers heat, and it delivers it well. What it does not do is remove any.<\/p>\n

So, the office block connected to that network still needs chillers. Those chillers still reject heat into the outside air, on the hottest afternoons of the year, when the air is already hot and the equipment is working hardest to push heat into it. The building has decarbonised its winter and changed nothing about its summer.<\/p>\n

Multiply that across a city centre and the consequence is not subtle. Cooling demand across offices, retail, healthcare, data halls and increasingly homes arrives simultaneously, on the same afternoons, and lands on the electricity network as a coincident peak.<\/p>\n

Here is what makes this an argument about the report rather than a separate complaint.<\/p>\n

The report counts grid infrastructure as an externality. It is right to. Network reinforcement is a real cost, paid by everyone, and it belongs in the comparison. But the reinforcement driver growing fastest in British cities is not winter heat. It is summer cooling.<\/p>\n

So, the report has built the machinery to value an asset that serves both loads, and then priced only one of them.<\/p>\n

Two circuits that never met<\/h3>\n

Some years ago, I worked on the decarbonisation of a large mixed-use development in east London. It was heated by combined heat and power plant and gas boilers<\/a>. It was cooled by air-cooled chillers.<\/p>\n

Two systems. One making heat, the other throwing heat away. Both running at the same time, on the same site, in the same season, with no connection between them.<\/p>\n

What we did was not clever. We calculated the base cooling load, the portion of the demand that is present more or less continuously and installed a water source heat pump between the two circuits. The heat being rejected by the chillers became the heat source for the network.<\/p>\n

That base load was about a fifth of the installed peak. We did not need to capture the hottest afternoon of the year to make the arrangement work. We needed the heat that was there almost all the time, and it was sitting in a circuit that had never been asked to talk to the other one.<\/p>\n

At the time this was treated as novel. It should not have been. The energy was already there, on the same site, being paid for twice, once to make it and once to get rid of it.<\/p>\n

That is what a heat-only appraisal cannot see.<\/p>\n

Half the heat is already in the building<\/h3>\n

More recently I worked on a feasibility study for a fifth-generation heating and cooling network serving a large central London estate. A mix of properties along a single street, served by a number of energy hubs, with loads projected out to 2038.<\/p>\n

An air source scheme had already been taken to concept stage. It would have used heat pumps to raise a loop to around twenty degrees and distribute that warmth around the estate. Workable engineering, and it spends electricity warming a pipe.<\/p>\n

We modelled a ground and water based ambient loop instead, in which the same pair of pipes carries heating and cooling, energy is shared between buildings, and what cannot be used immediately is stored in the ground for the opposing season.<\/p>\n

Then we asked how much of the heating demand was already present on site, in the form of heat being removed from other buildings at the same moment.<\/p>\n

The answer was fifty five per cent.<\/p>\n

That is not a marginal contribution. Only forty five per cent of the annual heat demand had to be drawn from the ground at all. On the cooling side, forty per cent was absorbed by buildings that wanted it at the moment it became available.<\/p>\n

That heat exists today. It is being made today. In the current arrangement it is pushed out of chillers into the street on the afternoons when the electricity network is under most strain, and then, a few months later, the same estate buys gas to make heat again.<\/p>\n

What sharing is worth<\/h3>\n

The study also priced what happens when you take the sharing away.<\/p>\n

Serve that estate with closed loop boreholes and an ambient loop connecting the buildings. Then serve the same estate with closed loop boreholes and no ambient loop, so that every building stands alone.<\/p>\n

The second option needs more than twice the boreholes, and it costs more than twice as much to install.<\/p>\n

Same buildings. Same loads. Same city.<\/p>\n

The optimised design, mixing closed and open loop boreholes with the ambient loop in place, came in lower still.<\/p>\n

The pipe that lets buildings share is not an added cost on top of the boreholes. It is the thing that halves them.<\/p>\n

That is what a heat-only appraisal cannot see, because the saving does not come from delivering heat more cheaply. It comes from not having to deliver most of it at all.<\/p>\n

And still we throw it away<\/h3>\n

One more figure from the same study, and it is the uncomfortable one.<\/p>\n

Even in that design, with the sharing, the boreholes and the seasonal storage, more than a third of the cooling energy still had to go to dry air coolers. Rejected into the atmosphere, because the ground could not absorb it all and no building wanted it at that moment.<\/p>\n

That is the best case. That is what good looks like, in a scheme designed specifically to use as much of it as possible.<\/p>\n

Everything above that line is what we currently do with all of it.<\/p>\n

I offer this as one estate rather than a general law. Dense, mixed use, central London, heavy on commercial floorspace. Change the mix and the balance changes with it. But it is a real estate with real modelled loads, and it is exactly the kind of place where heat network zoning is about to be applied.<\/p>\n

The honest objections<\/h3>\n

Three, and they are real.<\/p>\n

An ambient network moves capital cost rather than removing it. Every building needs its own heat pump, so what is saved on insulated pipework and central plant reappears in plant rooms across the scheme. Whether that trade is favourable depends on density and mix.<\/p>\n

It depends on that mix existing. A loop serving a hundred identical flats has little diversity to exploit, and the case weakens considerably. Ambient networks reward exactly the messy, mixed, dense urban fabric that is hardest to coordinate.<\/p>\n

And there are fewer of them, so financing is harder. Investment follows precedent, and the precedent base for high-temperature networks is deeper. The very mechanisms the ADE is asking for, a Regulated Asset Base and expanded grant funding, are more easily argued for the thing that already exists.<\/p>\n

Which is precisely the problem with leaving them out of the appraisal.<\/p>\n

Thermal networks, not heat networks<\/h3>\n

If the sector succeeds in its ask, the Treasury will commit ten billion pounds to deployment by 2035, Ofgem will regulate what follows, and fifteen to twenty large schemes may be built under a Regulated Asset Base. Every one of them will still be in the ground in the 2080s.<\/p>\n

We should be careful what we specify now, because we will not get to specify it again.<\/p>\n

A pipe that carries only heat is half an asset. It answers the problem we have worried about since 2022 and leaves untouched the problem that closed classrooms and triggered hospital heat plans last summer. It draws public investment into infrastructure serving one side of the thermal equation, while the other side continues to be met by machinery rejecting heat into hot air, on the afternoons when the network can least afford it.<\/p>\n

And it forgoes the prize. The cooling load is not the awkward second problem to be solved once heat is dealt with. It is the largest single source of low grade heat we have in our cities, it is already being paid for, and on the evidence of that London estate it can meet more than half the heat demand of the buildings around it. Serve it properly and a good part of the heating problem solves itself. Ignore it and we will spend ten billion pounds building infrastructure to deliver heat past buildings that were busy throwing it away.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it is time we stopped talking about heat networks and started talking about thermal networks.<\/p>\n

The ADE is right that our arithmetic has been too narrow. It widened the columns and I am glad it did. The next step is to widen the rows, and to ask of every proposed scheme not what it costs to deliver a kilowatt hour of heat, but what it costs to move a kilowatt hour of energy in whichever direction the building needs it that day.<\/p>\n

Physics does not distinguish between heating and cooling. They are the same process pointed in opposite directions, and a pipe full of water at ground temperature does not care which way the energy is going.<\/p>\n

Our funding models should not either.<\/p>\n

Written in a personal capacity. The views expressed are my own and are not presented on behalf of GeoEnergy Design Ltd.<\/em><\/p>\n

Neil Lawson BEng (Hons) has spent twenty five years working on the electrification of heat, following ten years as a combustion design engineer. He writes here in a personal capacity. Contact: neil@neillawson.uk.<\/em><\/p>\n

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