As the UK social housing sector faces pressure to decarbonise heating for net-zero targets and resident affordability, Tom Brough explains how heat networks, including community hubs and networked ground source heat pumps, offer scalable, efficient, and compliant low-carbon solutions for new developments
The UK’s social housing sector is undergoing a significant transformation as it works to decarbonise its heat and hot water systems. Not only is there a need to support the country’s net zero targets by 2050, but improving energy efficiency is essential to address growing concerns about fuel poverty and rising energy costs.
In England alone, housing associations own and manage 2.7 million homes for six million people, with this number set to rise with the new government’s house-building targets, positioning social landlords as key players in delivering a zero-carbon economy.
To meet these goals, making homes more energy efficient is not enough; we need to replace outdated heating systems, like gas boilers, with cleaner, more affordable options that benefit residents of social housing.
Decarbonising heat delivery into new homes is crucial for sustainability and affordability in social housing. Housing associations must balance these investments with the need to keep rents affordable while meeting regulatory requirements and addressing the financial constraints of tenants and the organisations themselves.
We know that social landlords work closely with the UK’s housebuilders and developers, particularly in ensuring that all new homes meet specific standards of affordability, sustainability, and energy efficiency. Their involvement often spans multiple stages of the development process, including planning, funding, and delivery, ensuring that the homes delivered are energy-efficient and cost-effective for tenants to maintain.
Heat networks can play a pivotal role in delivering low-carbon heat and hot water into newly built UK homes, at pace and at scale.
Heat networks have long been used worldwide. In the UK, heat networks have predominantly been installed in high-rise, high-density schemes, but there is now a heat network solution designed for low-rise, low-density schemes. It uses the same tried-and-tested technology and is being rolled out across the country with several of the UK’s largest housebuilders and developers on new-build sites.
Community heat hubs use large-scale air source heat pumps and thermal stores to produce hot water for the central heat hub. Heat, in the form of hot water, is delivered to homes through a site network of insulated pipes.
Community heat hubs remove the need for individual air source heat pumps to be mounted outside every home, and crucially, they:
- Meet Future Homes Standard, reducing carbon emissions by 75-80% from day one.
- Help address grid capacity issues, using the thermal stores to flatten the site’s grid demand. This significantly lowers a site’s overall peak demand compared with individual air source heat pumps.
- Lower costs for house builders and developers, and lower customer bills by up to 20%, compared to individual air source heat pumps.
- Will be regulated by OFGEM from 2026, giving homeowners the ultimate protection on price and service levels for their heat and hot water.
Housebuilders and developers must be offered choices to accelerate the rollout of the heat network.
Community heat hubs are one option. Networked ground source heat pumps are another option. These pumps work by extracting naturally occurring, stored thermal energy from the ground to provide consistent, energy-efficient heating.
The solution offers a clean alternative to gas through a ground source heat pump installed within each property. The pump is connected to a shared network of hidden underground pipes. The small, compact heat pump sits inside the home, saving valuable space and eliminating the need for any external equipment.
Networked ground source heat pumps can:
- Bring a complete end-to-end heating, hot water and cooling solution. This inclusion of passive cooling helps Part O Building Regulation compliance.
- Meet Future Homes Standard, reducing carbon emissions by 75-80% from day one.
- Offer up to five times the efficiency of gas and a 30% increased efficiency than an equivalent individual air source heat pump.
Heat networks offer social housing providers a major advantage by cutting the need for expensive, individual heating options in each home. Instead, whole communities can be served with one reliable, clean heating solution. This is especially important for meeting the government’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards. Heat networks help social landlords meet these standards by decarbonising heating systems at scale, which is vital to achieving the required energy performance certificate (EPC) rating of C by 2030.
The added benefit of a networked ground source heat pump solution is its integration with smart thermostat controllers. This allows residents to optimise energy usage, track their energy consumption, and adjust, contributing to a more sustainable lifestyle and achieving deeper financial savings.
What’s more, community heat hubs and networked ground source heat pump solutions are designed, built, owned, operated, and maintained by the regulated utility infrastructure partner, offering social landlords the ultimate simplicity. This means that the infrastructure team takes care of all service and maintenance required on the network, up to and including the heat interface units or ground source heat pumps housed within each property.
By providing a shared, community-wide heating system, these heat networks are not only Future Homes Standard-ready but also enable social housing providers to efficiently deliver heat and hot water requirements for entire estates while meeting broader environmental and regulatory goals. As the pressure to reduce carbon emissions mounts, integrating low-carbon heat networks is set to become a more common feature in social housing developments.
Tom Brough is sales and marketing director at GTC.
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