Heat pump projects receive £15m of BEIS funding

UK: Twenty-four heat pump projects in England and Scotland will share more than £15m in the second round of funding under the UK government’s Heat Pump Ready programme.

Heat Pump Ready is part of the £1bn Net Zero Innovation Portfolio (NZIP) and funding was announced in October 2021 alongside the Heat and Building Strategy.

Its key objectives are to reduce costs and increase the performance of domestic heat pumps, minimise disruption in homes during the process of heat pump installation and develop financial models that support an increase in heat pump deployment.

Innovation support is one part of the government’s support for its target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.

Stream 2 of the Heat Pump Ready programme comes alongside streams 1 and 3. Stream 1 is providing over £2m of funding across 11 projects developing feasibility studies for innovative ways to increase the deployment of domestic heat pumps within their local area. In their applications for Phase 1, project teams have estimated a potential cost reduction of at least 20% could be achieved through coordinated deployment.

The Stream 2 grants total £15,030,944.72. The projects will complete by 26 February 2025.

The following is a list of the specific projects and project partners: 

Build Test Solutions
MEASURED: The role of measured building performance in heat pump specification, system design and management
BEIS grant: £233,887.58
Project partners: Veritherm UK and Elmhurst Energy Services Ltd
This project aims to create a new method to optimise heat pump specification, design and management by using on-site measurement of building performance parameters as design inputs. 

City Science Corporation
Advanced Modelling for Heat as a Service
BEIS grant: £498,692.32
This project aims to transform our current understanding of heat in the domestic setting and to provide a scalable approach to heat pump financing and deployment throughout the UK. This will be achieved via the prototyping, deployment, and testing of a Heat-as-a-Service (HaaS) modelling solution, which will provide decarbonisation pathways and financing models.

EDF
Catalyst – Accelerating the heat pump journey
BEIS grant: £395,220.94
Project partners: Daikin Airconditioning UK Ltd, SPEN, University of Sheffield
The Catalyst project aims to simplify and improve the efficiency of the heat pump installation process by creating a consumer-centric digital platform to support customers through the whole heat pump installation journey. This digital solution aims to improve the customer journey by streamlining the required pre-installation steps into one remote survey, adopting a self-serve approach and reducing the amount of information required upfront. 

Energiesprong
Integrated Comfort and Billing Service
BEIS grant: £204,126.00
Aimed at retrofit system, this Comfort Plan will guarantee heating outcomes for occupants in return for a fee (which is no more than the total savings). This can help to fund the heat pump retrofit enabling greater deployment and support access to heat pumps through reducing the requirement for upfront capital investment.

Green Energy Options
AI Smart Heat Pathway
BEIS grant: £474,703.18
Green Energy Options are proposing an AI Smart Heath Pathway to enable rapid, high-quality and scalable heat pump deployment. This will be achieved through the use of AI on smart meter and smart thermostat data to determine a personal net-zero pathway for each home, and size the subsequent appropriate heat pump, from actual measured data. The project will be piloted across 150 homes, with the aim of scaling the AI Smart Heat Pathway nationwide subsequently.

Gen Game
Total Home Optimisation Management (THOM)
BEIS grant: £762,522.55
Project partners: Evergreen Energy, Chameleon Technology (UK), TalkTalk, EnAPPsys, University of Salford
The THOM project aims to create a heat pump specialist Home Energy Management System (HEMS) to help customers understand and maximise the benefits to their home. This will be achieved by using smart meter data to identify customers who would benefit from heat pumps and inform them of savings; sizing heat pumps based on a variety of data sources; optimising home energy systems across heat pumps, PV, electric vehicle charging, battery storage and other energy assets to reduce costs and carbon; providing access to flexibility markets to enhance the benefits and business case; providing customer choice by being energy supplier and product manufacturer agnostic.

Guru Systems
Guru Smart Heat Pumps: developing tools for social housing landlords to enable heat pump installation at scale across the UK
BEIS grant: £445,943.00
The Guru Smart Heat Pumps project will seek to provide tools and monitoring equipment to allow landlords to actively manage their heating systems. This will be achieved through continuously monitoring and analysing ongoing performance and providing operators with the ability to remotely adjust settings as required.

Guru Systems
Guru Verify for Heat Pumps: delivering best practice install, commissioning and maintenance verification tools to the heat pump market
BEIS grant: £475,162.00
The Guru Verify for Heat Pumps project is focused on creating a modular mobile app and web platform which supports the correct installation, commissioning and maintenance of heat pumps. The platform verifies outcomes and stores heat pump settings in order to benchmark for future maintenance and efficiency improvements, and acts as a training resource for new heat pump engineers.

Hildebrand Technology
Glow Heat Pump Community
BEIS grant: £665,910.00
Project partners: Build Test Solutions, NJV Limited, Richard Carmichael Research & Consulting, Davies and Mckerr, SE2
The goal of the Glow Heat Pump Community project is to create a feedback loop of peer-to-peer learning, among consumers and installers, that continuously improves advice and stakeholder confidence, based on practical real-world experience. This will be achieved through data from installations and enabling peer-to-peer learning and transparency.

Hoare Lea
Right sizing heat pumps
BEIS grant: £505,442.37
Project partners: City Science Corporation, Purrmetrix, Places for People Group
The Right Sizing Heat Pumps project aims to reduce capital costs, operational costs, and grid infrastructure upgrade costs through developing a tool to properly size, efficiently monitor and optimise heat pump performance. This will be achieved by improving cost and viability through standardising the approach to sizing heat pumps.

Home Infrastructure Technology
Green Homeowner Loans
BEIS grant: £367,507.20
The aim of this project is to develop a Green Homeowner Loan to pave the way for mass adoption of green home improvements, by developing a fintech platform specifically designed to fund heat pumps and other green measures

ICAX
Heat Pump Manufacturing Automation for Scale and Cost
BEIS grant: £923,816.56
This project aims to tackle the cost barriers of heat pump deployment by designing and building a trial manufacturing assembly line for residential heat pumps, using state of the art analytical and physical tools. This will offer a systemic approach to optimised manufacturing based on current state of the art intelligent manufacturing design and operation capabilities. By re-designing the heat pump assembly process, the objective is to reduce unit costs and increase product quality.

Kensa Heat Pumps
Highly Flexible Storage Heat Pump (HFSHP)
BEIS grant: £1,233,117.39
Project partners: MTC, PNDC University of Strathclyde
This project aims to combine electrically-driven heat pumps with heat storing batteries to shift heat production from times of peak electrical demand on the National Grid, enabling consumers to charge heating systems to store lower cost and lower carbon heat in anticipation of their peak heating demand.

Mixergy
Making Efficient Systems around Heat Pumps (MESH)
BEIS grant: £455,214.60
Project partners: Centrica, Vaillant Group UK
Project MESH aims to reduce the lifetime costs of domestic heat pump installation whilst delivering higher system efficiency throughout the year. In turn this will expect to reduce capital and operational costs, ensuring a more seamless installation process and holistic approach to design.

Parity Projects
Performance
BEIS grant: £670,708.44
Project partners: London South Bank University, ICAX Ltd., Cambridge Energy, RetrofitWorks
Performance aims to directly address the cost and quality assurance barriers of decarbonising heat in homes, by creating a low-cost, cost-effective options analysis and verification protocol to enable the offer of a financially insurable performance guarantee to homeowners and landlords. The project outcome will be software that integrates existing retrofit supply chain components to ensure improved assurance of design and installation of a suitable package of measures, with a particular focus on managing financial risk.

Q-Bot
Free Heat Pump Home Survey and Design Tool
BEIS grant: £782,664.99
The free heat pump home survey and design tool will help consumers make informed decisions on heat pump installation, ultimately providing a knowledge base to facilitate the national rollout of heat pumps. The tool will help consumers confidently match the heat pump to thermal demand of the house and other specific needs on a case-by-case basis.

RJ Barwick
Archetypal Heat Pump Retrofit for 175,000 Non-Trads
BEIS grant: £899,000.00
This project will utilise the Energiesprong approach to develop optimum standardised whole house retrofit solutions for four of the most challenging and/or common non-traditional home archetypes across sites in West Kent.

Switchee
Digitising the Customer Journey of Heat Pumps in Social Housing
BEIS grant: £468,656.00
Project partners: Leeds Beckett University, Daikin Airconditioning UK
This project aims to produce smart heat pump tools aimed at residents in social housing by providing tools and research to overcome the current scaling barriers relating to heat pump acceptance, lack of awareness and consumer behaviour. This will be delivered by: allowing remote reading of error warning messages to alert the housing association; using heat pump specific metrics including live and historic data; heat pump specific algorithms will be developed to alert on detected heat pump performance issues, excessive energy consumption; offering tailored heat pump advice focused on resident experience; empower the housing association to trigger when a new resident has moved into the property so that heat pump advice and educational material can be made available to them.

The MCS Service Company
EST MCS Heat Pump Consumer Journey
BEIS grant: £229,644.00
Project partners: Energy Saving Trust
Energy Saving Trust and MCS propose to develop a new consumer journey for heat pumps, guiding consumers from their first engagement through to receiving quotes for installation. The journey will build a technology selection tool based on the existing, tried and tested solution provided through Home Energy Scotland to assess a property’s suitability for a heat pump. This will be linked to an enhanced version of the MCS ‘find a contractor’ tool to allow consumers to request installation quotes from installers.

Thermoelectric Conversion Systems
Two stage heat pump with greywater energy recovery
BEIS grant: £574,108.00
This project aims to overcome several major infrastructural challenges of heat pump adoption, by harnessing demand-side management to cope with peak loads and time-shifting energy use. By utilising otherwise wasted energy, this solution aims to give economic and reliable products for retrofit in existing homes and new-build properties to dramatically improve energy efficiency of buildings and cut running costs. Included in the ways to achieve this will be reclaiming and re-using energy from the household wastewater stream and using a small air-source heat pump to top up the domestic hot water tank.

Thormer Solutions
Total Heat-Pump Installation Solution (THIS)
BEIS grant: £1,595,738.00
THIS is described as an all-encompassing integrated software package and app for installers to streamline the survey, installation and commissioning processes required when installing a heat pump. It will provide a digital survey platform and a fully automated design facility, allowing the system to be optimised from the beginning and uses augmented reality to provide the consumer with an upfront feel for how the system and components will look and sound when installed.

Ventive
Modular Heat Pumps for Cell Based Microfactory Assembly
BEIS grant: £1,498,600.00
QM-Systems Ltd, Clear Blue Energy
Ventive is designing a modular heat pump that will provide significant cost and CO2 savings across the installation, operation and production phases. The design is to be demand responsive, with fully integrated indoor environment control systems providing integrated ventilation, heating, and hot water with free summer cooling. The heat pPump will arrive pre-plumbed and pre-configured with monitoring and renewable energy storage to enable quick and simple installation. Ventive will use an array of integrated sensors to assess the indoor environment and adapt the performance of each system.

VIA Analytics
Heat Pathway
BEIS grant: £218,287.60
Project partners: Daedalus Environmental
Heat Pathway is a software project aimed at overcoming the barriers to heat pump adoption, including costs, understanding the technology, and appreciation of the long-term financial and environmental benefits.

Wondrwall 
Intelligent airsourcing to net zero
BEIS grant: £452,292.00
Project partners: Daikin Air Conditioning UK
This project aims to overcome the key technical barriers to integration and energy performance optimisation, reduce running costs of heat pumps, and more broadly support improved end-user experiences and acceptance of these systems. This will be achieved by optimising energy management to provide a platform that underpins advanced time-shifting strategies alongside proprietary artificial software intelligence software, using machine learning for dynamic predictive modelling of energy requirements based on their patented sensing technologies.