ESO raises projections for ground-source heat pumps

National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO) has raised its upper projections for the domestic deployment of ground-source heat pumps in the latest iteration of its Future Energy Scenarios.

It is now expecting almost 8.7 million ground-source heat pumps to be installed in homes across Great Britain by 2050 in its Consumer Transformation scenario, compared to less than 2.2 million in last year’s figures.

The ESO has also lowered its projections for the deployment of air-source heat pumps, which are again highest in the Consumer Transformation scenario. The ESO forecast a total of more than 21.3 million in last year’s report, including nearly 3.3 million installed alongside hydrogen boilers to form hybrid heating systems.

This year, the body has forecast a total of more than 16.5 million. This includes almost 8.1 million installed as part of hybrid heating systems: around 1.2 million alongside hydrogen boilers, 6.4 million alongside electric resistive heating and 520,000 alongside biofuel boilers. The last two sets are both new categories in this year’s analysis.

Domestic Heating Technologies by 2050

Note: The table above does not include all heating technologies.

Energy insight manager Alex Haffner told Utility Week the changes primarily reflect improvements to the ESO’s heat modelling: “The new spatial heat model is probably the biggest change we’ve got across all of the models that we use.”

Haffner said the new model was developed as part of an innovation project to provide “more bottom-up, geographic granularity.” He said their modelling has previously tended to be done at the national level before being disaggregated to produce regional figures.

“It’s part of a wider thing that we’re trying to do, which is introduce this concept of regionalisation a little bit more into the Future Energy Scenarios,” he added. “It’s kind of an acceptance that one size doesn’t necessarily fit all and that it’s really important to be able break the models down into smaller geographical areas.”

Haffner said this approach is also important because of the growing number of local authorities that have set their own climate change goals and undertaken their own energy projects. He said the ESO worked with distribution networks to allow them to “feed into the design of the model in the early stages”.

With regards to ground-source heat pumps, Haffner explained: “Where we were assuming there would be a heat pump of some description, we were probably more conservative last year around the suitability of ground-source and so have plumped for air-source, whereas the new model gives us a little bit more confidence to say actually you could have ground-source here and because of the higher coefficient of performance it’s probably the better option over the lifetime of the asset.”

Domestic Heating Technologies – Future Energy Scenarios 2021