Green Finance Institute launches Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce

The Green Finance Institute has launched a Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce to design and implement financing mechanisms to help facilitate the rapid adoption of green heating technologies.

The taskforce has been drawn from members of the Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings (CEEB), which launched in 2019, and includes representatives from academia and civil society, local and national government and the financial, energy and construction sectors.

The Green Finance Institute said the body will apply the same “action-focused strategy” as the CEEB, which has amassed a portfolio of 21 demonstration projects, the first of which is due to start later this month.

Rhian-Mari Thomas, chief executive of the Green Finance Institute, said: “Focussing on the heating and hot water in our homes is a natural next step for the Coalition for the Energy Efficiency of Buildings, which is working to create financial pathways to the widescale adoption of retrofitting across all residential tenures.

“We are delighted to convene this group of experts to move quickly to launch financial products and mechanisms enabling every home to access zero-carbon heating.”

The taskforce will conduct a review to identify barriers and boons to investment in zero-carbon heating technologies and user these finding to develop a series of new financial products as well as non-financial enablers.

The members of the taskforce include:

• Abundance Investment
• The Association for Decentralised Energy
• Arup
• Baringa
• BEAMA
• Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
• BNP Paribas
• Centrica
• Eon
• E3G
• Energy Saving Trust
• Energy Systems Catapult
• Engie
• Greater London Authority
• Greater Manchester Combined Authority
• Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
• Heat Pump Federation
• Leeds City Council
• Legal and General
• Lloyds Banking Group
• Octopus Energy
• Santander
• Scottish Government
• The Kensa Group
• Vattenfall
• Welsh Government
• Worcester Bosch

Charlotte Owen, policy manager at the Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE), said: “To decarbonise the UK’s heating, it needs to be more attractive to invest in low carbon heating, including city-scale heat networks, than in fossil gas boilers and fossil gas networks.

“To achieve this, we need to reform the signals to investors and ensure policy incentivises investment in a low cost, low carbon, high comfort offer to consumers.

“The ADE is delighted, therefore, to be taking part in the Green Finance Institute’s Zero Carbon Heating Taskforce, which will make a meaningful contribution to shaping the low carbon investment landscape.”

Clementine Cowton, director of external affairs at the Octopus Energy Group, said “The technology to electrify heat has already been embraced at scale in other countries. We know that small changes to move sin taxes off green electrons would catalyse investment in thousands of jobs installing heat pumps, improving our homes and helping to build a more secure energy grid, and we are excited to work with the Green Finance Institute to help make that happen.”

“Decarbonising the way we heat our buildings over the next ten years is presently one of the largest policy and investment gaps to meeting the UK’s domestic carbon budgets,” added Pedro Guertler, programme leader for heat, cooling and energy efficiency at E3G.

“How we finance the transition to zero carbon heat is a key part of the challenge, and we are keen to see policy-makers emboldened – by the steps the finance sector and supply chain are taking to tackle it head on – to be ambitious in the forthcoming comprehensive spending review and heat and buildings strategy.”