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By: Evie Townend
October 10, 2024
It’s another cold snap and the fields of Cornwall, in south-west England, are blanketed in snow. But down a windy lane, Ceri Simmons’ home is toasty warm. Her living room is a jungle of hanging plants and, through the kitchen, glimpses of a wood-lined studio reveal Simmons’ job as an aerial-yoga teacher. “It’s not just lovely for me to have a warm house, it’s also important for my clients,” she says.
The remote village of Stithians, close to the most south-westerly tip of the UK mainland, where the Simmons family live has become an unlikely frontier in the race to decarbonise heating. It is piloting a new approach to low-carbon heating which could be key to the rapid scale-up needed worldwide.
The project zooms out from the obstacles facing individual homeowners and designs a heat pump system that can be delivered at scale across streets, towns and cities. In doing so, it could provide a model for urban spaces across the world pondering how to decarbonise their heat systems quickly and effectively.
In the UK today, 74% of people heat their homes using gas boilers, with mostly electric heaters and oil comprising the rest. This leads the heating sector to account for a third of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions – comparable to the emissions of all its petrol and diesel cars. Similar values are seen in the US, where around half of heating comes from gas.
To limit global warming, this needs to change drastically, and in many places, that means installing many more heat pumps. By 2030, around a quarter of UK buildings should be heated using them, according to the UK government’s climate advisory body, rising to 52% by 2050. Electrifying heating will also be key to decarbonising buildings in the US, says Melissa Lott, director of research at the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. One study in San Francisco referred to heat pumps as the “single most impactful lever” to reducing emissions.
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