£288 million fund opens for green heating projects

Households and businesses across England are set to benefit from greener heating as a £288 million government funding scheme is opened.

The Green Heat Network Fund will provide grant funding to schemes that will deliver clean heating to homes, offices, commercial and public buildings over the next three years, allowing more towns and cities across England to take up this tried and tested technology.

Heat networks offer carbon emissions savings by supplying heat to buildings from a central source, avoiding the need for households and workplaces to rely on individual, energy-intensive heating solutions - such as gas boilers.

The fund is expected to reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 5.6 million cars off the road for a year. The scheme is also expected to fund the delivery of an estimated 9.7 million tonnes of total carbon savings by 2050 with the independent Committee on Climate Change estimating that, with continued support, heat networks could meet nearly 20 per cent of overall UK demand for heating by 2050.

Energy Minister Lord Callanan said: “Heating in buildings forms a significant part of the UK’s carbon footprint, so changing how we warm our homes and workspaces is vital to meeting our world-leading climate change commitments. Heat networks are an effective way of reducing carbon emissions and this fund will enable us to accelerate the roll-out of these cutting-edge and green technologies.”

The Green Heat Network Fund is the successor scheme to the government’s Heat Networks Investment Project (HNIP), which has provided more than £250 million of funding for schemes across England and Wales since 2018.