Would I need to buy into community heating?
If we go ahead with community heating then this will require some number of homes to either buy-in or make a multi-year commitment to the service.
The reason this is different to solar is that solar generates the income to repay the capital investment by selling electricity to the grid, it requires no community commitment, but heat can only generate income locally from the homes in the community.
There are two models we will look at and may offer both, or variations of, to suit different people’s needs:
- Zero investment, multi-year commitment – here homes wouldn’t need to pay an upfront cost as we’d raise funds via the ESG route (see below). However, this would require a multi-year commitment to guarantee we could pay back the investors. Typically this would be a combination of a fixed, standing charger and a variable usage charge.
- Up front investment, no commitment – here homes would pay the upfront costs to build the heating system and then pay running costs based on usage.
There are variations that could combine both models. For example, with a heat network, the cost of building the shared network would be investor funded and require a commitment, while the per-house costs to connect are paid up front.
This also depends on the type of technology we use. For example, Air Source Heat Pumps can be installed independently per house and the community part of this approach might be limited to bulk purchase savings. Ground or Water sourced heat pumps would be cheaper if done with several nearby homes as they could share the costs of the ground or water sourcing pipes. A heat network would also have shared infrastructure.
We expect to work with either a heating consultant or vendor, such as Kensa, to do a feasibility study and to work out the likely costs and how many homes we’d need to be involved to make it viable. When we have this we can present it to the community with some real numbers and details.
