£288m fund opens for green heating projects across England

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

Schemes delivering clean heating to homes, offices, commercial and public buildings will be able to apply for grants to the Green Heat Network Fund over the next three years, allowing more towns and cities across England to take up this tried and tested technology.

The fund is expected to reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 5.6 million cars off the road for a year.

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.

Funding will support the uptake of low-carbon technologies like heat pumps, solar and geothermal energy as a central heating source. Applications for grants can be made from March 14.

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.

“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 £250m of funding for schemes across England and Wales since 2018.

More than 20 heat network projects have received HNIP funding, including 2 innovative schemes in the North-East of England, which source their heat from water in abandoned mine shafts and a community-led project in Cambridgeshire, which could be a model for other rural communities seeking to decarbonise their heating.