Integrated Electric Heating Project

• The project aimed to understand the opportunities and challenges for electric heat to meet ongoing UK household requirements
• Project built modelling software to analyse the interaction across UK housing architecture of heating systems, control systems, building fabrics, weather and consumer requirements
• The Energy Systems Catapult has taken forward the project via EDF Energy to build the new software based on their existing open source BuildSysPro modelling tool

Many modelling scenarios suggested electric heating could play an important part of a future decarbonised energy system. The Integrated Electric Heating Project aimed to provide an understanding of the opportunities and challenges for electric heating to meet UK household requirements. Through this project EDF Energy were tasked with developing a software package by extending the capability of their existing open source BuildSysPro modelling tool. With this newly developed software tool the Catapult and EDF Energy jointly modelled the interaction across a number of domestic UK building archetypes and household types between the heating system, control system, building fabric, weather and consumer requirements.

The outputs from this modelling highlighted the specific opportunities and challenges of delivering low carbon heating solutions in UK homes whilst considering the needs of domestic residents. It also enabled the Catapult to undertake further detailed engineering analysis of current home energy/ heating systems and new heating technologies as they emerged.