It's time to rethink our approach to heat in the home - Rebecca Sweeney looks at future concepts for heating our homes without the carbon

In order to meet the UK’s climate change targets the UK will need to eliminate carbon emissions from heating in our homes. Today, 90 per cent of consumers would prefer gas central heating to low-carbon alternatives. This attitude must shift dramatically and low-carbon options need to be appealing and easy to introduce if the country is to replace gas central heating in these homes in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Rebecca Sweeney looks at how the UK could make low-carbon heating more appealing to consumers. 

As part of our Smart Systems and Heat programme, we wanted to explore what heat in the home really means to consumers and how we can use these insights to help the energy industry provide a simpler, better and more environmentally friendly way for consumers to buy heat. Our latest insight report, produced on behalf of the ETI by the Consumer Insights Team at the Energy Systems Catapult highlights ways the industry could make low-carbon heat a more appealing option in the future based on consumers attitudes towards heat.

Using the insight that people care more about the experience of using heat rather than how it is delivered, we believe that it is possible to rethink the way the heating experience is sold to consumers, to make it a more valued service. One of the key findings from the research showed that people often do not realise how much they actually valued the heat that they used. So when questioned most participants in the research recalled the pleasure of a hot shower every morning and standing next to a radiator after being outside in the cold. The research showed that whether heat was used to enhance health by relieving pain, enriching relationships by making guests feel comfortable, or even to protect property from frozen pipes or avoiding damp in the home – heating in the home was in fact, an important experience for the people involved. This experience the participants described does not easily overlay with the current approach of simply buying units of energy from a supplier.

It is also clear from the research that the everyday consumer is a passive bill-payer who understands very little about the cost of heating their home – indeed, what does a kWh really mean in terms of the heating experience? How are bill-payers expected to determine whether their deal is value for money for what they are seeking from their heating experience? By using connected home technology currently available (and likely to advance further), the energy industry could start to match the heat experience with their provision of energy. Our research has shown that this can convert passive bill-payers into discerning customers who can agree a level of service with their provider, and this in turn paves the way for the introduction of low-carbon alternatives.

So how can this switch to low carbon technologies be achieved? Connected home data can create new opportunities for providers to offer consumers a new customer proposition that is based on heat experiences rather than the commodity price of energy. In other consumer-centric markets, such as the mobile phone market, businesses are constantly competing to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty by differentiating their offerings. Businesses could offer varying service packages to the consumer based on how they are using heat in their homes – how many rooms require heating, what times of the day does the home need to be at a certain temperature etc. Consumers could potentially buy “warm hours”, rather than kWh – a much more intuitive concept for them to understand. Using such data from a connected home, homeowners and tenants could not only then take control of their heating remotely, but they could also see real-time data on where their money is spent meaning they would have a real understanding on how much it costs to heat the home.

This is the point at where providers have the opportunity to make the low-carbon energy offering more appealing than natural gas. Providers could begin to offer alternatives like electrifying heat in individual homes or improving the fabric efficiencies of homes. There could be opportunities for wider-scale change; connecting neighbourhoods to new district heat networks or repurposing the natural gas grid to transport other fuels such as hydrogen or biogas which are more low-carbon in their nature.

For this concept to become a reality however, the shift must be supported by regulation. Policy-makers have an opportunity to use this data and research to look towards creating market environments where consumers pay businesses to deliver energy experiences. This will mean service providers could start to compete with one another to decarbonise heat – decreasing the UK’s carbon footprint. This is not just an opportunity for consumers who are able to pay for a better heating experience, the government could also use the data to better target and help those in fuel poverty.