Boxergy is an installer of renewable technologies including heat pumps, solar PV, electrical batteries, and thermal storage. We want to investigate a solution to a problem related to District Heating (DH) that will become critical as housing stock becomes more energy efficient. Our solution builds on completed joint projects with ETP and the Power Network Demonstration Centre (Strathclyde University), and Edinburgh University School of Engineering.

District Heating can prove a highly effective and efficient way of heating housing estates. However, the equipment needed to generate the heat, and the infrastructure to distribute it, is specialised, and additive to existing infrastructure. This means there are significant up-front costs associated with its construction and long pay-back periods needed to recover these costs.

As insulation standards improve, however, customer heating needs reduce. This means either payback periods for the heat networks stretch further into the future, or the minimum size of an estate that is considered commercially viable becomes larger. Currently, developments less than about 130 homes are not considered viable for conventional heat networks. New standards due to take effect in 2025 will reduce the number of viable developments further. This means the low carbon options open to these developments, and existing developments, is reduced and a major obstacle to net zero grows.

Boxergy's intention is to develop a new kind of network that brings district heating benefits to smaller scale estates. We already produce a system that connects heat pumps, thermal storage, electric batteries and solar panels through our own controller. This controller uploads data to our cloud servers so that our customers can monitor their energy use. We would like to investigate the feasibility of extending this system to automatically manage an energy purchasing strategy for all our customers. By co-ordinating the energy purchase we can provide benefits to our customers and to the energy companies that supply them. In doing this we would have produced virtual district heating (VDH) that needs no new infrastructure, generates heat extremely efficiently, and decouples purchasing from demand in a way that significantly reduces costs for our customers. The substantial size of the whole network's storage and energy generation could also reduce pressure on the grid at peak times and allow us to offer additional services to the energy distribution companies.