The ETI is seeking expressions of interest to understand how electric heating can play a role in decarbonisation of heat in UK homes

The ETI is seeking expressions of interest from organisations as it seeks to develop a better understanding of how electric heating in individual homes can play a role in the decarbonisation of heat in UK homes.

The ETI’s strategy work has identified electric resistive heating and heat-pumps in individual homes as potentially playing an important part in transitioning the UK to a low carbon future.  These diverse heating sources will be deployed in a wide range of homes with a correspondingly diverse mix of thermal properties.

Given that electric heating is likely to play a significant role in the decarbonisation of the UK’s domestic housing, the ETI now wants to model a variety of electric/hybrid heating systems in representative homes with specific thermal properties.  Such a capability will help the understanding of the challenges and barriers to such a transition.

The modelling will consider the interaction in a number of domestic UK building archetypes and household types between the heating system, control system, building fabric, consumer requirements, weather and other large energy systems within the home.

Currently, electric heating systems are an unattractive replacement alternative to gas heating systems in terms of cost and performance for most existing homes. The challenges include:

• limited network capacity and competition for use of that capacity with other appliance use within the home, potentially increased by new and expanded uses of electricity, such as vehicle charging or increased IT equipment etc. and complexities such as PV self-generation;


• low heating system power, leading to long pre-heat durations that give the resident a poor experience and cause high losses in older, less thermally efficient homes;


• high costs for peak energy supply, combined with few options for heat storage at the scale required for space heating (building fabric is the obvious thermal store, but is only effective where the building has sufficient thermal efficiency);


• high capital cost of electric heating system components and installation; and


• proprietary control system protocols at the component level and operating cycle dependent performance characteristics which limit the scope for control integration with the wider energy system to improve customer experience and reduce energy cost.