City heat pump follow-up plan after Cornwall pilot

Chris Parker, who has been in his house for 20 years, was able to hook up to the communal scheme

The company behind a renewable heating project in Cornwall is hoping to run another pilot in the "not too distant future", it says.

It comes a year after some homes in Stithians were able to connect heat pumps to a community heat grid.

Kensa Utilities said the work was a 21st Century version of a gas network and it cut carbon emissions.

But bosses also acknowledged hurdles, such as electricity costs making it hard to convince consumers to switch.

The Heat the Streets pilot has seen households drawing heat for heat pumps from boreholes drilled out in the street instead of having a bore hole per home.

Heating homes accounts for about 30% of the UK's carbon emissions.

The Heat the Streets trial may go to a city after a trial in the village of Stithians

The model mirrors the gas network with a pipe in the ground and a £25 a month standing charge, plus the cost of the electricity to run the pump, project bosses said.

Stithians is not connected to mains gas and resident Chris Parker said he thought he would not be able to have a ground source heat pump as his garden was small.

But the pilot scheme meant he was one of about 40 opting to connect to the network.

He said: "The house is lovely and warm ... and it is costing me slightly less money than before when I didn't have a warm house. "

Kensa Utilities business manager Lisa Treseder said: "For retrofit, it's a bit more expensive and we've got some work to do to roll that out at a bigger scale.

"But we are hoping to do another pilot in the not too distant future, and that's likely to be in a city."

Peter Connor, a professor of energy policy at the University of Exeter, said the government needed to get involved for such approaches to work widely.

He said: "I think it's going to be a long time before this is right across the country, and I don't think we've got a fully joined up plan for what that's going to look like."

A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson said the government was "committed to our ambition of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028" and it had increased heat pump grants.