Alison Thewliss – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Alison Thewliss on 2016-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, whether her Department has a strategy to ensure that the growth of district heating is accompanied by the development of non-fossil fuel heat sources that are compatible with long term carbon emissions targets.

Andrea Leadsom

Yes. The development of heat networks and non-fossil fuel heat sources needs to go hand in hand. One of the key benefits of heat networks is that they can be used to transport heat from a wide range of low carbon heat sources.

The Government’s support for both renewable heating and district heating (heat networks) was confirmed in the Autumn Statement. My Rt Hon friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer made clear that the Renewable Heat Incentive will see an increase in funding to £1.15 billion by 2020-21 and separately that over £300 million of funding would be made available for up to 200 heat networks to generate enough heat to support the equivalent of 400,000 homes.

We are currently designing the Heat Network Investment Fund to allocate this funding, which is due to launch later in 2016 and run until 2021. We are keen to ensure that the projects supported by the fund are low carbon, economically viable and strategically designed to ensure future growth and development. We expect a range of projects with a mix of different heat sources to come forward for support, as we have seen with those Local Authority projects already supported at the development stage by the Government’s Heat Network Delivery Unit. As well as fossil fuelled Combined Heat and Power, such sources include non-fossil fuel heat from waste, deep geothermal heat, water-sourced heat pumps and heat from underground minewater. In addition, DECC’s innovation budget was doubled; some of this will be used to support the development of low carbon technology in heat delivery.