Earlier in 2024, we worked with stakeholders and community groups across the clean heat sector to develop a proposal for a coordinated approach to low-carbon heat. We are now looking to further the work, testing elements of the recommendations laid out in our report on coordinated switching. We have been using this to influence the UK, Scottish and Welsh governments and think there is a strong interest in developing a more area-based approach, if it can be shown to work. 

We now want to put our proposal in contact with reality and partner with organisations, communities and households to test our understanding and build the capacity to deliver a more coordinated transition to low-carbon heat across the UK.

We’ve split our focus into three main areas: planning and zoning, scheme design, and delivery ie, the offer to households. Within these three areas, we’ve listed some of the key questions we’re interested in understanding.

We’re looking to partner with people in two main ways:

• Piloting and prototyping
  • We want to be learning by doing, working with partners to plan, design and deliver coordinated switching approaches. 
  • This may look like working with a local authority on a granular planning methodology before developing methods, or tools to communicate this with households.
• Knowledge sharing
  • We’ll be building a working group around coordinated switching and using our impartial position to collect case studies, run events and convene those interested or already working to deliver low-carbon heat. 
  • We’re interested in working with partners to co-create case studies, cataloguing projects and amplify learnings.

Learn more about our open calls for collaboration below.

Our aim with this work is to:

• develop recommendations for a place-based methodology to low-carbon heating that removes obstacles faced by stakeholders and communities across various contexts 
• document and share key lessons learned with a wider group, providing resources for others to use
• highlight areas of improvement and showcase successful examples of local planning, scheme design and delivery 
• articulate and advocate for the required policy and legislative changes required to enable more coordinated approaches to heat decarbonisation.

Our preferred way of working is for both Nesta and our partners to contribute staff time, acting as a joint project team. We do not provide grants or match-funding for projects, or usually fund or ask partners to fund either our or their staff time. Where non-staff costs are required (for example, cost of materials or compensating research participants for their time), we agree upfront on how to split these costs. We’re not looking for funding for our time.

Wherever we collaborate, we seek to generate learning or tools to help all organisations, and we aim to publish our work as a default.

We’re looking to start projects as soon as possible, aiming to capture the first learnings from projects by summer 2025.

If you’re interested in discussing any of our three main areas, or have a project that you wish to share please reach out to [email protected].