We will gather data about residential properties in Great Britain to map out how suitable different kinds of heat pumps are at the neighbourhood scale. This will help Nesta and other organisations in the energy sector identify the best approach to decarbonising heating in each neighbourhood. In turn, this will also support our switching streets approach to delivering low-carbon heat.

We want to create a robust, impartial and reliable dataset showing how suitable different types of heat pump are for each neighbourhood. This dataset can be used to challenge common assumptions about heat pump suitability and understand which locations are suitable to make the switch.

This will not replace the need for local planning for heat. However, it should simplify how strategic choices are made about which low-carbon heating technologies are suited to different neighbourhoods.

Understanding which areas are suitable for which heating technologies is important for policy makers, local energy planners and homeowners. Consumer choice, market offerings and infrastructure development will all be guided to some extent by data and models that present assumptions about what works where. These assumptions are largely choices made by whoever owns or builds the model and are rarely impartial – so without unbiased evidence to challenge this they tend to be accepted. This often means heat pumps are ruled out in homes where they could be installed, or they are assumed to be viable in homes where they might not be the best option. We want to facilitate a debate about the best technology choices for different types of homes.

Having reliable data on how suitable areas are for different low-carbon heating technologies is a critical tool to switch households away from fossil-fuel heating. This project will work directly in combination with our work on clean heat neighbourhoods, which is developing an alternative model for rolling out low-carbon heating. However, a street-by-street approach is only effective with good data to identify which streets to target.

This project uses data science approaches to modify and enrich the openly available energy performance certificate (EPC) dataset of properties. We undertook stakeholder workshops to understand the landscape of assumptions on heat pump suitability, and used these assumptions to map out suitability for different technologies at small-area levels.

Part of our work addressed the fact that EPC data is incomplete - it only includes around two thirds of residential properties in England and Wales. Therefore, we employed statistical techniques, such as iterative proportional fitting, to reweight the EPC dataset so it is proportional to other less incomplete estimates of property features (such as those from the 2021 UK Census).

The stakeholder workshop helped us obtain a clear view on the factors affecting heat pump suitability and what should be measured to quantify those factors. Following this, the EPC dataset was enhanced to include these factors by linking EPC properties with other datasets.

After producing this enhanced EPC dataset we were able to calculate heat pump suitability scores per property, and then by using our statistical method of reweighting we were able to create robust heat pump suitability average scores per neighbourhood. You can view the current version of this dataset and a map in which to explore the dataset.

In the next phase of work, we will be focusing on conducting user research to make sure that our dataset and visualisation tool are as useful as possible for local energy planners.