It is unclear how many homes in Great Britain are suitable for different types of heat pumps (eg, air source, networked ground source). Some people believe that heat pumps are not suitable in certain types of home and neighbourhood, often without robust evidence to support this. Therefore, this project aims to create an evidence base that allows us to challenge or verify these assumptions, while presenting which homes may be best suited to different heating technologies.

We will gather data about residential properties in Great Britain to map out which homes are suitable for different kinds of heat pumps 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 which homes are suitable for different types of heat pump. 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 homes 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 which homes are suitable 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 switching streets, 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 will be using data science approaches to modify and enrich the openly available energy performance certificate (EPC) dataset of properties. We will undertake stakeholder workshops to understand the landscape of assumptions on heat pump suitability, using these assumptions to map out suitability for different technologies at small-area levels.

The first part of our work will address the fact that EPC data is incomplete - it only includes around two thirds of residential properties in England and Wales. Therefore, we will employ 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 workshops will help 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 will be enhanced to include these factors by linking EPC properties with other datasets. This can occur through:

• exactly matching property codes
• fuzzy matching other identifiers, or
• joining based on common locations.

Finally, we will produce a geographic visualisation of our results at small spatial scales.