Heat Highways

In the age of abundance, we’ve forgotten the old mantra of ‘waste not, want not’. If we desperately need clean, low-cost energy – why do we squander so much of what we already produce? Building solar parks and offshore wind farms might be exciting, but there’s a far more practical solution right under our noses: waste heat.

Data centres, power stations, supermarkets, and factories are just a few industries generating incredible amounts of excess heat that currently disappears into the ether. Using existing technologies, the UK’s 17,000 heat networks could form a ‘green heat grid’ that captures waste heat via inter-city heat highways. By transporting low-cost, zero-carbon heat from points of surplus to where it’s needed most, we have a remarkable opportunity to make fuel poverty a thing of the past.