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Why East Lothian is critical to the UK’s future heat network strategy


Lars Fabricius highlights the significance of implementing regional heat infrastructure, such as heat highways, in Scotland's East Lothian District to address heating challenges, reduce costs, and promote sustainability in the UK's energy strategy.


Lars Fabricius www.sav-systems.com


S


Managing director at SAV Systems


obstacle is not a lack of public support or complicated logistics, but policy. According to the Scottish government’s Heat Network Support Unit (HNSU), East Lothian has insufficient heating demand density to justify the creation of heat networks. Instead, the current national strategy


cotland’s East Lothian District epitomises the UK’s struggle to secure clean, affordable heating. But by scaling our ambitions and learning from Denmark’s use of waste heat, we can embed sustainability into the fabric of our urban planning. With mounting pressures driven


by climate change, volatile energy prices, and a rapidly approaching net zero target, the UK’s energy strategy stands at a pivotal crossroads. Down one path is ‘business as usual’ silo economies that squander useful heat, adds to pollution, and intensifies our cost-of-living crisis. The other path, fortunately, leads


to a symbiotic net zero economy that embraces circularity, reduces costs and emissions, and rewards green investments with socio-economic benefits. With the UK’s future prosperity at stake, the policy and infrastructure choices we make now will have far-reaching impacts for decades to come.


The East Lothian question At the heart of this crucial decision is East Lothian, a Scottish council home to over 100,000 people. To meet its long-term heating and decarbonisation targets, the council is investigating a heat utility strategy utilising clean, low-cost waste heat from its local industries. But rather than the traditional approach of developing small, independent heat network zones in each town and suburb, the council proposes to build an extensive, regional heat infrastructure using Heat Transmission Highways. This concept will allow the council to harvest waste heat across its district, and leverage economies of scale to significantly reduce its cost of heat. However, East Lothian’s primary


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encourages a patchwork of local, small-scale heat networks across the country. Compared to the regional heat transmission model, this approach is far less efficient, more costly, more time-consuming to develop, and limits the amount of waste heat sources that can be utilised.


This challenge leads us to the East


Lothian Question: Can the Scottish government achieve its net zero socio-economic objectives without being energy efficient with its plentiful waste heat resources?


The limitations of ‘electrify everything’ With decarbonisation now such a hot topic in the UK, there’s understandably a lot of focus on electrification. But a sobering reality we must accept is that the power grid alone won’t get us to net zero. If we are to succeed in meeting


the targets of the Paris Agreement, we must break the global emissions curve. To do this we need to be smarter with our energy use. The IEA has mapped out the cheapest and most effective path to reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement. They find that more than 40% of the reduction in energy- related emissions must come from energy efficiency (IEA, 2018).


This means we need to reuse the heat generated by power stations, factories, and data centres to heat our buildings. We need to make sure our machines run only as much as they need to. And we need to optimise the way we heat and cool our buildings. In other words, we need to stretch every single watt generated from wind and solar as far as we can so we can speed up the fossil fuel phase-out. This problem is underlined by the staggering sums we’re currently paying clean energy generators not to produce power. Since 2021, it’s estimated National Grid has paid out £1.9 billion to curtail wind farms and restart gas-fired power stations closer to the demand. Why? Because grid bottlenecks often mean there’s no way to transmit green electricity from where it’s generated to where it’s needed - namely, the north of Scotland to the south of England. And, adding insult to environmental injury, these costs inevitably fall on consumers, which the Carbon Tracker Initiative projects could increase household power bills a further £200 a year by 2030. Along similar lines, there’s mounting


Winning the war on carbon requires a bold vision and embracing more sustainable ways of thinking


support to replace all existing gas boilers and oil heaters with single home heat pumps. This idea may seem practical, but a recent study in Germany, with a population and climate similar to ours, found that installing tens of millions of individual heat pumps would be substantially more expensive than first estimated, possibly exceeding €1 trillion by 2045. And that’s not to mention the environmental burden of embodied carbon and the materials needed to retrofit every home and business. Clearly, we cannot achieve net zero simply by installing as many solar panels, wind turbines, and heat pumps as we can. Winning the war on carbon requires a bold vision and embracing more sustainable ways of thinking – and that starts with being smarter about how we use resources.


Heat highways in a circular economy Waste heat has all the qualities needed for a low-carbon future: it’s


EIBI | MARCH 2024


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