In the latest round of funding from The Green Heat Network, seven state-of-the-art heating schemes will share a total of £91m to invest in projects which will include Britain’s first geothermal heat network in Cornwall.
Heat networks take heat found underground or generated through manufacturing or waste management, and supply heating and hot water to homes and businesses through a connected network.
The Cornwall scheme – which is run by the council – will extract heat from hot granite rocks 5,275m below Langarth Garden Village near Truro, to provide power and heat to 3,800 homes in the village as well as the Royal Cornwall Hospital, local schools and a leisure centre.
Ryan Law, CEO of Geothermal Engineering Limited, said: ‘We use almost 50% of all energy in the UK for heating, yet most of this is currently gas. The potential of geothermal resources to produce renewable heat from our natural resources will play a large part of decarbonising this form of energy over the next decade. The great thing about a deep geothermal plant is that the heat will always benefit the immediate area surrounding it as it cannot be exported to a grid. Langarth will be an excellent example of a local community directly benefiting from having a geothermal initiative nearby.’
The Green Heat Network Fund is a £288m scheme that opened in March last year and is expected to run until 2025. In contrast to the Heat Networks Investment Project which it replaced, the GHNF scheme only funds projects where there is a low-carbon heat source.
The projects chosen for funding are: