Electricity demand flexibility facilitates decarbonisation of the electricity grid and lowers grid investment costs. Schemes and tariffs to incentivise this flexibility are well established for large energy consumers such as industry, but are now becoming accessible to households and household aggregators. Households benefiting from these schemes and tariffs to date have tended to be higher income households; we believe the large-scale deployment of heat pumps in social housing offers an opportunity to broaden access to such benefits.
This 2 year project, funded by Energy Redress, is lead by Carbon Co-op with partners Shortwork, experts in participatory research, and Manchester City Council.
Through the project we’re exploring:
- Optimal usage patterns for heat pumps and batteries, to reduce user bills and/or increase comfort.
- The potential of flexibility within a social housing context, testing response to flexibility events and modelling benefits of Time of Use tariffs.
- Business models for social landlords and community based aggregators.
What we hope to achieve
System benefits
- Increase engagement of social housing tenants in energy transition
- Support energy justice
- Facilitate more renewables and decarbonisation on the electricity grid
Benefits to housing providers
- Improve quality of design and installation of electrified heat
- Work towards a business model for social housing providers to act as electricity flexibility aggregators
Direct benefits to tenants
- Identify opportunities to reduce energy bills
- Improve end user understanding and experience.
We hope to do this by:
- Understanding the experience of tenants with existing heat pumps – the good and bad.
- Better understanding the performance and use of existing heat pumps.
- Supporting tenants to engage with flexibility services.
- Involving tenants in the design of better materials and guidance.
To date the project has:
- carried out in-depth research with heat pump households via doorstep surveys, one-to-one interviews and a series of workshops to better understand the current tenant experience.
- developed a user guide explaining how heat pumps work, recommended usage patterns and the importance of tariff selection.
- installed equipment in tenants homes to allow them to better understand their heat pumps energy use.
- developed a smart metering tool for tenants to allow them to visualise energy costs and compare the costs of their usage against a range of tariffs (including those aimed at heat pump households).
- mapped social housing in Manchester and Salford to DNO flexibility tender areas.
- developed a high level business case for aggregation services by social landlords or community partners to allow flexibility market participation.
Interested?
Our project is now well progressed. At this stage (autumn 2025) we’re looking for housing providers who are doing (or planning) electrification (e.g. through heat pumps, electrical heating and/or hot water storage) and interested in:
- Leveraging flexibility on their housing stock, acting as an aggregator.
- Making use of our heat pump user guide for their tenants (with version 1 due to be published very soon).
For more information, please contact Matt Fawcett matt@carbon.coop or Helen Grimshaw helen@carbon.coop
More information is available on the Project Heat Pump page (tenant facing). The final outcomes of the project will be published at the end of November.