By testing a clean heat plan in Plymouth, we’re aiming to develop more effective policy recommendations for local heat planning. In partnership with Plymouth City Council, the project aims to bridge the gap between strategic energy planning and the implementation of low-carbon heat solutions by creating a draft clean heat plan for a specific area in Plymouth. This serves as a learning opportunity to test assumptions about the value, feasibility, and replicability of granular heat plans.

The goal is to develop replicable methodologies, guidance, and tools that can be used by other areas to plan the switch to low-carbon heating. A key assumption is that heat planning will provide clear signals, raise awareness, and facilitate the delivery of clean heat. The project involves selecting an area, mapping low-carbon heat approaches, engaging with stakeholders and residents and refining the approach and plan based on feedback.

Findings from this project, including recommendations on how to undertake granular heat planning, its value, and any developed tools or guides, are expected to be published later this year.

We gathered data on several wards across Plymouth and decided on an initial focus area. This area sits just outside of the city centre, with a mix of building types and tenures. We mapped local stakeholders, such as charities and social housing providers, and the potential value that a plan may offer, for example, clear direction-setting to guide business decisions. We started discussions with supply chain stakeholders, including heat pump manufacturers and installation companies, to further our thinking on what may be useful from a plan. After drawing up a speculative structure, we ran a workshop with stakeholders from the supply chain to critique the proposal and further our thinking. Our work to date has drawn heavily on our heat pump suitability project, meaning we can create quick feedback loops between testing our suitability dataset and tools in a live context, then using these results to refine our work.

While our findings are still preliminary and will require further validation in the coming months, we have identified some emerging themes below regarding the value and implications of clean heat planning.

Clean heat planning serves as a market signal and an invitation for engagement

A plan should articulate direction and ambition rather than providing definitive answers. Its purpose is to foster confidence in an area's approach and encourage the supply chain to allocate resources accordingly. Even imperfect maps or plans act as a declaration of intent from the council, signalling proactivity and offering a foundation for supply chain analysis. In certain cases, particularly with technologies such as individual air source heat pumps, a plan - coupled with an understanding of demand and local authority buy-in - could lead to companies directly offering solutions to households and play a key role in accelerating and increasing the scale and speed of delivery.

Local heat planning should safeguard consumers and facilitate tailored solutions

Council-led planning can help prevent suppliers from promoting suboptimal technology choices. By ensuring areas have a plan and households can access impartial information, better outcomes for residents can be achieved. We will further explore how households might interact with a local heat plan throughout the remainder of this project.

Identifying the most suitable technology for each home is complex, requiring both human expertise and data analysis

Technology mapping does not need to be flawless, but it must incorporate an understanding of household needs and fuel poverty levels. A plan should maintain a focus on the local context, including market mechanisms and demographics, not solely on technology. This approach could lead to engagement strategies that are responsive to resident concerns and result in higher uptake. Individual priorities should be determined by the local context and will be closely tied to the available funding landscape.

While understanding what technology may be best suited to all properties is a step forward, there is still a gap in feasibility and multi-tenure funding that would enable delivery

Although out of scope for this work, the project has started to build a picture of potential changes to the funding landscape to enable delivery. There were two main takeaways from discussions with the supply chain. One, whether there would be funding for the delivery organisations to develop feasibility reports for particular clean heat schemes, especially those that may rely more on communal infrastructure with high CAPEX. The second is the complex funding landscape, as mentioned in this project update, preventing multi-tenure delivery. We should consider these challenges as we move forward and consider how the process of clean heat planning could interact with wider policy levers.

Our initial work on a clean heat plan has been significantly influenced by our engagement with the supply chain and other local stakeholders. This has led to a plan structure that identifies suitable technology while also engaging the wider supply chain, local skills, and the economy to prepare for delivery. The next phase will focus on the value to households and exploring the wider opportunities presented by a clean heat plan within a unitary local authority as a whole.

A key challenge for the remainder of this project is how to present the information to different audiences. We are exploring various ways for audiences to interact with the plan. For instance, for the supply chain, it could be a technical document detailing the methodology for identifying suitable technology. For households, it might be an interactive map or an address search function.

Moving forward, we will collaborate to leverage data science and digital product approaches. This will help us develop tools to make clean heat planning easier and less resource-intensive, building on our collaboration with colleagues working on heat pump suitability.

To achieve our mission of reducing household carbon emissions by 30% by 2030, we must rapidly increase the installation of low-carbon heating technologies. Our preliminary findings from the work with Plymouth suggest that clean heat planning can help engage the supply chain across different areas. In the absence of clean heat planning, opportunities to develop alternative clean heat models for neighbourhoods might be missed. Enabling more models may result in a more equitable transition across various building types by ensuring the delivery of the most suitable technology for each property.

We will share more of our work in the coming months.