Nesta and the Energy Saving Trust (EST) are collaborating to share expertise on two projects that will help us better understand the current landscape around heat pump adoption and identify the directions it will take in the future. One project – user journeys – uses analytical and design research to understand the user journey for heat pump adoption. The other – user profiles – employs data science to ascertain whether knowledge of who has currently adopted a heat pump can help inform us about who’s likely to adopt next.

A central element of work in Nesta’s sustainable future mission is to generate and deploy innovation that will reduce carbon emissions from domestic home heating. According to figures from the Committee on Climate Change, space and hot water heating in homes is responsible for about 15% of the UK’s carbon emissions.

Heat pumps are a good solution for the UK’s homes. In many cases they can be linked up to existing radiator systems with not too many modifications. They are highly efficient, much more so than a gas or oil boiler and, if they’re powered by renewable electricity sources, they can be considered completely zero carbon. However heat pump uptake is at present very low, around 30-35,000 installs per year. What’s more, consumer awareness is low and the challenges of getting a heat pump are many and diverse. The aim of our collaboration with the EST is to better understand these challenges so we can work out the best ways to reduce them.

The partnership with the Energy Saving Trust is made up of two approaches.

The user journeys project

This project looks at the process that people go through to obtain a heat pump. We need to know more about what it’s like for householders who choose to adopt heat pumps. We want to understand the challenges that householders who already have heat pumps have faced, as well as those faced by current and potential future waves of heat pump adopters.

By identifying any barriers or attrition they may generate, we’ll be able to better identify where innovation can improve the heat pump adoption process and make it easier for more households to get heat pumps installed.

To do this, we’ll be deploying Nesta’s analytical and design teams alongside experts in customer experience at the EST.

The user profiles project

In this project we use knowledge about who has already installed a heat pump to see what it can tell us about who might take up a heat pump in future. By using data sources such as the database of Energy Performance Certificates issued in the UK alongside other relevant data, we want to experiment with building predictive models that might help us identify or target the next wave of heat pump adopters.

To do this, data scientists from Nesta’s Data Analytics Practice will work alongside those from the EST to examine this problem from different angles.

The aim of this collaboration is to build new, actionable knowledge that will help Nesta, the EST and other innovators in the space to improve levels of heat pump adoption. At Nesta, we will use the findings from our work in conjunction with the EST to create new ideas for innovation. We will also commit to working in the open, both by sharing our findings and by showing how we got to them, so that other innovators can make use of the work we’ve done.