Nesta and Kensa aimed to focus on the practical challenges of delivery first, by creating and demonstrating a service that directly connects end users with utilities and finance providers to deliver low-carbon heating in their home.

Whole-street approaches are likely to play an important role in helping to decarbonise homes in the UK, particularly for flats and more densely populated areas where space may not be available for separate outdoor units such as air source heat pumps.

However, there are multiple complex issues that need to be addressed for this approach to work at greater scale. They include the financial products that are offered to consumers, assessing areas and individual homes, convincing investors and delivery organisations, planning policy and, of course, engaging and working with residents and their homes.

This project sought to identify solutions to some of the problems and test them with real users as one integrated service for consumers. We wanted to demonstrate which changes need to occur across the system and how this could enable whole-street approaches to flourish.

Collective purchasing and coordinated, street-level switching to heat pumps is highly promising in theory, but has not been successfully done at the neighbourhood level in the UK. Some borough-wide purchasing schemes exist for solar PV and energy contracts, but no one has so far developed a way to engage local groups at a small scale, sign them up for infrastructure work and then enable it to be financed in a way that works for households and providers.

Our work tested solutions and demonstrations of new policies across finance, planning and community engagement. It sought to address an interrelated set of issues that are holding back the deployment of street-based heating, creating solutions and defining the evidence required for different stakeholders, such as local authorities, national government, funders, consumers and the utilities industry.

We worked with several communities in the UK to understand the needs and barriers related to participating in group purchasing of heating. We then identified opportunities for potential solutions and develop prototype concepts for services to engage these communities and take them through the sign up process, working with Kensa and local partners.

The project aimed to take residents through a whole sign-up process in order to demonstrate how sufficient numbers of people in one or more neighbourhoods could confidently sign up for shared ground source heating. As a result of this work, Nesta, Kensa and its partners should be able to clearly identify the wider changes that need to happen to make this work at scale, and we can build further versions of this model.