Millions of people worldwide can’t afford to keep their homes warm, but few realise the heat wasted in our energy system could provide the answer.
We need to do more to prevent valuable energy being lost to the environment as heat. It’s not just draughty buildings – power stations lose a vast amount of heat through their cooling towers or dumped into waterways, equivalent in the UK to a third of final energy use, while UK industry wastes enough heat to warm more than two million households. Storing this heat can even help us manage renewable energy – at lower cost than batteries.
A 2013 study by Buro Happold showed that tapping into the waste heat rejected into London’s environment could provide enough warmth for the whole city. What’s needed is a strategy to “join the dots” between waste heat sources and demand for heat using new infrastructure. Early initiatives are currently underway, looking to capture waste heat from the London Underground and from transformers on the power network to heat homes.
