The heat is on

It’s funny how some things seem to crop up in your life and take you down new and interesting paths.  Heat has become a recurring theme in our work recently and so I thought I’d draw together some of the strands in one neat blog!

This week, the CHPA announced their name change to the Association for Decentralised Energy to better reflect both its central role in the UK’s decentralised energy transition across the industrial, public, commercial and domestic sectors and the wide range of its members’ interests and focus.  The CHPA/ADE is one of our longest standing (and favourite!) clients: we first ran their conference and awards dinner in 2008.  The conference evolved into the Heat Conference in 2012, co-hosted by the Energy Institute, and the 2015 event – to be held on 25^th November – will see it return bigger, better and more compelling than ever before. 

Through 2014 we also developed a relationship with DECC’s Heat Network Delivery Unit.  Established in 2013, HNDU is unique in the way in which it’s brought industry experts into Whitehall to create a support framework for local authorities.  The team grew rapidly in its early days and so we were brought in to help them take stock of all that they’d achieved, to recognise their strengths (and weaknesses) as a team and to plan their direction of travel for the next 6-12 months.  This then lead to us going on the road with HNDU to deliver three promotional workshops towards the end of 2014 for local authorities who have yet to benefit from their funding and support. 

Heat networks are also of growing interest to local authorities, and so in December we invited Casey Cole of Guru Systems to give a cross-industry perspective to a joint meeting of the London HECA Forum and the London Boroughs Energy Group (LBEG).  We’re the secretariat for both groups so it was great to be able to bring them together for discussions and networking: there are already plans afoot to hold another joint meeting at the end of 2015.

We’ve also been taking a look at community-level heat projects, through the scoping project we carried out for DECC and Community Energy England into one of the promises in the Community Energy Strategy.  The Strategy recognises that community energy groups and projects would benefit from better access to information and support that would help take projects from ideas to reality and includes the idea of establishing an information resource to help build capability and capacity within the sector.  Our scoping study mapped the information, advice and support already available to community energy groups and identified the role that an information resource could play and the benefits it could bring.  The call for proposals to provide this service was published by DECC at the end of December, and we await with baited breath to see how it will unfold!