Ground and Air Source Heat Pumps: the Future for Norfolk

Strides are being made by the Norfolk County Council to harness the benefits of up-and-coming renewable energy sources with their recent decision to create a renewable energy company owned by the Council. The company will start by installing solar panels on council buildings, but it seems more than likely that the success of this will lead to their expansion into the development of ground and air source heat pumps in Norfolk.

With the cuts to the feed-in Tariffs which help prospective solar panel owners, the popularity of heat pumps looks to take over. Air source heat pumps can extract heat from any air above absolute zero, which means that in any weather it can use the heat from outside to heat your home and water supply. Ground source heat pumps can give you the same benefits, drawing heat from beneath the ground without disturbing the ground stability. It can also cool the house as well, acting as a sophisticated temperature control system.

With backing from the Council there could be more incentives for housing associations and public bodies to make more use of the heat pumps. While this may not immediately seem to affect you personally, with corporate and public support for the heat pumps industry it can blossom, such that the developers can improve the efficiency and decrease the cost of heat pumps in Norfolk. Then you can afford the improved benefits of heat pumps in your own home!

Why there will more heat pumps in Norfolk

I touched on this in my previous post but thought I would go into it in more detail. 

In April 2010 the government introduced the feed in tariffs, which reward people with a tax free return on investment who invest in renewable electrical energy (through things such as solar panels). It is a popular and well recognised scheme, now being in place in around 40 countries.  It was this scheme which caught the attention of Norfolk County Council and largely contributed to their decision to set up an independent energy company to oversee their investment and installation of renewable energy sources. 

Now with the renewable heat incentive, the council will most likely take advantage of this scheme too and installing heat pumps on properties with the surrounding space necessary. How the renewable heat incentive works is by you being paid a fix amount for the heat your renewable energy system generates (the amount you get paid will also depend on the type of technology and its size). So there are likely to be many more heat pumps in Norfolk in the future.

Ground Source heat pumps in Norfolk

Norfolk County Council has recently set up an energy company to take advantage of new government incentives (including the renewable heat incentive). Because of this and the fact that Norfolk is a rural county with a lot of space we are likely to be seeing the installation of many more heat pumps. 

There are two main types of heat pumps air source and ground source, in this post I shall be talking about ground source. Ground source heat pumps, as the name suggests, take heat from underground and use it to warm a building, basically using the earth as a heat reservoir. The temperature under the upper 6 meters of the earth’s surface is generally between 10 and 16 °C (depending on latitude). The heat pump does not disturb this, it just harness the heat. This heat actually comes from the sun and gets stored in the ground.

Ground source heat pumps can also be used for cooling in the summer by transferring heat back into the ground. Heat pumps will automatically adjust whether they heat or cool adjusting depending on the outside temperature. Heat pumps are much more energy efficient than electrical heaters, and it is a smart move to have more ground source heat pumps in Norfolk.