Manchester Surveyors – A £20m scheme from Nedo, the Japanese Government’s R&D agency, is set to hit Manchester, involving the replacement of conventional boilers with air source heat pumps – highly efficient electric heaters that absorb heat from the outside air. These will be twinned with a heat store, which is essentially a hot water tank, to allow heat to be stored until it is needed.
The innovation is in the energy management system that will connect all the homes, linked to the electricity grid and using the stored energy from the heaters to balance the load on the electricity network.