The project aims to create a blueprint, showing how the decarbonisation of London’s King’s Cross heat network could scale up for millions of buildings across the country. It’s being carried out by UK Power Networks in collaboration with energy management company Passiv UK and district energy network experts Metropolitan. Swedish energy-tech companies NODA and Crossbreed are supporting Passiv UK in the project.

Heat networks are estimated to cover over 18% of the UK’s heating supply by 2050. The King’s Cross heat network currently delivers heat and power to over 40 commercial buildings, including Google and Nike’s UK headquarters, a university and more than 2,400 residential units.

The smart management of these networks is set to become an increasingly important asset in the wider energy system. The ability to shift the electric heating load over the course of the day, could reduce both peak demand and the potential need for network Infrastructure upgrades, The project will quantify how smarter low-carbon heat networks can use design Innovations and Innovative control strategies to maximise the use of existing network capacity.

Ian Rose, Sales and Strategy Director at Passiv UK, said: “We are excited to collaborate with NODA and Crossbreed in this project to explore how smart control technologies can provide heat networks more demand flexibility and reduce the need for costly electricity network reinforcement.”

By implementing Crossbreed EnergyOS, accurate information will be retrieved from the buildings in the network and all remote control from operational governance of buildings and network will be carried out in a secure and industrial manner.

However, the crucial aspect of the Heatropolis solution is the ability to extract trustworthy insights from the vast amount of the collected data and to enable operational governance through a holistic understanding of the entire system. This is accomplished by leveraging Noda Intelligent Platform and its cutting-edge AI technology. Through continuous analysis and augmentation, Noda facilitates optimisation of the entire energy system, encompassing both power and thermal networks.

Heatropolis is supported by Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund. In the next phase, the project will explore what commercial methods will be needed to help unlock this value and test the feasibility of new technologies.