One of Nesta’s focus areas is to help Scotland to reach net zero by 2045 by accelerating the decarbonisation of household activities and to help boost productivity and people’s prosperity by developing skills for green jobs.

This included supporting a 28 per cent reduction in household emission by 2030. This will require wholesale change to the way homes are heated, away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy.

One of the problems, however, is that mains gas, which makes up 81% of Scottish household heating fuel (11 per cent use electricity and 5 per cent use oil), is a very effective way to heat poorly insulated and drafty homes. And the UK’s homes are some of the worst performing in Europe.

With an objective to identify the barriers to installing low carbon heating technologies within existing housing stock in Scotland and the steps required to overcome them,  Nesta asked Energy Systems Catapult to test some of their assumptions about the suitability of different property types’ for ground and air source heat pump installations:

• Low-carbon domestic heating options will be costly to install.
• The running costs and effectiveness of heat pumps will vary in different types of properties.
• There is a portion of Scotland’s housing stock for which heat humps may not be a viable heating option at all.
• Older tenement flats (which are around 28 per cent of urban housing stock in Scotland) pose particular problems to become sufficiently energy efficient and to site and install a heat pump.