A storage solution:
The role of off-peak electric heating in reducing fuel poverty
More than 9,000 homes will benefit from the first payments made by the National Grid’s £150m Warm Homes Fund in an effort to address the UK’s fuel poverty problem. However, electric heating is often left unaddressed from such schemes, resulting in a failure to support many homes that are in need. From inner-city suburbs to remote Scottish islands, Government statistics paint a bleak picture of families, couples and individuals all struggling to heat their homes due to cost.
A person is considered fuel poor if their required fuel costs leave them with an income below the official poverty line. Of course, there are factors outside of heating systems that can contribute to a household living in fuel poverty - insulation, glazing and building fabric, for example, can all play a part, especially in older homes. But the fact remains that too many households are living with outdated or ineffective heating systems in electrically heated homes. In fact, due to their inherent reliability, the average storage heater in the UK is more than 20 years old, and around 70% of the UK’s installed storage heaters are of the old, manually-controlled variants.
Clearly there is no single fix to the UK’s fuel poverty epidemic, but our white paper highlights the most common issues faced by electrically heated homes in relation to their heating system. It also presents some of the existing technologies that could help lift almost 500,000 electrically heated households out of fuel poverty and begin to close the almost £160m fuel poverty gap in the UK.
