Sheffield has the largest district energy network in the UK. The City’s heavy industry means significant amounts of waste heat from industrial processes are emitted to the atmosphere. We are looking for innovative solutions to capture and store that heat for use by domestic, commercial and industrial consumers connected to the City’s heat network. Decentralised energy, particularly in the form of heat and its decarbonisation, forms a central pillar in our strategy.

The network is currently working at full capacity and is not taking on any new connections. We are tackling this in 3 ways:

• Improving the efficiency of the network
• Connecting in new heat sources to boost capacity
• Developing options for heat storage to meet peak demand

To facilitate the growth of the network we want to capture the energy emitted into the atmosphere by Sheffield’s industrial buildings and develop heat stores in the city to reduce the need for gas top-up at peak times. These heat stores, or accumulators, could be either large scale stand-alone or individual heat stores next to properties that the network currently supplies. These stores will maximise the efficiency of heat generation and improve the resilience of the network overall.

To realise the benefits of the heat networks, the City needs to better understand the technical solutions, feasibility and cost-benefit of heat stores which address resilience at the network scale and the building scale (to protect vulnerable buildings like hospitals and research laboratories). We are looking for proposals which set out the options for heat capture and storage from industrial processes to serve existing, and future heat-network customers.