Have your say on new technologies to reduce heating bills

16/05/2023

Eastlight Community Homes has joined the SHIELD project to investigate the potential of using technology to reduce residents’ heating bills and our carbon footprint.

SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) is a partnership of organisations which wants to pilot established and new energy technologies in some Eastlight homes to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions.

In the project’s first phase, Eastlight tenants are being invited to support this work by completing a short survey or agreeing to have a 30-45 minute conversation with a team member from SHIELD.

How to get involved

  1. If you are an Eastlight tenant, please click here and fill in this short questionnaire. It takes about six minutes to complete and asks you questions about your energy use, any challenges you face and whether you would like to find out more about
  2. Sign up for a 1:1 session with a SHIELD team member. In this session, you will learn more about the technologies we plan to use and how they work. We will ask for your feedback on these ideas. The session will last 30-45 minutes. We will give you a £10 Boots Voucher to thank you for your time.

What technology could be used to reduce energy costs?

1) A distributed data centre that can provide all the heat and hot water a house needs for £300 per year 

2) A smart battery that works with other batteries to sell energy and other services to the National Grid

3) A new kind of wind turbine that sits on the ridge of the roof, generating energy from the flow of wind over the roof

4) A heat battery (like an electrical battery, but that stores heat)

What happens next with SHIELD?

There are potentially three phases to SHIELD. Funding has been secured for the first phase, and SHIELD will be applying for funding for phases 2 and 3:

Phase 1 - discovery. Alongside the survey and interviews, this involves working out the best way to combine the technologies mentioned above so they can be installed in a home. We are also modelling the potential reductions in energy costs and carbon emissions of installing these technologies.

Phase 2 - detailed design. If approved, this starts in October 2023.

Phase 3 – implementation. If funding is secured, the technology will be installed into 300 Eastlight homes as part of a large pilot programme.

Who is involved with SHIELD?

The following organisations are involved in this project: