The University has recently been awarded a £50,000 grant from Phase 2 of Salix Finance’s Low Carbon Skills Fund (LCSF2) to undertake a heat decarbonisation study for the Earley Gate side of the Whiteknights campus.
Funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the LCSF2 is specifically focused on helping the public sector make plans for how they can decarbonise their heating systems in the years ahead. The University’s Net Zero Carbon Plan commits it to full decarbonisation of its heating systems by 2030 and with all of the buildings on Earley Gate currently heated with gas boilers, this is no small task.
This is the fourth major grant the University has received from Salix Finance in the last 12 months, with total funds awarded of just under £3.5 million.
The study will explore the potential to reduce heat losses from buildings, as well as to retrofit alternative, heat pump technologies in place of gas boilers. This may be at an individual building level, or potentially through the creation of a small district heating network, which if created, may also be able to link in with some of the non-University owned/operated buildings on site.
This initial study is intended to help the University prepare for future capital grant funding bids and accelerate our progress towards a low carbon future.
Separately, the University is bidding for support in developing plans to begin decarbonising its Energy Centre on the west side of Whiteknights, which it hopes to be able to begin moving forward with as early as next year.
More information on some of the other Salix-funded projects implemented in the last few months is available here.
