Heating and cooling buildings accounts for 15% of UK carbon emissions, and ground-source heat pumps could slash that figure. These devices work like refrigerators in reverse: for every unit of electricity they consume, they extract three to four units of heat from the ground. The problem is that installing them typically requires drilling deep boreholes, which is expensive and disruptive. The SaFEGround project aims to bypass that cost by embedding heat-exchange pipes directly into civil engineering structures—foundations, retaining walls, tunnel linings—that are already being built. Researchers will combine materials science, heat-pump engineering, and building-energy modelling to work out which structural designs and ground conditions deliver the best performance. If successful, the approach could make ground-source heating cost-competitive with gas boilers, cutting emissions without requiring separate drilling. The impact would be felt in new housing developments, transport infrastructure, and commercial buildings—anywhere concrete is poured anyway. This is applied engineering, not fundamental science: the goal is a practical template that developers and local authorities can adopt immediately.
View original technical description
Through the 2008 Climate Change act, the UK committed to reduce by 80% its carbon emissions. While great progress has been made so far, data suggests that reductions in emissions have been achieved through switching electricity production to greener, more environmentally friendly sources, such as offshore wind. Clearly, it is inevitable that, to achieve further reductions in carbon emissions, we need to look for improvements elsewhere, such as heating and cooling of buildings, which accounts for 25% of all UK final energy consumption and 15% of carbon emissions. Project SaFEGround aims to provide a template for reducing emissions associated to heating and cooling through the deployment of heat pumps. These are efficient devices capable of extracting heat from a storage medium, e.g. air for air-source heat pumps or the ground for ground-source heat pumps, and this is done with high efficiency, since for each unit of electricity consumed by the system, it is usual to get 3-4 units of heat. Clearly, these are more environmentally-friendly than boilers as they require only electricity, which, as mentioned above, is increasingly being generated from renewable and low-carbon sources. Therefore, SaFEGround will investigate how ground-source heat pumps can be coupled with civil engineering structures to deliver low-carbon heating and cooling in a sustainable, safe and efficient manner. To achieve this, SaFEGround will combine research on material science, heat pump technology, energy geotechnics, building energy systems modelling, whole-system modelling and finance, to demonstrate that ground source energy systems can play an important role in the UK's future low-carbon energy mix in a cost-effective manner.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know