Heat share plan for Oxford University laboratories could cut bills and emissions

That is the vision of Oxford University and Oxford City Council, which have jointly funded a £136,000 study into the feasibility of creating a heating network.

And one day, the system could even extract the warmth of the River Thames using a heat exchanger and power the city using one of its oldest natural resources.

The feasibility study has been led by the city council’s energy and climate change team leader Paul Robinson.

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He and his team looked at heat consumption for 195 buildings around the city and discovered the hottest properties by far were Oxford University’s laboratories, in the science area around Parks Road.

Mr Robinson said: “The first phase would be there – that’s where we’d get the most bang for our buck.”

Under the scheme, any shops, offices and labs that hooked-up with new, heavily-insulated underground water pipes could save up to 20 per cent on heating bills.

Buildings could just plug into each other’s existing boilers to share excess heat, and once the buildings were connected, they could all switch to use a shared, central energy centre running at much greater efficiency.

That centre could then run on a low-carbon fuel like woodchips to save even more carbon emissions.

Oxford City Council created this heat map of Oxford 

At the moment, the council is only looking at non-domestic buildings like shops and offices because the cost of plugging into homes can make it a lot less efficient.

But once the system is up and running, it could be expanded to serve flats and houses.

Technically, Mr Robinson said you could even use excess heat from Cowley’s BMW plant to heat homes in Blackbird Leys.

But he cautioned: “So much of it is about the specifics – what is underneath the roads for example.

“At the moment we’re just saying: ‘This is the scale of the opportunity.’”

Council engineers are now looking very closely at route options – the cost of digging up road is huge compared to the cost of digging up grass. The study has been going for nine months already and the final report is due at the end of March.

If it concludes the whole project is feasible, the council would then have to start looking for investment for the construction costs.

A new body or partnership would need to be set up to own the system – it could be privately owned, crowd-funded or even owned by the local authority.

Oxford City Council’s board member for a “cleaner, greener Oxford” John Tanner said: “If this study gives us the green light this would be the biggest single contribution Oxford could make to a low-carbon future. It is so important we come up with low-carbon schemes which save energy and make Oxford more efficient and if we could find a way of using surplus heat generated by BMW and hospitals and university buildings and using it more efficiently, everyone would benefit.”

Oxford University head of environmental sustainability Harriet Waters said: “A heat network in the city has the potential to make a significant contribution to achieving this target, and the university has partnered with the city council to co-fund this feasibility study.”