If you switch from a gas boiler to a heat pump, or from a petrol car to electric, how much carbon will you save, and what will it cost? It's not easy to tell, but the Future Energy Tool is here to help.
The tool has been designed to help whole communities to establish a community scale picture of domestic energy usage, carbon emissions and energy costs, and to understand what types of low carbon interventions and scale of action are required to achieve a local net zero energy system by 2050. The tool will help you in setting ambitions, facilitating community scale planning and proposing collective and individual household action for a net zero future.
But it is just as much about engaging a community in a vision to reach net zero as it is about planning and taking the necessary actions.
We recommend that you download and read the step-by-step guide on how to use the tool, here.
It shows you how to set up your community in the tool, navigating through the different stages. It provides guidance on what information is required about your community and where to find it so that you can tailor the tool to the specifics of your community. Examples are included to demonstrate how WREN has applied this process to set up the Wadebridge and Padstow Community Network Area.
Once you have created a community in the tool, you can explore what impact different decisions about adopting net zero technologies will have on the community's pathway to net zero and in particular the impact that is made by the timing of those decisions. The tool estimates the current and future annual energy requirements of the whole community, along with the associated cost and carbon emissions.
When you have defined and agreed a pathway in your community, you can share the tailored model with people within the community, so they can plan their own individual journey to net zero and take their own individual actions.
The transition to net zero is not just about a tool. We have also produced a wider Guide for Communities which you can download for free here.
The tool, user guide and Guide for Communities is an output of Net Zero Community (NZCom) work package of ‘Project Vulnerability and Energy Networks, Identification and Consumption Evaluation (VENICE)’, National Grid Electricity Distribution’s first innovation project focussed wholly on customers, and in particular those with vulnerabilities. For more information about Project VENICE visit the National Grid website.
You can find more reports produced by NZCom on the Project Workstreams page.
Introduction Participants Project Workstreams Events Future Energy Tool
