Talk title: CommuniHeat: Working with communities towards net zero carbon emissions
Speaker: Helen Robertson, Buro Happold
Event: CIBSE Scotland Conference 2026: Heating the Future, 27 May 2026
Video: https://youtu.be/ybJMAiZ5hFc

[00:00] It's been so nice to hear about really local projects. You're so familiar with the towns and cities that we have been speaking about today. I'm going to cover a village in the south of England. No. So I am Helen Robertson, a senior energy engineer at Bureau Happold and I'm going to be presenting a project called CommuniHeat. The project focuses on helping rural communities transition towards net zero carbon through climate change. The project focuses on helping rural communities transition towards net zero carbon through climate change. The project focuses on helping rural communities transition through coordinated planning. I'll be focusing on one village in England as a blueprint to show how coordinated planning can reduce their carbon footprint and improve energy costs. But before I jump into that I'll just have a brief, briefly introduce Bureau Happold. For those that don't know, Bureau Happold is a global engineering consultancy and we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year.

[01:05] There are around 3500 employees across the globe working across a wide range of disciplines that you can see on the slide. So my background, I worked for Sweco for a bit as a building services engineer and then moved into vertical farming for a few years. But I've recently joined the energy consultancy team at Bureau Happold in Edinburgh and we're a team of around six engineers across the UK working on all different types of projects that have been covered throughout the day. So you can see the multiple services offerings and a few of our example projects. So as I said, I'll be speaking about a village in East Sussex today called Barkham. I don't think that's how they pronounce it, but that's how I'm going to.

[02:01] This project is to create a blueprint for decarbonising off-gas grid communities. I was surprised to find out that in the UK there are around 4 million homes that are off-gas grid and where many of these homes rely on oil for heating. So hopefully you can see how that really relates to Scotland where we've got a huge amount of homes that are rural. So this project was a partnership between Bureau Happold, Community Energy South, UK Power Networks, but mainly working with the residents in the village to deliver a blueprint with them to decarbonise their community.

[02:52] So the first part of the project was understanding the community. Their household carbon footprint is almost double the national average, and a lot of which arises from burning oil for heat generation. The other reason this community was chosen was because they were really highly engaged, and that's key for this project to collect real information about the housing stock.

[03:17] You can see from the graphic that it started with receiving information from the community to map the village, so we could do that really detailed financial analysis. So we could do that really detailed financial analysis. So we could do that really detailed financial analysis. So we could do that really detailed financial appraisal. And then it ends with creating a digital twin of the village, and then the circular approach is allowing that information in the digital twin to be updated and reviewed by all the stakeholders.

[03:46] So initially data was collected from the usual sources of weather station data, energy loggers, but you can see that a lot of the homes actually had energy performance certificates. But as well as the publicly available data, it was key to ask the community to complete questionnaires and actually go into the houses and conduct room-by-room surveys to make the modelling as accurate as possible.

[04:19] So by collecting this data, it allowed the team to get a really good understanding of the building stock in the village, and it was decided to group the homes into the five categories, as you can see. So these were grouped by age and building type. So grouping the houses into these categories allows the creation of bespoke heat profiles and retrofit costs. So they're not just blanket across all houses, they're grouped by age and building type. You can see in the graph that a lot of the houses fall into some of the lower EPC bands and we found that over half of the existing housing stock are deemed poorly insulated. So as you can imagine, there's a really strong potential for improving that building fabric and allowing more houses to install heat pumps.

[05:19] So just a quick graphic to show the existing scenario. You can see that the houses are heated by oil. There's a lot of heat in the building. There's a lot of heat in the building. There's a there's a very small amount of solar PV, but it's really a fossil fuel dependent community, like many rural villages across the UK.

[05:41] So the heart of the project was creating these two pathways to decarbonisation.

[05:48] So we decided it wasn't reasonable to just compare to the existing scenario because you can make anything look better than burning oil. So we created two scenarios. One was a realistic, gradual uptake where residents led the change. So they were adopting the new technologies themselves, upgrading building fabric independently over time with the assumption that the uptake would be irregular and led by market.

[06:21] And we were comparing that against scenario two, which was... A community-wide intervention, so that involves the community coordinating the uptake of interventions, using government support and shifting to a community-wide energy strategy. If any of you have been involved in creating techno-economic models, you can imagine how difficult it is to assign high, medium or low uptake and balance that with the different building stops.

[06:52] And balance that with the different building stops.

[06:58] So that was what was at the heart of this, was taking the time to do that, to create these two really realistic scenarios that we could compare against. So I've put these side by side so you can see, as expected, the uncoordinated model on the left. It has been upgraded since the existing scenario.

[07:25] But with only low uptake of retrofit, a small amount more PV, but there's not that community energy generation. Whereas on the right-hand side, in the coordinated model, you can see that there's a much higher uptake of low-carbon technology, and it's connected across the village.

[07:43] And it's connected across the village and the scenario creates opportunities for larger renewable energy schemes to be introduced with community energy financing which couldn't be done just leaving the residents to fend for themselves.

[08:02] So focusing more on that coordinated approach I was really surprised to see, to be honest the households at the end of the day they could save up to 30% on energy bills and that is not comparing to burning oil that's comparing against a realistic approach to the village upgrading independently.

[08:30] So the reason that they could save so much on energy bills is that with all the data they could target the approach to building fabric retrofits and only improve the homes that could improve the most and allow them to install more heat pumps and they also obviously saved a huge amount of carbon per year.

[08:58] So in the final parts of the project was creating a digital twin and this allows all the stakeholders throughout the project to make sense of the vast amount of data in the model. It allows everyone, to be involved in the project, to visualise information and understand the system as a whole. And the team really found that this was key to keeping the community engaged with the project as they could understand how their property interacts with the system as a whole.

[09:30] And that could continue through the lifecycle of the heat network. So just to summarise the key insights, firstly, it was just so important to take the time and effort to really understand the make-up of the buildings in the community and allow the modelling to be as accurate as possible.

[09:56] The next point is we learned how being strategic about the transition from early on in the project can reduce overheads for all the stakeholders.

[10:06] And thirdly, it was about that partnership and community engagement. Although there's publicly available and publicly available, and we could see that a lot of the houses had EPCs, it's just really important to refine that where possible with real input from the residents and keep them engaged. And finally, we realised the benefit of using digital planning tools to help align the rollout of the community and network assets.