MCS Foundation awards £500,000 to projects helping scale up low-carbon heating and home energy improvements

Thursday 5 November 2026:The MCS Foundation has awarded half a million pounds in grants to ten innovative projects carrying out research and running pilot programmes that are working to ensure every UK home benefits from being carbon free.  

This year, more than 80 organisations applied for funding for work addressing one or more of four key themes: 

• The role of heat pump system efficiency and flexibility 

• How to better utilise data 

• Ways to support commissioning organisations to deliver low-carbon heating 

• How to use comfort as a driver for retrofit demand 

We are delighted to announce that grants have been awarded to: 

• Centre for Sustainable Energy: testing whether messages focused on home comfort can encourage households to take action on retrofit. 

• Changeworks: bringing together data on homes, residents, supply chains and finance in the Scottish Highlands to help communities plan and deliver retrofit across different housing tenures. 

• Datblygiadau Egni Gwledig: working with six Welsh-speaking communities to test comfort-focused messages that encourage home energy improvements and producing a bilingual toolkit for the retrofit sector to use in communicating about comfort. 

• Leeds Beckett University: testing practical approaches to commissioning, snagging and post-installation support to improve performance, resident experience, and delivery outcomes in social housing. 

• Leeds Beckett University: investigating how long different homes retain heat, to help electricity network operators make better use of flexible heat pump operation without compromising comfort. 

• Matrix Academy: piloting an 80-hour practical heat pump training programme with independent assessments, to improve installer competence and reduce installation errors. 

• Mixergy: modelling and testing how smart heat pump controls can reduce peak electricity demand and help network operators avoid costly grid upgrades. 

• Newcastle University: creating a digital model of council homes to test whether heat pumps, solar panels and batteries can generate enough savings and income to help social landlords fund wider deployment. 

• Passivhaus Trust: exploring how the retrofit industry can communicate the comfort benefits of insulation and heat pumps more effectively, and developing guidance based on the findings. 

• Regen: examining how heat pump installation quality and flexible operation affect electricity network costs, to inform future policy and standards. 

This takes the total amount The MCS Foundation has provided in grants since 2018 to more than £4 million, supporting those working on practical solutions to scale up the transition to electric homes and ensuring every home benefits from being carbon free. 

Alastair Mumford, Programme Director at the MCS Foundation, said, “Congratulations to every organisation being awarded grants today.  We’re delighted to again be making a substantial investment in projects that are tackling key challenges that need to be overcome to make UK homes healthy places to live, affordable to run. and low-carbon. 

 “From helping people to engage with the benefits of an electric home of the future to understanding the business case for those changes, these projects have the potential to make a real difference. 

“There will now be an opportunity to turn the lessons from these projects into changes that can be adopted across the country. By sharing what works, we can help more households benefit from clean energy and accelerate the transition to carbon-free homes.”