Bruno Cardenas secures prestigious research fellowship

Dr Bruno Cardenas recently secured a prestigious fellowship to lead a project to explore the decarbonisation of space-heating, a key challenge for our journey to net zero.

The “High-Performance Hydrogen-Powered Heat Pumps” (HP3) project has received over £390k of funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and will see Bruno combine a hydrogen boiler with a heat pump cycle into a single, fully integrated system to deliver a large amount of low-temperature heat for space heating using only a small amount of hydrogen. 

These systems can offer the best of both worlds:

• They enable us to continue to exploit the existing gas infrastructure but in a clean way
• They avoid overwhelming the electricity grid 
• They give us the very high efficiencies of heat pumps

 
Another key feature of the HP3 systems is that they can generate electricity by sacrificing some of their heat output.  In the future, houses where HP3 systems are installed will be able to export electricity to the grid at the very time when energy is most valuable to reduce the stress caused by electrical heat pumps being used in other houses. This is a neat way to couple the gas and electricity networks together.
 
This concept proposed in Bruno’s fellowship has been very well received by the Department for Energy and Net Zero, National Grid Gas and the European Heat Pump Association. Bruno has also received support from Clausius Heat Pumps, the Midlands Energy Hub and utilities such as Scottish Power and SGN. 

To enquire about this project contact Bruno Cardenas.