What is a heat network?
A heat network, also known as district heating, is a system that provides heating from a central source to customers via underground pipes.
They can be small, serving a cluster of flats on an estate, or huge, serving a whole city or anything in between.
There are thousands of heat networks of various sizes in the UK, and they’re very common abroad. In Denmark around 64% of homes are connected to a heat network.
The issues with older heat networks are well known
- Many dated heat networks use big gas or oil boilers in a central plant room to create high temperature heat.
- These older types of heat networks aren’t good for the environment, and they can be expensive to run.
- Sometimes customers found themselves locked into pricey electricity or gas contracts with one supplier.
Superloop is different, efficient, and future proofed.
Melbourn Energy Superloop is designed to eliminate the problems associated with old style heat networks.
- Runs at a low ‘ambient’ temperature - around 20c - which is ‘topped up’ to the higher temperatures your home needs by your heat pump. This means far less heat loss across our underground pipes network - better for the environment and your energy bills.
- Uses ground source heat pumps sized for each customer’s needs, rather than a one size fits all approach.
- Enables you to choose your own electricity provider and tariff.
- Has a fair and transparent standing charge, tied to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI)
- Let's you stay in control of your heating and hot water temperatures, just as you do now.
How will Superloop be constructed?
To create the network, we need to build a new single storey data centre on the edge of the village connected to local solar energy farms and the national grid.
From the data centre we will dig trenches for pipes around the village – doing this in small sections to minimise traffic disruption.
We’ll connect the pipes to heat storing boreholes, and finally to ground source heat pumps in homes and businesses.
When the network is finished it will be almost invisible as it’s mostly underground.
It doesn’t matter if you’re at number 1 or 43, or how close you are to our main pipes, you’ll get the same temperature network water as your neigbours.
Want to know more detail?
Data Centre
Waste heat from computer chips is moved to water held in our network’s pipes.
Network pipes
Large underground pipes carry warmed water into the village from the data centre.
The pipes get progressively smaller as they branch off to individual streets, boreholes, manifolds, and finally into homes. Each part of the network is carefully designed to make maintenance and control as simple as possible.
Cooled water is returned in pipes to the data centre to be reheated.
The entire network is a ‘closed loop’, so the same water is used over and over. The system is designed to last for many decades with no or minimal maintenance.
Fibre broadband
We’ll be running ultra-fast fibre broadband from the data centre, in the same trenches as our water pipes, minimising construction disruption. This work will offer residents in the village up to 10gb speeds at market beating prices.
Boreholes
Boreholes are drilled where our overall network planning deems them necessary. These deep but very narrow holes will be hard to spot when complete. They can be fitted into very small areas of unused ground.
We loop the network’s thin pipes down and up the boreholes, and the insulating effect of the earth allows us to store heat in the ground.
This makes the network more efficient and helps us even out the temperature across the network.
They’re also there as back up. If one of the data centre’s main warm feeds was ever accidently broken – perhaps by someone else’s road works – homes can run off the stored borehole warmth and still have heating and hot water.
Kensa already install networked ground source heat pumps for new housing estates that run just off boreholes, so you can be confident in the technology.
Street boxes
We’ll need to install street boxes across the village, like those you’ll have seen used for telephone and broadband equipment.
We’ll work to ensure these are as unobtrusive in size and placement as possible.
These boxes will contain vital equipment including a heat exchanger and pumps that control the flow of warmed water to homes and boreholes nearby.
Image Provided Courtesy of Morgan Marine Ltd
Manifolds
Manifolds are buried in the street. It’s here pipes split from the network into different people’s homes. You’ll only see a maintenance cover in the pavement or street.
Ground source heat pump
A Kensa ground source heat pump replaces your gas boiler and is connected to the wider Superloop network. These modern heating systems run on electricity and are extremely efficient, up to 5x more efficient than a gas boiler.
That’s important because a heat pump’s economics depend not just on the price of electricity compared to gas, but on how efficiently the system turns electricity into usable heat.
There’s no loss of efficiency depending where you are on the street, or how close you are to our main pipes. Everyone gets the same temperature water looped through their heat pump.
You can read more about heat pumps here.
Where our heat network’s heat comes from
In many traditional data centres, large amounts of water and electricity are used to cool the computers, with waste heat exhausted into the air.
We view that ‘waste’ heat as a valuable resource. By capturing it we can warm water held in Superloop’s network of pipes.
Sinking the heat into Superloop means the data centre use less power (making it easier to run on solar on the sunniest days) and it helps the community, cutting energy bills, carbon emissions and improving air quality.
It’s an approach that the government’s £15b Warm Homes Report backs:
“Heat networks will play a crucial role in lowering bills and delivering energy security to homes and businesses in densely populated urban areas, or in places near to accessible heat sources which can be tapped into – for example data centres and industrial sites which generate excess heat.” Warm Homes Plan, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero, 2026.
Tried and tested
This isn't new. Around the world, data centres are already helping to heat local communities.
In Odense, Denmark, Meta Platforms (owners of Facebook) supply large amounts of waste heat to a network running beneath the city’s streets.
In West London, data centres will soon help heat 10,000 homes at the Old Oak Common regeneration site. And there are many more…
We’re bringing that same proven approach to Melbourn.
Built to last
Heat networks sound complex but the technology and the construction materials used are extremely robust.
The network’s pipes will last approximately 100 years, and the data centre’s infrastructure will continually be updated, ensuring a continuous source of heat.