What if switching to a heat pump didn’t mean a hefty upfront cost, a stressful installation, or a breakdown at 11pm in January that’s somehow your problem to sort? What if you just paid for warmth — a guaranteed, comfortable home — for a predictable monthly fee, with a low carbon system designed, run, and maintained by someone who actually has skin in the game? That’s the promise of Heat as a Service (HaaS), and it might be closer to reality than you think.

 In this episode, Kev is joined by Tom Wigg, Senior Advisor in the Net Zero Homes platform at Energy Systems Catapult, for a genuinely fascinating conversation about one of the most exciting — and underexplored — ideas in the UK's transition to net zero.

 Tom explains how HaaS turns the traditional domestic heating model on its head. Rather than purchasing a heat pump, managing your own energy supply, and hoping the installation was done properly, a service provider designs, installs, and runs a low carbon heating system for you — taking on all the risk and complexity, while guaranteeing the outcome you actually care about: being warm and comfortable in your home.

The conversation covers a lot of ground, including:

• Why HaaS isn't one thing — it’s a spectrum of options, from simple output-based contracts to fully managed outcome-based services
• The ‘servitization’ concept: why home energy has been slow to follow in the footsteps of Netflix, Spotify, and mobile phone contracts
• How service providers can unlock new revenue through flexibility markets — aggregating demand from thousands of homes to stabilise the grid and pass savings back to consumers
• The social housing opportunity: why models targeting vulnerable households could deliver some of the most meaningful wins for fuel poverty and social value
• The data challenge: why a portfolio of 10,000 homes generates something far more powerful than 10,000 individual smart meters
• Consumer control: what it really means to hand over your heating system — and why the best service providers will make sure you never want it back
• The skills gap, the regulation gap, and why the spark gap (the price difference between electricity and gas) remains one of the biggest barriers to making this fly
• What success looks like in 2036: Tom’s vision of HaaS becoming as unremarkable as a mobile phone contract

There's also a candid moment when Kev reveals his own heat pump installation didn't go entirely to plan — and why that's actually a perfect argument for why this model needs to exist. 

Whether you're a sustainability professional trying to understand where HaaS fits in the decarbonisation toolkit, a developer or housing association weighing up your options, or simply someone who’s curious about what the future of low carbon heat delivery actually looks like in practice, this one’s worth your time.

Things mentioned in the show:

•  Energy Systems Catapult
• Green Finance Institute
• Citizens Advice — Report on third-party ownership models for home energy
• Connected Response — innovator working on smart storage heaters in social housing
• Sero — innovator delivering heat pump + PV + battery in social housing with comfort charge model

Website: https://www.hut22.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-couling/

Music credits:
March of the Bold by Balloon Planet (via Artlist.io)
Check out their stuff here: https://soundcloud.com/balloon-planet