As the era of fossil fuel heating comes to an end, we spoke to Professor Aimee Ambrose to learn more about the role of home heating in our daily lives.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself, why did you decide to become a researcher?
After training as a town planner, I worked for several years in practice developing masterplans for the redevelopment of social housing estates in Sheffield. My role included improving the environmental performance of the new housing built in these areas. However, I became disillusioned with the lack of influence I was able to have on developers and frustrated at the poor quality of the housing stock.
An opportunity arose to apply for a research position at the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research and I jumped at the chance. I went on to complete my PhD on domestic energy efficiency while working as a researcher and became Professor of Energy Policy in 2020. I now lead a team of researchers all focussed on social, cultural, and socio-technical aspects of sustainability and nature recovery who are working to collectively inform more effective and ambitious policy responses to the climate and nature emergencies.
Can you tell us about this project?
At higher latitudes, the pursuit of a warm home can form a big part of our lives. Justheat (A Social and Cultural History of Home Heating) is a European research project, through which I lead a consortium which spans four countries: the UK, Sweden, Romania and Finland.
The project aims to use oral history interviews alongside archival research to understand how different approaches to heating the home have shaped our lives and our homes over the last 70 years. We are conducting this research in different types of neighbourhoods, some which are trying to move rapidly to low carbon heating, some which have strong allegiances to fossil fuels and some which face huge barriers to moving away from fossil fuels. Through the research we start to understand in detail the consequences of different types of heating technologies and fuels for the quality of life and prosperity experienced by ordinary households.
When reviewing historic data, we see a lot of unfairness and inequality emerging. For example: women being mostly responsible for the hard labour of keeping the home warm for the rest of the family, and households outside of the coal mining industry struggling to secure sufficient access to fuel whilst mining households enjoyed abundance. These findings remind us that we must take care not to deepen existing inequalities and create new ones when changing the way we heat our homes.
Who are you working with on this project?
We are working with the Universities of Lund (Sweden), Tampere (Finland), Babes Bolyai (Romania) and the University of Sheffield. Within those institutions, we are working with a mixture of historians, political scientists, energy specialists, architects, and engineers.
Perhaps most exciting of all is the fact that we have recruited a network of artists, one in each country, to produce original works of art to support the rest of the project team and the public to see the project’s findings in a different way. Working with the team of artists, led by Dr Becky Shaw, has really enhanced our interpretation of the data we are generating, helping us to see things that we might otherwise overlook from our sometimes narrow disciplinary perspectives.
Why did you decide to embark on this project? What inspired this research?
I have always been concerned with the fairness of home heating arrangements and how they impact our daily lives and I have also always been fascinated by the history of the home. However, I think it was the realisation that we have reached the end of an era in terms of domestic heating that really set me thinking.
For example, house coal was banned in May 2023 in the UK, something that most households won’t even have noticed, as we primarily use gas to heat our homes in the UK. This marked the end of a period of at least 120,000 years where we have been burning solid fuels to enable us to keep warm, heat water and cook food, amongst many other things.
There is now no manual future for heating, with the future set to bring increasingly autonomous digital heating systems that are less prominent within the home and fade largely into the background, rather than being the heart of the home that they once were. It felt important to capture a detailed record of heating in living memory and to use learnings from that to make sure the future of home heating is better for the planet and people.
The University recently launched its Climate Action Strategy. How does your research fit into this?
I really enjoyed being part of the group that put the Climate Action Strategy together. It felt incredibly important to me to be undertaking climate related research at an institution that takes the climate emergency seriously and takes tangible action to not just reduce its impact on the climate and the natural environment, but also uses the knowledge and expertise that resides here for positive effect.
Whilst we were developing the strategy, I used my expertise to encourage the University to go further and deeper in terms of policies on things like waste, greening the campus and its buildings and reducing harmful activities like flying.
Why is changing our home heating methods so important?
Heating can account for as much as 40% of our carbon emissions across the UK and Europe. So, decarbonising our heating systems is crucial to slashing emissions overall. Currently, we rely almost exclusively on fossil fuels to heat our homes. Our homes, in the UK especially, are also very energy inefficient and so we must use more energy to heat them than we would if they were well insulated and more efficient.
This leads not just to high carbon emissions but also to fuel poverty, which leaves many households unable to afford to heat their homes to a temperature which allows them to stay healthy and comfortable. Around 20% of households in the UK are in fuel poverty, which is unacceptable.
Technologies like air source heat pumps are a better alternative to the gas or oil boilers that we currently use, generating four times more heat for the same energy input compared to gas boilers, when installed in a well-insulated home.
Energy invisibility is a focus of your research. Could you tell us a bit more about this, and why it is so important?
Since we stopped using solid fuels, such as coal or wood, to heat our homes and have moved towards automated central heating systems, we have lost touch with how much energy we are consuming when we turn the heating on or up. It is important to reverse these passive attitudes to energy consumption to promote greater environmental citizenship.
What do you hope to achieve through this project? What impact will it have on society?
We hope, amongst many other things, that our findings will make those who are designing our heating futures to think not just about the most technologically and economically viable options for the future of heating but to give the social and cultural ramifications equal consideration. We also hope that our findings will help to show the way to a fairer future for home heating, where fuel poverty and uneven access to adequate warmth between households is alleviated. We also hope to open the eyes of energy researchers and practitioners around the world to the ways in which energy policy decisions about how we heat our homes can have huge ramifications for ‘ordinary’ households and can play out very differently between households and even between different members of a household.
What are the next steps for this project?
We’ve just finished our first of two rounds of data collection and archival research and have come together as an international, interdisciplinary consortium to consider what these emerging findings tell us about how the transition towards low carbon heating should be approached to be socially and culturally acceptable and enhancing. When winter comes, we will be back out in the field, this time in different areas, collecting more oral histories of heating and working out how we can promote dialogue between decision makers and the households on the receiving end of their decisions.
