Powering Parks Toolkit

Harvesting heat from our parks and green spaces

To find out more, first tell us what best describes you:

Welcome to the Powering Parks toolkit. We created it specifically to help those who work for a local authority or manage a greenspace and are interested in investigating and developing opportunities for heat pump schemes in parks.

It’s designed so that you can access the relevant modules to get the information you need, when you need it. It provides guidance, progress aids and background information to help you along the way.

You can find out more about how heat pumps work and get information on everything from opportunity searching to the various benefits of park heat schemes or, if you prefer, you can jump straight to our modelling tool spreadsheet. Here you can input your own data to get estimates of outputs such as heat resource, heat demand, emissions and finances.

Start exploring

Welcome to the Powering Parks toolkit. Although we created it specifically for people working at a local authority, such as park managers and energy managers, we hope you’ll find lots of the information interesting and useful.

If you’d like more background information on what a heat pump is and how it works, then you could start with the ‘All about heat pumps’ section. You’ll find a short video there to get you started.

Or, if you’re aware of heat pumps but would like to know more about how they can work in parks and green spaces in your borough, check out the ‘Basis for action’ section.

If you think there may be opportunities for park heat projects in your area, please recommend this toolkit to your council officers, such as park managers, energy managers and climate change officers.

Start exploring

Or, if you’re aware of heat pumps but would like to know more about how they can work in parks and green spaces in your borough, check out the ‘Basis for action’ section.

If you’re not sure who best to contact, get in touch with the councillor in your area with responsibility for parks, environment or climate change. They should be able to point you in the right direction.

Start exploring

Welcome to the Powering Parks toolkit. It has been designed especially for people working for a local authority, but although some of the sections are very technical, there’s lots of useful information for everyone. And if you think it looks interesting, why not pass the link on to your council? You can find out the best person to contact by speaking to your local councillor - you can find their details here.

In the meantime, check out the ‘All about heat pumps’ section, where you’ll find a short video explaining how heat pumps work, and why they can be great news for parks, our local communities, and for the climate.

Start exploring

Estimating costs

Co-benefits

About Powering Parks

Parks are the perfect place to take kids to play, enjoy a quiet stroll, or have a kick about with your mates. But they cost money to maintain - something councils have less and less of. Parks are also home to a large amount of ambient heat, stored in the ground below the lawns and playing fields. We can harvest this low carbon thermal energy for our buildings with the help of heat pumps.

Powering Parks is a project by Possible, Scene and Hackney Council, piloting the installation of heat pumps in the borough’s parks and green spaces to provide heat to nearby buildings - tackling climate change, improving air quality and generating income to re-invest locally. The project is supported by the Rethinking Parks programme, funded by National Lottery Community Fund, National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Nesta.

This toolkit is designed to help local authorities and park managers with the search for opportunities, with shortlisting of potential sites, and with first-stage assessment of costs and benefits for park heat projects. It’ll help you to decide whether or not to commit time and resources to develop specific opportunities further. The toolkit does not cover the development of technical designs or fully fleshed-out business cases; nor does it offer guidance on procurement or contracting.

The information and guidance in this toolkit is not a substitute for rigorous professional advice, but will help with assessing the feasibility of an opportunity, justifying the “go” or “no go” decision of whether to proceed to the next stage in the project development process.

If you’d like to know more, please contact neil.jones@wearepossible.org