tepeo secures £1 million funding to optimise its award-winning technology for mass manufacture
Wokingham-based tepeo, inventor of the award-winning Zero Emission Boiler (ZEB®), has secured funding for a £1 million project with grant funding from Innovate UK. The project will enable it to conduct deep research into the ZEB’s core technology, with a focus on optimising it for high volume manufacture. The Innovate UK funding package, granted as part of the Knowledge Transfer Partnership programme, is part of a £7m scheme to support British foundation industries.
tepeo’s ZEB is an easily-installed, affordable electric alternative that works with any thermostat and matches the high temperature and power performance of gas or oil boilers for domestic heating purposes. The ZEB’s combination of electric heating and thermal storage works together with its intelligent controls so that the electricity needed for heating is only consumed at the cheapest and greenest times of the day - the energy is then efficiently stored until needed.
ZEBs are currently only available for immediate purchase locally to the company’s headquarters in Berkshire but demand is high and growing rapidly nationwide so the company plans to expand its coverage later this year.
Johan du Plessis, founder and CEO, said “tepeo is leading the way in developing compact sensible heat storage technology for domestic use and we are delighted to have been recognised as such. This research is a vital step toward enabling large scale adoption of our ZEB technology and we are building a great project team to achieve it.
As the nation works towards net zero, renewables must play a significant role but in 2020 the National Grid spent over £280m on curtailing wind generation because energy storage was simply not available - devices like the ZEB will play a huge role in reducing and hopefully eliminating this wastefulness.”
ZEBs on test at tepeo’s production facility in Winnersh
Notes to Editors:
tepeo is tackling the UK’s biggest challenge to achieving its Net Zero target: rapid and low cost decarbonisation of domestic heating. Our invention, the ZEB (Zero Emission Boiler), is a low carbon, affordable, easily installed replacement for a fossil fuel boiler. It combines electric heating with ultra-high density dry core thermal storage to deliver the performance of a fossil fuel boiler without the associated emissions and it uses the existing radiators, pipework and insulation of a home’s existing central heating system.
The ZEB’s thermal storage is managed by smart tech that controls when it is charged up using 100% efficient electric resistive heating elements. The heat can then be released, as needed, in a controlled manner using tepeo’s patent-pending heat transfer technology. This means that the ZEB can decouple electricity demand from heating demand and take advantage of green and/or variable (“time-of-use”) electricity tariffs. The charge cycle of the ZEB is automatically optimised to minimise cost and carbon using Machine Learning to accurately forecast individual heat usage patterns for each home. The ZEB’s flexibility also supports self-consumption of renewables and supports balancing of the electricity grid.
The ZEB is regularly featured on the popular low-carbon technology Youtube channel ‘Fully Charged’. It has won awards such as the EDF Pulse Innovation Challenge 2020 and was runner-up Innovation of the Year in the BusinessGreen Leaders Awards 2021.
Innovate UK drives productivity and economic growth by supporting businesses to develop and realise the potential of new ideas.
We connect businesses to the partners, customers and investors that can help them turn ideas into commercially successful products and services and business growth.
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Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs): KTPs or Knowledge Transfer Partnerships http://ktp.innovateuk.org is Europe's leading programme helping businesses to improve their competitiveness by enabling companies to work with higher education or research and technology organisations to obtain knowledge, technology or skills which they consider to be of strategic competitive importance. The UK-wide programme is overseen by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, and supported by 16 other public sector funding organisations.
