Earth Notes: Pint, Poster, Paper: Slice-and-Dice Heating Decarb (2026)
Updated 2026-09-26.: Pint of Science
I was encouraged to do a second Pint of Science public talk, for . I picked a topic on the spur of the moment that I thought should be interesting. The organisers entitled the slot The Future of Home Heating and a Greener UK. The talk's published blurb/abstract was:
Heating our homes creates around 15% of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, so most of us will eventually switch to heat pumps. But there's a twist: while heat pumps are great for the planet, they could double peak electricity demand—right when our increasingly renewable grid is at its most unpredictable. So how do we keep the lights on and the carbon down? In this lively talk, discover why flexible energy use is essential, how it strangely resembles financial derivatives trading, and the simple actions you can take tomorrow to support a cleaner, smarter grid—even if you're still using a trusty old gas boiler.
See the slides [PDF]
The "help the grid even with a gas boiler" item was to have your heating scheduled to be off maybe an hour either side of , which is peak winter domestic demand. The grid will be relieved of the load of your boiler's circulation pump, which is not huge but it is not nothing: the entire grid has to be sized and costed to cover that peak.
: Conference Poster
I thought that I could try to extend this to be a bit more formal, and present it at my university's internal PGR/ECR (Post Graduate Researcher / Early Career Researcher) conference.
I was accepted for a poster presentation, which I have not done before!
See the (A0!) poster [PDF].
For a future poster I would want to improve the story-telling so that it works better when I am not present to explain. But I had interesting discussions as-was!
: Formal Paper
It took the best part of a month to (in tandem with the poster) bring the work up to be a plausible academic journal paper, and then another three months of revisions and proofing, from that throw-away 30-second Pint-of-Science thought! I submitted a journal article According to the journal's process and timings, if my paper is accepted, it may take until to be published. As of today the on-line progress tracker shows: As of today: As of today: I am pleased that all the reviewers found some merit in this paper. The review challenges are thoughtful and interesting. I have some work to do! But a week away at a festival first. For one knotty schematic diagram requested I realised that I have at least three tools to hand that might make sense: In the end I went with That was a huge chunk of work. I should try not to casually assign myself months' labour on a paper idea whim again, unless I really want to... That was fast! Reviewer 3 gave further response today! My second music festival this year slowed me down for this one, but it is in: Soon: At around this point the abstract was, before being 'structured' in round 3: Late morning: Some very specific points from the Editor and Editorial Office, one of which I was worrying about anyway a little... I was not able to respond to Reviewer 3's remaining concerns, and keep the paper within its intended original scope. That is uncomfortable, and may result in a rejection: we will see. And the status has moved on to: Which by the time I checked the next morning was: Early afternoon: Arrived mid-morning from the journal... Three days of proof merging and corrections, updates returned this evening! Just checking/correcting the bibliography took the whole first day! Remaining minor points of date formats, linking out to repositories, and the structured abstract. Resubmitted after a quick check from my supervisor, and a hasty fix to some graphics shading that seems unreliable under macOS 27. Back and forth with a few more tiny issues such as another image tweak, and a quote that came from an email circular having to be redone... This may have come from me adding it manually to my ORCID list, for example because it contains the abstract whereas the journal's downloadable BibTeX citation entry does not, or may have come direct from the journal's data feed. It looks as if the citation data has propagated from the journal to my Google Scholar profile, granting my previous paper a self-citation! Journal timeline...
: submitted
Grid Flex Rhymes With Derivatives Trading: an Observation
to a journal that I had not seen before, nominally for a special edition. : one review
One reviewer has reviewed your manuscript
: three reviews
Three reviewers have reviewed your manuscript
: with the Editor
The Editor is reviewing feedback from reviewers
: first round of revisions requested
: diagrams
picture or tikz systems, already both in use already in the paper. picture mode, since I was able to import (with adjustments) two parts of the diagram from previous work. : submitted revisions
Second round of revisions
: resubmitted
Reviewers are assessing your revisions
. The Editor is reviewing the feedback from reviewers
! To eliminate the ~15% of UK greenhouse gas emissions due to home heating most such households will move to heat pumps by 2050. But electrifying heating will roughly double peak demand on the grid while green intermittent renewables such as wind and solar make available generation less predictable. Most of us will need to learn to flex our home space heat and hot water and other electricity demand else we will pay a high premium, but we do not all have to flex in the same ways at the same times to support the greening grid. Householders have varying agency in mental energy and interest and capital on hand, but individual contributions will be and already are guided and aggregated with tools such as time-of-use tariffs of varying complexity and dynamic control of loads by electricity suppliers. This has some analogues to financial derivatives trading and structuring, and the energy system should pay heed to its experience and mistakes. This conceptual observation illustrates how diverse techniques, evidenced in one net-energy-exporting case study home with a largely set-and-forget system sympathetic to the behaviour of the household, usefully bends its electricity load curve away from that of a typical home.
The Editorial Office is reviewing your revisions
... : third round of revisions
: submitted
Reviewers are assessing your revisions
. The Editorial Office is reviewing your revisions
. : accepted!
Congratulations! Your manuscript was accepted for publication
. : copy back for proofreading
: proofs returned
: back with me
: detritus
: published!
Your manuscript was published on Mon, Sep 21, 2026
. : available add to my Google Scholar publications
: citation data from the journal?
The paper
Grid flex rhymes with derivatives trading: an observation
[hart-davis2026flex] and some of the supporting material and a local copy of the paper.