Hull City Council has granted planning permission for a research and development facility to be built by Ideal Heating to develop technologies like heat pumps.
The £12.5 million UK Technology Centre will be built at Ideal Heating’s headquarters in Hull and will create a testbed for product development, along with the expansion of the company’s R&D team.
The centre is due to start construction in October 2023 and be completed in late 2024, with the R&D centre becoming operational in early 2025.
Ideal Heating said the new facility “represents a significant investment from Ideal Heating and will play key role in the company’s transition to low carbon heating solutions, including heat pumps.”
On August 4, Lord Callanan, Minister for Energy Efficiency and Green Finance visited Ideal Heating’s Hull site “to mark the start of our heat pump production in the UK.” Ideal Heating said the new heat pump production line was part of a £60m investment programme at the site.
Ideal Heating engineering director Helen Villamuera said: “Our UK Technology Centre is part of a major £60m investment we’re making in our Hull site, to support heat pump manufacturing, distribution and innovation in heating technologies.From the outset, Hull City Council has been fully supportive of our plans, which will create highly skilled jobs in the city and expand our existing R&D capabilities.”
“We’re delighted to have secured full planning permission for the UK Technology Centre. We will now begin a competitive tender process to appoint a contractor to deliver this project,” Villamuera added.
The building will be a key site for developing heat pump technology, which the government is aiming to encourage to meet a target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028. Although the number of heat pump installations is increasing, they are currently a long way off the target.
Ideal Heating is one of many training providers that took up the £500 government grants offered to electrical engineers to retrain as heat pump installers.
The new centre’s laboratory facilities will allow Ideal Heating to simulate different scenarios and conditions to test new technologies. The facility is one of a number of new investments Ideal Heating is making at its Hull headquarters.
The company invested £20 million in a heat pump production facility and distribution centre, and is starting to produce a new monobloc heat pump, called Logic Air. They have also opened a £2.2 million training centre outside of Hull which can train up to 5,000 installers a year.
