Electrifying Britain – how EDF is supporting customers to electrify their homes
“Electrification is one of the key ways that we can help Britain to achieve net zero,” says Toby Allen, EDF’s director of business development
Reducing the carbon footprint of the country’s 30 million homes is a crucial step towards achieving net zero – and EDF is committed to doing all it can to help.
As Britain’s largest producer of zero carbon electricity, EDF supplies millions of customers with electricity, generating low carbon electricity from five nuclear power stations, more than 30 onshore wind farms and two offshore wind farms.
The company sees home electrification as a vital way to reduce carbon emissions by replacing fossil fuel-based energy sources with cleaner electricity from low carbon sources. In addition, measures like installing heat pumps and solar panels offer cost savings through increased energy efficiency and greater energy security for householders.
“It’s our company purpose to help Britain achieve net zero – and electrification is one of the key ways that we can do that,” says Toby Allen, Director of Business Development at EDF.
“By switching homes from gas to electricity and from petrol and diesel to electricity for cars you’re reducing carbon emissions a lot. It also helps to save cost, both in the short term and the longer term.”
EDF is working hard to increase customer uptake of heat pumps and solar panels by simplifying the installation process.
“We saw this big need from customers,” says Mr Allen. “We want to help in the journey to electrification and we could see that with thousands of different installers it was a complex and problematic space for customers to purchase what they needed – so we decided to bring it in-house.”
EDF has made two major acquisitions, partnering with Clacton-based CB Heating, now known as EDF Heat Pumps, for heat pump installations and with Chorley-based Contact Solar for solar panels and battery installations. This has brought the energy supplier one step closer to being able to offer “whole house” net zero home offers, combining solar, battery, EV charge points and heat pumps.
“We are now installing 25 to 30 heat pumps a week,” says Mr Allen. “And around 40 homes are having solar panels and batteries installed a week with EDF.”
EDF has also introduced special solar and heat pump tariffs to fit with the products they are selling.
“For our solar business we have a solar tariff that is sold alongside the product,” says Mr Allen. “It means that the price you pay for energy varies through the day to match up with when you’re generating electricity or when you need electricity – so it’s reducing your energy costs overall and there are no standing charges or exit fees.
“There are certain times of day when your heat pump needs to be powering up to heat your home so we offer a tariff that matches when we can buy the electricity more cheaply. It means the overall cost of operating the heat pump is much lower.”
The new solar and heat pump tariffs have proved so popular that around half of customers who have installed solar panels and heat pumps through EDF have signed up for them and the company hopes to grow the number even more. The rate of installations is double that of a year ago and the company is confident that it will double again in the next couple of years.
“We see an opportunity to grow in the market but to a certain degree how fast these markets will grow depends on Government policy,” says Mr Allen. “We’ve had some great meetings with the Government already, looking at how we can help to grow both in solar and in particular in heat pumps and we’re looking to work with them to make sure that the right incentives are in place to make that happen.
“The Government’s incentives, particularly around heat pumps, are really important but at the moment we have a situation where some of the incentives to decarbonise work against each other, with some of the costs associated with the move to renewables and paying for the ECO [Energy Company Obligation] scheme disproportionately loaded on to electricity and not gas.
“We’d like the Government to equal out the costs between gas and electricity and stop the clash of incentives making it more difficult to make the case for the switch to electric heating.”
Another measure that EDF would like the Government to look at is making it mandatory for heat pumps to be installed in new homes.
“New homes have very high insulation and are absolutely perfect in terms of installing heat pumps and running them at very low cost,” says Mr Allen. “One of our asks is that we don’t think it’s necessary to put in new gas networks for new homes. New home standards ought to be preparing for an electric future so that the people buying these homes have heat pumps right from the start.”
Heat pumps and solar panels are admittedly costly to install so EDF is doing all it can to make them more accessible, particularly for those who may struggle with the investment.
Since 2022 EDF has helped more than 27,000 households with measures to improve their energy efficiency through the ECO scheme to tackle fuel poverty and help reduce carbon emissions. The ECO initiative obliges medium and large energy suppliers to promote measures that improve the ability of low-income, fuel-poor and vulnerable households to heat their homes.
The current ECO scheme ends in March 2026 but EDF would like it to continue – with more incentives added.
“It’s a very effective scheme for helping very large numbers of people but it could definitely do more,” says Mr Allen. “It’s really important because we don’t want it just to be wealthy households that get the benefit of electrification.”
Similarly, the Government’s Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS) is designed to deliver improvements to the least energy-efficient homes in Great Britain – but EDF has been concerned that the rules around the scheme are far too complex.
“The Government recently confirmed some very sensible changes to GBIS, but the complexity of both the ECO and GBIS schemes could be reduced further under future schemes” says Mr Allen. “If the rules were less complex and easier to implement then the cost of delivering schemes would go down and we’d be able to help more people. It’s in everybody’s interest to make sure this happens.”
