Hitachi Ltd., Daikin Industries Ltd. and Mizuho Bank Ltd. will take part in a demonstration project in the U.K. aimed at expanding the use of heat pumps.
The ¥4 billion ($39 million) project, involving 600 public-housing homes in Greater Manchester, will run for three years starting this year, Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization said in a statement Thursday. U.K.'s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department of Energy and Climate Change is among the other participants.
The project will gauge the effectiveness of electrical or hybrid heat pumps, devices that extract heat from one place and transfer it to another, in cutting heating costs compared with traditional gas-fired boilers, Hitachi, Daikin and Mizuho said in a separate statement
The partners also plan to develop a system to aggregate the load-balancing capacity from heat pumps for trading in the power market, according to the statement.