The Manufacturing Technology Centre has invested £1.3m in nearly 2,000 solar thermal collectors at its Coventry site, as reported by The Chemical Engineer, giving manufacturers a working example of renewable heat designed into a modern building system and expected to be the largest installation of its kind in the UK.

The MTC said the 1,277 square metre rooftop farm will generate up to 786kW of heat for the site’s buildings and serve an absorption chiller providing summer cooling, and that it will reduce annual emissions by up to 37 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.

The collectors are manufactured by Naked Energy, which says they can save up to ten times as much carbon as standard solar photovoltaic panels, according to The Chemical Engineer.

The MTC is a manufacturing and scale-up research centre founded in 2010 by Loughborough University and the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham, according to The Chemical Engineer, and employs 900 people across Coventry, Liverpool and Oxford; Naked Energy is a solar thermal technology company supplying the collectors.

Christophe Williams, CEO and co-founder of Naked Energy, said in comments carried by The Chemical Engineer: “The energy transition isn’t a distant ambition.” He said the project shows what can be achieved when renewable solar heat is designed as part of a modern system, with higher efficiency and lower emissions.

The MTC described heat as the overlooked half of the energy transition, accounting for around one-third of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to The Chemical Engineer.

The installation reflects manufacturing sites treating heat as a design problem alongside power, with the Royal Society reporting that industrial heating accounts for 14 per cent of UK emissions and about half of that heat is wasted.

Energy Systems Nexus reported that 4,780 recoverable heat sources sit within 1km of UK heat network zones, including nuclear plants, data centres and retail refrigeration, and called for coordinated policy to connect them.

For the sector, an on-site array serving both winter heating and summer cooling shows a research centre using its own estate as a demonstrator of renewable heat for manufacturers.

The wider signal for the sector is that heat decarbonisation is moving from policy reports into installed hardware at manufacturing sites.