RBE joins £2.5m investment round in tepeo

Ritchie-Bland Energy Limited (RBE) joins £2.5m investment round in clean tech company, tepeo to support commercialisation of its Zero Emission Boiler for the domestic heating market.

Ritchie-Bland Energy, a Yorkshire-based privately funded investment company supporting entrepreneurs and technology businesses that are within the renewable energy industry, has joined the Clean Growth Fund and others in a £2.5m investment round in tepeo, a British clean technology company that has developed a low-cost, easy-to-install low carbon boiler. It is Ritchie-Bland Energy’s first investment in low carbon heating, a sector that is set to grow significantly over the next decade as homeowners are encouraged to replace their gas boilers with low carbon alternatives.

tepeo’s Zero Emission Boiler (ZEB) is a drop-in replacement for a gas or oil boiler that similarly heats water to 60-80°C and works with any thermostat. It has been designed to be affordable while supporting the transition to a low carbon electricity grid.

Installing a ZEB involves little or no disruption for the homeowner as there’s no need to change any aspect of a home’s existing central heating system; it will use the same radiators, same pipework and same insulation. Plumbing-in a ZEB and the electrical connections are straightforward tasks for qualified heating and electrical engineers.

The ZEB has a ceramic core which acts as a heat battery, with smart tech that controls when it is charged up using highly efficient electric resistive heating elements. The heat can then be released in a controlled manner using tepeo’s patent-pending heat transfer technology as needed. This means that the ZEB can decouple electricity demand from heating demand and take advantage of green and/or variable (“time-of-use”) electricity tariffs. The charge cycle of the ZEB is automatically optimised to minimise cost and carbon.

The ZEB is therefore a flexible asset and tepeo has developed software which can aggregate a fleet of ZEBs at scale which could then provide grid flexibility services with the potential for ZEB owners to directly benefit from the value created.

Johan du Plessis, founder and CEO of tepeo and inventor of the ZEB, said: “We are really pleased that Ritchie-Bland Energy is included among the investors in this funding round.”

“We have carried out successful trials of the ZEB in a range of house types, and with this welcome investment, we are in a strong position to launch our commercial ZEB in the autumn and extend our product range. We are initially targeting all types of dwellings of up to three bedrooms, but we intend to market future models to larger homes too.”

“Importantly, the ZEB will cost roughly half the price of a heat pump and we are confident that as we scale-up our manufacturing, the cost of the ZEB will drop and be competitive with the lifecycle cost of a typical gas boiler, so making the consumer’s decision to replace their gas boiler that much easier.”

James Ritchie, CEO of RBE said: “Decarbonising the heating of buildings is a huge obstacle to the UK achieving Net Zero – RBE believes that the market for low carbon heating is therefore poised to grow rapidly. We believe tepeo’s ZEB is uniquely placed to take advantage and we are pleased to support the commercialisation of their technology.”

The ZEB that will be launched later this year is a replacement for a regular or system boiler which works for homes with a separate hot water tank. tepeo intends to develop two other versions of its ZEB: a ‘combi’ version that does not require a separate water tank and a larger capacity ZEB suitable for larger homes.