How Sewage Plants And Data Centres Could Help Heat One In Five UK Homes Gas boilers heat around 85% of homes in the UK, but their installation in new homes is to be banned from 2025. While heating produces over a third of the country’s CO₂ emissions, there are only two low-carbon heating alternatives that most people hear about: heat pumps or hydrogen boilers. Heat pumps are like a refrigerator working backwards: they use electricity to run a compressor, which transfers heat from the outside to the inside. Hydrogen boilers are just another sort of gas boiler, designed to burn hydrogen instead of the fossil fuel natural gas.