ABOUT GENERATION 7
Energy should serve life,
not siphon from it.
We are an energy systems studio and infrastructure engineering practice focused on one thing: making heat and cooling work for people, places and the planet – not just for the spreadsheet.
Energy Systems Studio
We look at heat the way a good city planner looks at streets: flows, desire lines, tensions and bottlenecks. From estates to districts, we design systems that move energy where it is needed, when it is needed, with as little waste as possible.
Infrastructure Engineers
We are engineers by training and habit. Twenty plus years of heat networks, hospitals, social housing, mixed-use schemes and critical government estates mean we know where projects crack under real-world pressure – and how to stop that happening.
Think & Do Tank
We work from policy to plantroom. We help shape briefs, funding cases and strategies – then stay in the room as designs are tested, costed and built. Fewer hand-offs. More coherence. Better outcomes for the same pound.
Something about the way we ran energy just never felt right.
Our founder grew up loving how things work – and how they could work better. Engineering was the obvious path. But the more he saw of modern energy systems, the more something felt off. Lots of clever hardware. Not enough attention to the humans living with the consequences.
A remote community in the Philippines changed everything.
Twenty years ago, he travelled to a highland village to help
design a small hydropower system to mill rice. The local
community wasted nothing, shared responsibility and treated the
landscape as something to belong to, not extract from.
The lesson was simple and permanent: systems thrive when people
do. Energy design is really relationship design.
Heat networks, hospitals, social housing, Parliament.
Back in the UK, the work scaled up. Heat-network engineering
across London. Energy strategies spanning hospitals, social
housing and regeneration schemes. Estate-wide decarbonisation
for critical government sites and the Houses of Parliament.
Project after project, the same patterns showed up: brilliant
people, fragmented briefs, and systems that worked on paper
but struggled in real life.
You can’t decarbonise a pipe. You have to decarbonise a system.
Real decarbonisation is not just a kit swap. It is social,
financial, cultural and behavioural as much as it is technical.
Suppressed creativity in design teams. Briefs that ignore how
buildings actually behave. Funding that rewards spend, not
performance.
The conclusion: if we want better heat networks, we need better
briefs – and practices – for a better world.
Designing for the people who will live with our decisions.
Generation 7 exists to bring those threads together. The name
nods to the idea of working in ways that will still make sense
seven generations from now.
In practice, that means using fifth-generation thinking – shared
resources, waste heat as a civic asset, networks that adapt –
and pairing it with deeply human engineering: belonging,
coherence, creativity and care.
WHAT WE DO NOW
Today, we help public and civic teams make heat work – for life.
Better briefs, better systems
We help shape decarbonisation roadmaps and heat-network briefs that join the dots between buildings, budgets, behaviours and policy – long before tenders go out. The aim: spend once, spend well, and avoid heroic retrofit later.
Design & assurance that holds
From early-stage options to detailed design and peer review, we interrogate assumptions, stress-test schemes and keep people and place in the frame – not just kilowatts and compliance.
Making waste heat a civic asset
We look for the heat you are already paying for but not using: from hospitals, data centres, housing and transport. Then we help you turn that into reliable, low-carbon comfort for the communities you serve.
A TRACK RECORD IN REAL PLACES
Decarbonisation that survives board papers, funding rounds and winter.
Kingston Hospital · Heat Decarbonisation
Led the heat-pump and de-steaming design for a £10m programme that will cut CO₂ by around a quarter and move the estate away from gas-fired steam toward low-temperature, low-carbon heat.
Defence Infrastructure Organisation · Estate Strategy
Helped shape the decarbonisation approach for a critical UK government estate with a ~£360m annual energy footprint, guiding investment decisions with multi-hundred-million-pound implications.
UK Parliament · Energy & Resilience
Directed the utilities appraisal that set a resilient, lower-carbon, lowest-lifecycle-cost energy strategy for the Houses of Parliament and the wider Parliamentary estate.
Public Sector Decarbonisation
Delivered engineering designs that unlocked more than £150m of PSDS investment across hospitals, leisure centres and civic buildings, enabling large-scale heat-pump deployment and deep carbon cuts.
Social Housing & Community Heat
Developed retrofit strategies and optimisation measures for social-housing heat networks, improving reliability, reducing losses and making low-carbon heat fairer and more affordable.
Fifth-Generation Demonstrators
Engineered core elements of 5th-generation district energy schemes that harness waste heat from data centres and transport to decarbonise mixed-tenure housing and civic assets.
If you are responsible for an estate, a network or a town, we would love to work with you.
Whether you are just starting to map your options or wrestling with a stalled scheme, we can help you see the whole picture, brief with confidence and design systems that people will actually thank you for living with.
Start a conversation