We’re engineers who think in communities, not components.
If you are here, you are probably wrestling with big questions.
How do we decarbonise this estate and still keep people comfortable?
How do we spend public money wisely? How do we design systems that still make sense
in twenty years, not just in year one?
Generation 7 is an energy systems studio built for those questions. We help public bodies
and estate teams design heating and cooling that works in the real world – for people,
budgets and the planet.
We reframe heating and cooling from a compliance problem into a systems opportunity. From strategy and briefs to detailed design and optimisation, we help you see how heat actually moves through buildings, budgets, behaviours and policy – then design it better.
Clear, honest options. Designs that hold under pressure and over time. Evidence that stands up to scrutiny. And a partner who can explain complex systems in ways that make sense to boards, clinicians, residents, councillors and communities.
We work with people who are responsible for shared places – where comfort, cost and carbon all matter at once.
Underneath the drawings and models, Generation 7 is built on a simple idea: heat should serve life, not siphon from it. Everything we do – from the way we brief a project to the way we test a pipe temperature – flows from a few core beliefs.
Generation 7’s founder, Oliver Riley, became an engineer because he loved
making things work – and, if possible, making them sing. Two decades ago,
that curiosity took him to a remote highland community in the Philippines,
helping design a small hydropower system to mill rice.
What stayed with him wasn’t the machinery. It was the way the community
related to each other and to the land: tough, generous, resourceful,
wasting nothing and giving a lot back. Heat, water and labour were all part
of one living system.
Since then, Oliver has spent over 25 years working on energy, heat networks
and decarbonisation for hospitals, housing, campuses and government estates.
Generation 7 exists to bring that experience – and that early lesson in
interdependence – to the UK’s heat transition.
The name comes from the idea of thinking seven generations ahead. We design
systems so that future teams, future residents and future budgets will be glad
you did this work the way you did.
We quietly sit right in the middle of some of the UK’s most significant decarbonisation and heat-network work:
Our track record
We quietly sit in the middle of some of the UK’s most significant decarbonisation and heat network work.
From hospitals and social housing to government estates and mixed use schemes, our work lives in real places where failure is not an option.
Where our work shows up most
Hospitals and health estates
Public sector estate decarbonisation
Heat networks and communal heating
Mixed use regeneration and new build
Decarbonisation projects we have helped to shape
Selected work from across estates where people, budgets and the planet all need to come out better.
Hospital decarbonisation
Kingston University Hospital
Low temperature heat pump and de steaming design cutting emissions by around a quarter while moving the estate away from gas reliance.
Government estate
Defence Infrastructure Organisation
Decarbonisation pathway for a critical government estate with a three hundred and sixty million pound annual energy footprint.
Parliamentary estate
UK Parliament
Energy and resilience strategy shaping a lower carbon, lower lifecycle cost future for the Parliamentary estate.
Public sector decarbonisation
Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme
Engineering that unlocked more than one hundred and fifty million pounds of heat pump upgrades for hospitals, leisure centres and civic buildings.
Heat network design
SDEN local authority heat network
Five year design assurance for a local authority network serving around one thousand homes and community assets with performance and financial targets that had to hold.
Community energy
GreenSCIES II, Innovate UK
Fifth generation district energy system drawing heat from transport and data centres to serve mixed tenure housing.
Social housing providers
L and Q, A2Dominion and others
Heat pump retrofit strategies, network optimisation and investment ready decarbonisation roadmaps across multiple communal heating schemes.