In the latest of our series of interviews with manufacturers and merchants, Andrew Gaved is first in line to talk to Pastor Casanova, who joined Carrier UK and Ireland as managing director in May.
The arrival of Pastor Casanova to Carrier UK and Ireland marks a milestone for the manufacturing giant – the first boss to oversee both the residential and commercial sides of the business, with a brief to bring closer collaboration between the two operations and across the Viessmann, Toshiba and Carrier brands.
The two sides of the business combined makes for a portfolio of eye-watering scale, ranging from boilers and patio-sized heat pumps for the home, through to cooling for both residential and commercial buildings, right up to chillers, air handling and high capacity, large-scale heat pumps for offices, data centres and the like.
With such a range of applications for his teams to serve, Pastor has a perspective on the UK market and its energy transition that is pretty well unparalleled.
“I think the key is we need everybody to come together,” he says, “We need the manufacturers, we need government and we need installers. I think we have a general idea of the direction, but we need more focus, more energy.”
He is in no doubt that this is the time to press the accelerator on heat pumps – and Carrier has set itself a pretty bold target to do so: “Our target for the UK is by 2030 to have 450,000 heat pump installations. Last year, we grew that by 7% and you might think that 7% sounds really good in an industry that moves slowly, but if we want to get to the 450,000, 7% per year is simply not going to do it. We’re going to have to accelerate that a lot more. That is where we need everybody to work together – everybody has to pull in the same direction and the message has to be consistent.”
Winning installer hearts and minds
A key element of this is to keep winning the hearts and minds of both the existing installer workforce and the new entrants, he notes: “I think we have a workforce with the skills and a very strong work ethic but we don’t have enough installers yet. The infrastructure in the country is well-established – you could say that the muscle exists but we need to flex it the right way to get the workforce to buy into it more.”
Carrier has acknowledged the vital role of the installer in helping the consumer to decide on the direction they take, by embarking on a range of partnerships to enable installers to feel more comfortable with the world of heat pump installation. One partnership that is already working well is with Heat Geek, Pastor notes:
“They have a really good platform where an installer can go and get training and technical information, and an understanding on how to get subsidies and suchlike. For us as an OEM manufacturer, it is difficult to work individually with so many different installers, many of whom are just one or two men in a van. So this aggregates a lot of our installer population and provides the necessary training and comfort with the technology. Then Carrier can provide the product and technical support and the warranty – everything that comes with the product. That’s a good partnership.”
To Pastor, such arrangements are simply a good way to focus on what each partner is good at. In a similar vein, Carrier also now has a partnership with Centrica to engage their national installer workforce. The difference is that this one includes air conditioning as well as heating – using their installers to roll cooling out into the consumer market.
Cooling for homes is of course a real talking point at the moment when parts of the country are still experiencing heatwaves. Pastor points to a cooling journey that is being undertaken by the UK homeowner: “We are finding that homeowners often start with a portable AC and then maybe they think about making the investment for a split system or a monobloc. The nice thing is that Carrier has heating and cooling under one roof so we can ship it all – and that also means that an installer can go in to a home and offer a combination of cooling and heating. There are few manufacturers that can offer that.”
Ensuring innovation meets the customer’s needs
He acknowledges that as a company with a strong focus on innovation, it is important that the customer’s needs are taken into account, rather than throwing a raft: “You don’t want to come up with a product that is not right for the particular country. So what we’re trying to do is put our effort into what the UK market needs. An example of this is what we have done with our new Vitocal 200-A ie heat pump. The model fills a gap that we’ve had in our portfolio – this unit is quieter, efficient and compliments our Home Energy Management System (HEMS) much better than its predecessors. And we have listened to both installers and homeowners, so it has the easy install base, it has the positioning of the piping that makes it easy for installation and it has the compact footprint that allows us to put it in place of a boiler – it’s definitely something that makes it easier for a consumer to bring it in to their home.”
The theme of improving the ease of use for installers also extends to the Viessmann boiler range which has recently been redesigned. Pastor stresses that in the rush to decarbonise, we shouldn’t overlook those who might still require a new boiler:
“It’s important to remember that the discussion isn’t all about heat pumps for us, it is the full portfolio. For us today, the ratio between boilers and heat pumps is probably something like 80:20, or 75:25, so it is definitely still a market that will continue for a few years – without giving you a hard number as to how many years.”
Addressing the balance between heat pumps and boilers has been a theme amongst the leader interviews, and Pastor believes the UK can learn from what continental Europe has done, with a combination of push and pull: “The punitive side tends to work when you tell them that there will be a point where you can no longer have a boiler, but then you also need a subsidy support to entice them. You then create a pull effect where the customer will call their installer and say, ‘I have this amount of money that the government will give me. I want to install this.’”
Ease of use at the heart of One Base
The ‘ease of use’ theme continues with the new Viessmann One Base energy management platform. As home energy systems become more sophisticated, the company has set out to remove complexity with a platform that connects and manages multiple technologies through a single interface.
Pastor points out that the system will make things easier for both the homeowner, in allowing them to manage and optimise their appliances, and for the installer, because it enables them to see the full system remotely and thus troubleshoot with fewer potential callouts.
But the key strength of this, he adds, is that One Base is not just for the Viessmann system – it can be set up to control solar panels, batteries or even another manufacturer’s heat pump from the one platform.
Pastor is excited about this product: “I look at my system at home: I’ve got a heating system and then I’ve got separate underfloor heating, but I am able to see everything on the one app – that’s really quite special for us. It provides energy management and optimising and works with dynamic tariffs.”
Given that Pastor has come to Carrier from a role at Siemens leading on Smart Infrastructure, it is perhaps no surprise that he is keen to drive the company’s developments in controls technology. It all comes from the customer, he says: “The demand from the customers is effectively for a single pane of glass where you can bring in the information from all of the other systems, so that it doesn’t matter what the assets that are installed are, you have a view that they are performing at the right temperature or the right humidity.”
Such remote optimisation is important for improving the efficiency of a home, but when it comes to the commercial buildings, this becomes a big opportunity, he notes: “For a commercial building, that kind of monitoring could save you 20-30% of energy – and you can also reduce the footprint that you have to run, because depending on the type of sensors that you use, it can all be automated. You say you need to change the office temperature and whereas in the past you needed to send John in to change the temperature, today you can change it on that single pane of glass.”
The vast potential in commercial buildings
There is vast potential here, and the excitement from Pastor is palpable as to how Carrier might play its part:
“When you think that 40% of CO2 emissions in the world are generated by buildings and approximately 65% of buildings in the UK are not sustainable, the opportunity presents itself. Despite all the efforts to electrify cars and other assets, if we want to reach our sustainability goals at large, we need to make buildings energy efficient and sustainable. . Now within the group, we have Carrier, Toshiba and Viessmann, so we have a full suite of products that can support decarbonisation.”
He adds that already there is government support to drive that decarbonisation, with the requirement (recently watered down), that by 2030 for residential and by 2031 for larger commercial buildings, to have an EPC of at least C in order to be rentable.
“Added to that, an increasing number of companies that lease office space now have their own CO2 emission targets to meet,” he says, “So if your building is not sustainable, a company like ours, for instance, would not be able to lease your building, because we have to meet our own emissions targets. So there is an incentive for the owners of the buildings and for the operators of the buildings to move into that direction. So there’s a tonne of opportunity.”
He also points out that there are now a range of financial models to enable the customer to avoid the large upfront capital expenditure on kit – allowing them to pay over a number of years instead: “The return on that is often just seven or eight years, it’s not 30 years – so that ends up being an attractive investment. But the challenge is that I don’t think the education amongst commercial buildings has been widespread yet. So we have to do a better job of getting the information to them so that they feel comfortable making the investment.”
In light of the potential for improving commercial buildings, it is no surprise that Pastor’s closing takeaway for installers addresses the full spectrum of opportunities:
“An event like InstallerSHOW shows you there is potential not only for heating but also for cooling in both the residential side and in the industrial and commercial side. Then on top of that we have the challenge – and opportunity – in data centres. Did you know that AI data centres utilise 10 times more electricity than a regular data centre? So they will need more cooling and improved technology and effective installation. That’s exciting for everybody.”
