The Know Daily - Monday 17 February 2025

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INI Food and Wellbeing Centre – a new community initiative in South London – is offering residents a social supermarket, with affordable groceries, fresh produce and a space for connection. “For me it’s about food, but it’s also about wellbeing and caring for each other,” said its founder.

🏠 Hydrogen homes

The UK’s first homes run on renewable hydrogen have been unveiled in Scotland, a milestone in the transition to sustainable energy sources.

Tell me more.
Earlier this month, three homes were opened in Fife, which rely on hydrogen for heating and cooking, with new innovative hobs and boilers. The electricity used to produce the hydrogen is sourced from offshore wind farms, making the project’s emissions comparatively low.

What’s the bigger story?
It’s part of the H100 pilot project where people in the area can opt in to transitioning their home to run on hydrogen. With the success of the three demonstrator properties, the plan is to then scale up the project and build a further 300 hydrogen homes over the coming months. Ultimately, the creation of hydrogen-led neighbourhoods will help to reduce the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to meet decarbonisation targets.

What’s the reaction been?
While the news has been welcomed, some critics have cautioned that the electricity used in the production of hydrogen needs to be renewably-sourced. If it isn't, then there isn’t much benefit. Currently, less than 1% of hydrogen is produced from renewable sources, meaning plans to scale up this process must be addressed to make the hydrogen home-building initiatives sustainable. In fact, the UK government announced an additional £21m of funding for “green hydrogen” projects last year to address this. Plus, they awarded £20m of funding to set up the National Centre for the Decarbonisation of Heat (NCDH), which aims to convert as many of the UK’s homes to low-carbon alternatives as possible to help meet net-zero targets by 2050.

Concerns have been raised about the costs to homeowners, as it could be more expensive than alternatives being explored by the NCDH, like heat pumps. However, as appliances work in much the same way when run on hydrogen and most of the differences occur on the supplier’s end, this is seen as potentially one of the “least invasive ways of decarbonising home heating” once the initial infrastructure is set up.

💰 Money Monday: In the past couple of weeks some online banking services and apps have faced outages – here’s how to handle the situation if it happens again.

🎥  Film’s best: The BAFTAs took place this weekend – check out the winning films here.

📱 Service suspension: South Korea has become the latest country to ban downloads of China’s AI chatbot DeepSeek over privacy and security concerns. 

🌕 Lunar sights: A rare blood moon will be visible in the UK over the next few weeks – here’s how to catch it.

🎶 Record sales: This department store is bringing back vinyls amid a resurgence of non-digital music formats.

🐉 Mythical lands: Another spin-off of this popular fantasy series has been confirmed.

🔗 Last week’s most clicked: The UK’s first vegan Michelin star restaurant, the Natural History Museum in London’s new gallery and the perfect ‘treat yourself’ gift.

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Trivia answer: A) Joan Didion’s journal is set to be released in April – here’s what we know so far.

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