I fear our dash away from gas will see common sense go out of the window

As Ofgem calls for all gas boilers to be banned...

SURELY the whole point of Ofgem is, supposedly, to stop the big energy firms ripping us off for our gas and electricity?

The regulator for the gas and electricity industry has singularly failed in that regard. But now it seems to have changed direction altogether and backed government plans to stop us heating our homes with gas at all — something which could prove ruinously expensive for many.

Yesterday, Ofgem published its Decarbonisation Action Plan, setting out how it hopes Britain will reach its selfimposed target of zero net carbon emissions by 2050.

Most consumers share concerns about the environment, doing their best with recycling and accepting the need to reduce carbon emissions in coming decades. But they might be shocked at how quickly officials are planning to wean us off our gas boilers and cookers — before we really have any idea of what is going to replace them.

Intense

In its action plan, Ofgem has backed a policy, first floated in the May government’s Clean Growth Strategy two years ago, to ban new homes from being connected to the gas grid from this decade. That would mean whole housing estates being built without a gas supply in five years’ time.

The regulator also supports a call by the Government’s climate change committee to begin the ‘large-scale deployment of low- carbon heating’ before 2030.

There will be intense pressure on all homeowners to rip out their gas boilers in the next ten years, which promises to come at huge expense for struggling households.

Of course, we would all love to heat and light our homes with clean energy but there are huge technological barriers which need to be overcome before we can reach zero carbon emissions.

Trying to drive government policy towards an arbitrary timetable devised by Extinction Rebellion — which has demanded zero emissions by 2025 — risks sending vast numbers into fuel poverty.

Sadly, this whole approach is all too typical of the Government’s ham-fisted efforts to decarbonise the economy. When it comes to climate change, panic seems to set in and common sense goes out of the window.

Presumably, all these new homes would be heated by electricity instead of gas. But heating a home with electric bar fires is very expensive.

Electric heating only becomes affordable if you install a heat pump — effectively a refrigerator or an air-conditioning unit in reverse. To install one of these in most homes will cost £10,000.

Moreover, heat pumps only function efficiently in homes with high levels of insulation. If you live in one of the eight million old homes in Britain which have solid walls, insulating your home will typically cost you another £10,000.

To cap it all, it is far from certain that detaching us from the gas grid would necessarily cut carbon emissions anyway. Heating a property with electricity does not achieve anything unless the electricity itself is carbon-neutral.

The Government likes to claim that a third of UK electricity comes from renewable sources, hoping that we might think that means wind and solar power. The truth is that two-thirds of ‘renewable’ energy comes from waste incineration and from burning wood imported from North American forests.

In some cases, depending on how the wood is sourced, this can be even dirtier than burning coal.

When you look at Britain’s overall energy consumption last year a mere three per cent came from wind and solar. If we are going to power our cars and homes entirely by renewable means, it would require a masses of wind turbines and solar panels. But still we would have the problem of what to do when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. It would require some novel form of energy storage which we don’t yet have.

Ofgem says we need to have ten million electric cars on the road by 2030, and seems to think that we could use our electric cars to buy cheap electricity during the night and sell it back to the grid when demand is higher in the daytime. But it is no use draining your car batteries during the day if you need to drive somewhere in the evening.

What everyone seems to have forgotten in this headlong rush to get rid of gas is that it is one of the cleaner forms of energy. For every kilowatt hour of energy generated it emits only half as much carbon dioxide as coal does.

Switching from coal to gas has contributed hugely to the fall in UK carbon emissions over the past 30 years but if we try to cut out gas without any viable source of energy to replace it we are going to have serious problems.

Punishing

We could turn to nuclear energy — which generated 21 per cent of our electricity last year – but that, too, is very expensive. Hinkley Point C power station in Somerset is only getting built because the Government has guaranteed consumers will pay roughly twice as much for its energy as current market prices.

Not only that, we have never resolved the problem of what to do with nuclear waste, while a nuclear accident on the scale of Fukushima in Japan in 2011 would cost billions and lead to the surrounding area being abandoned for many years.

Sadly, the Government has an appalling record when it comes to pushing through measures to force us to cut out CO2 emissions.

We all bought diesel cars because we were encouraged to through the tax system by successive governments obsessed with cutting CO2. But then it turned out that diesel emits deadly nitrous oxide and dangerously high levels of soot particulates that have sent tens of thousands to an early grave. Now the Government has reversed the tax incentives, punishing us for buying diesel cars.

Then there is David Cameron’s Green Deal to make energy- saving improvements to their home, such as loft insulation or double glazing. A National Audit Office report in 2016 concluded the scheme had ‘failed to deliver any meaningful benefit’ – in spite of costing taxpayers £240 million.

Fiasco

The introduction of smart meters telling us how much energy we are using in real time has been a similar fiasco. The Government argues that, if we can see how much energy we are using, we will be shamed into using less. But it didn’t turn out like that.

Rather than save £26 a year per household, as the Government claimed, it seems that we have been inspired to save just £11. The cost of installation by electricity companies — and paid for through an increase in our bills — has risen from an estimated £11 billion to more than £20 billion.

Meanwhile, the Government has poured billions of subsidies into wind and solar farms but without investing enough in the national grid, which can’t cope on sunny, windy days.

Turning off the gas supply could end up being the biggest error of the lot. It could be that the most cost-effective way to reduce emissions in homes is through biogas produced from sources other than fossil fuels, or using hydrogen. But what if we have already allowed the gas grid to degrade — or got rid of it altogether?

We all want a greener planet but ministers commit to reaching carbon reduction targets – often as a result of pressure from groups like Extinction Rebellion – without any real idea of how they are going to meet those targets.

And we are the mugs who end up as the victims of their illthought-out policies.